Posted by Jeremy Scott | 4 Comments
Your Teenagers Are Probably Online Right Now
A new study from the Institute of Breathtakingly Obvious Findings shows that teenagers spend a lot of time online. 31 hours a week, in fact.
That’s roughly 4-5 hours a day.
There’s even some breakdown information, detailing what they are surfing for during those 31 hours a week:
- One hour and 35 minutes per week looking at dieting and weight loss Web sites
- Two hours and two minutes per week looking at clips on YouTube
- Nine hours per week on social networking sites, chat rooms, forums, MSN and other ways to talk to friends and acquaintances.
- Oh… and two hours per week looking at the more inappropriate neighborhoods of the web (don’t make me spell it out… this is a family blog)
I think the most surprising thing about this study is that it’s complete hogwash. The average kid is online more than that, particularly if you’re counting mobile devices that access the web such as the iPhone or Amazon’s Kindle–don’t even get me started on XBox Live. I know of at least one local school where new students all have laptops–not because it’s en vogue, but because the school demands it. So those kids are online way more than 4-5 hours a day.
How about you? I bet you’re already blushing from embarrassment, aren’t you? Chances are you have a computer on your desk at work… one that connects to the Internet. So you’re probably hitting the 4-5 hours a day mark just during your work day. Then you go home and what do you do? Well, if you’re like me, you fire up the laptop. Between work and home, I figure I’m probably online close to 8-10 hours a day.
Teens surveyed also apparently declared that they spend nearly three hours a week on homework-related web surfing. Yeah, right. I totally believe that. You expect me to believe that today’s teenagers spend more time using the web for homework each week than they do browsing YouTube videos? I don’t know what kind of teenagers you’ve met, but the ones I know don’t fit this profile.
I guess we already knew that kids spend a lot of time online, probably too much. Nice to have some probably-inaccurate data to back that up.
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Posted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Some People Are Passionate About Their Dial-Up Int...
A new study contradicts some commonly held beliefs about people who use dial-up internet service. We’ve long been assuming that they didn’t have access to broadband service–that they lived in too rural an area to be able to trade up.
Seems that idea is wrong.
The survey shows that only 14% are “stuck with dial-up” because they can’t get a faster service where they live. 35% say they stay on dial-up because of prices–they can’t afford broadband.
Perhaps the most surprising number? The 19% of dial-up users who say nothing you do or say could convince them to give it up for something else.
That’s staggering to me. They’re tech-savvy enough to want to be on the internet, but old-fashioned enough to stubbornly cling to 2 minute page loads even if that same page could load in 2 seconds if they swapped up to broadband?!?! Weird.
How many of you still have dial-up? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Dual Monitors, Bigger Monitors, Increase Employee ...
If you’ve ever been to our offices, then you’ve certainly seen the two-monitors phenomenon in action. All but one person in our office uses a two-monitor computer set up.
I must admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I am that lone single-monitor user. However, I do have a large wide-screen display that has greatly increased my on-screen “real estate.”
A new study shows that two monitors do much more than just making you look cool… seems they help your productivity as well. Sweet. In fact, they can help you complete tasks up to 52% faster than your one-monitor peers. Actually, it’s not the adding of a second screen itself that increases productivity… but, rather, it is the increased size of your on-screen real estate. So simply buying a bigger monitor would help.
From the article:
“The study concluded that someone using a larger monitor could save 2.5 hours a day.”
Wow. That’s a number that could easily justify the added cost of a new or bigger monitor. Our employees find that the increased productivity comes from having multiple programs open and readily available at the same time. Your Outlook inbox, for example, open on one screen… with Quickbooks or Internet Explorer open in the other. Hopping back and forth between the two is beyond simple, and the time you save from not having to minimize and maximize program windows adds up quickly.
Microsoft also has an excellent “how-to” article on setting up a dual-monitor work station.
So the bottom line is this: dual monitors–even just bigger monitors in general–are not just for power users anymore. More and more companies are seeing employee productivity rise dramatically from the two monitor set up, and the trend is picking up serious steam.
Obviously, if you are a Keystone customer, we would love to talk to you further about our own dual monitor set ups and help you place an order for the right monitor additions for you and your employees. Let us know if we can help.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 15 Comments
Teenagers Don’t Buy CDs Anymore
These darn kids today & their newfangled music formats!
It seems that teenagers don’t buy CDs anymore. They have moved beyond the compact disc in a big way.
