Brendan Mitchell

On New Years Eve 2008, an estimated 43 billion SMS messages where sent globally! Which was up 30% on 2007, but the rise wasn’t evenly spread… Portugal tripled and The Netherlands doubled. Developing nations are by far the fastest expanding mobile markets, India’s 220 million mobile subscribers sent over a billion, a 300% rise on daily norms, but the Phllippines outshone everyone, with 1.4 billion SMS’s from a subscriber base of only 50 million!

When it comes to SMS messaging the USA ranks very low, when mobile users were asked whether they have or would send a “Happy New Year” text message, all countries except the USA showed an increase:
U.S.A. 35%; France 85%; Germany 88%; Spain 90%; Italy 92%

For an example of how amazing all this electronic communication can look, have a look at this gorgeous visualisation of the SMS messages sent on New Years Eve in Amsterdam

By Aaron Koblin (check out his site there’s some cool stuff on there!)
and his vimeo page

As our time has become very precious and much more of a commodity to be valued, more & more of us are moving away from paper based communication during the festive season, brevity is king, but even voice calls only showed a moderate increase (guess they take too long and you can only speak to one person at  a time), electronic communication via email, SMS & the likes of Twitter have increased dramatically, so it will be interesting to see how the mobile networks & Twitter cope in the next few hours… I hope Twitter have their fail whale primed and ready to go : )

So just in case I thought I’d get in early and wish you all a fantastic 2009!