I know this because I just read this article in the LA Times, which says that in 2007, half of all U.S. teenagers bought zero CDs. Well, almost half… it’s 48%.
That’s sort of astounding. I remember being a teenager–barely–and I bought a lot of tapes and CDs. Hey, back off…I’m just old enough that my youth spanned the gap between cassette tapes and CDs.
But regardless….I bought a lot of music.
And I don’t think music is any less important to teenagers today than it was to kids in my day. It’s pretty clear what’s going on: iTunes and illegal song-swapping have killed the compact disc… or at least maimed it.
The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Please note that Wal-Mart is the number one music retailer in the U.S. Also note that Tower Records went out of business in 2006. Also note how sad these two facts make me. And the article says that computers are to blame. Here’s a snippet:
Rachel Rottman, 14, says she hasn’t bought a CD in a year. The Santa Monica High School freshman says she downloads five or six songs a day, using paid services such as iTunes and social networking site MySpace, where bands post songs for free download. Rachel said she had about 2,600 songs stored on her computer.
Before getting a computer in the seventh grade, she always bought CDs. But now it’s too much trouble, she said.
“You have to go to the store and then you have to pay — I don’t know how much, $12, I’m guessing? — then you have to put it on your computer,” Rachel said. “When you download it, it’s right there.”
Man, this girl is out of touch if she thinks CDs are only $12.
But seriously, she’s right. Buying a CD is, to this generation, just an unnecessary step in the process of getting your favorite songs on your iPod or uploaded to your MySpace page. By the time people my age start becoming grandparents, the age of the physical medium for entertainment will have come to a close. Movies, TV shows, music and more will be all digital. These crazy teenagers today just don’t care about holding something tangible in their hands. They care only for the music.
In a decade or so you’ll find quaint little throwback boutiques opening up in trendy places like Nashville and Austin and they’ll sell things like CDs, DVDs, BluRay Discs, and other physical media like magazines and books. And hippie people will shop there and remember the days when your entertainment dollars actually brought you something you could hold in your hand and touch. And those things will cost $100 a piece, because they’ll be nostalgic items now… antiques.
But the trend has too much momentum to be stopped now. Digital media is the wave of the future. You can either ride the wave, or let it overtake you… but there’s no stopping it, that’s for sure. I can just hear the Scooby-Doo CD manufacturers howling about how they “would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”
Hey, at least music itself isn’t dead… yet.
Read MorePosted by Jeremy Scott | 4 Comments
People Who Drive While Using Cell Phones Cause Tra...
People who drive while talking on the phone are most likely to blame for traffic increases, at least according to a new study from the University of Utah.
Even when using a hands-free headset, cell talkers “just don’t keep up with the flow of traffic.” And when they’re a part of commuter traffic clogs, they move at an average of 2mph slower than the average phone-free driver.
From the article:
“The distracted driver tends to drive slower and have delayed reactions,” said Strayer, whose study will be presented later this month to the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. “People kind of get stuck behind that person and it makes everyone pay the price of that distracted driver.”
Cell users, on average, take 3% longer to reach a destination through highly congested traffic. And when you consider that nearly 1 in 10 drivers is talking on the phone, it can add up pretty quickly.
The most alarming thing to me about this survey is that they project the number of cell-chatting commuters at a mere 1 in 10. That, to me, is ridiculously low. Feels like every driver I see on the road is gabbing away, but maybe that’s just my perception. Or maybe I only drive on roads that teenagers drive on.
And I’ll go ahead and tell you that I talk on the phone while I’m driving. So I guess the next time you’re stuck in traffic, you can blame me. Sorry about that. Couldn’t be helped.
Oh, and let’s not forget this recent study that says that people driving while sending text messages cause accidents (Yeah, I know…from the Well, Duh Center for Research & Obvious Findings). What person in their right mind says, “Yeah, I know I’m driving…but I think I’ll send a text message”?! Wouldn’t it be less distracting and use fewer of your hands to simply call that person you’re texting…considering you need at least some of your appendages to operate the vehicle?
What I want to see is a study about how much traffic congestion is caused by people who put on makeup while they drive… or people flipping through their CD storage case while driving. I guess this study could just as well read “people who carry on conversations with their passengers while driving cause traffic congestion” because the real problem is that their not focused on driving… they’re laughing at something Billy said in the back seat. Driving, of all things, is the worst candidate for multitasking. I, for one, am calling for an immediate ban on doing anything while driving except for the driving itself. I know, I know…it’s a revolutionary idea.
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