The high holidays in Israel are always a good time to catch up on some reading, inbox maintenance, etc. There are only 5-6 official national holidays, but if you combine all of them together, including half-days, you can have almost 14 days of vacation.. Add that to the fact that schools are on a break the entire period (14 days) – and pretty fast you’ll find yourself seating alone in your floor, lots of open space cubicles to choose from..
Since I’m leaving in couple of days to a much anticipated vacation in NYC (any comments about this museum?), I had a lot of time to go over some articles piling my Google Reader. There I came across ThreeBillion.com, a website operated by Paul MacGregor, who defines himself as “a man whose life has been dedicated to making money out of young people by giving them something they want.”
The concept of the site is pretty simple: There are three billion people under twenty five on this planet… roughly half the world’s population. Pick one member of your family who is under twenty five. Ask them to name a cool brand. Now ask them to describe why it is cool. Did it make sense? Even if it did, would the other three billion under twenty fives say the same thing?
The site acts as an aggregator of content on the subject of teens’ marketing and lifestyle, and you can find articles, videos, studies, reports and much-much more. MTV and threebillion.com produced this video to explain why threebillion is important, and why Asia is super-important.
I also found this video, on the recent, (and somewhat) controversy Israeli ad campaign, aiming at improving tourism to the country.
Doing some searches in the site’s archives gave me this very interesting study, from USA Today, dated December 2006, about the gap in IM usage between teens and adults. The study provides the following stats:
- Almost 75% of adults who do use IM still communicate with e-mail more often; Almost 75% of teens send instant messages more than e-mail.
- More than half of the teens who use instant messages send more than 25 a day; 75% of adult users send fewer than 25 instant messages a day.
- 30% of teen users say they can’t imagine life without instant messaging.
- When keeping up with a friend who is far away, teens are most likely to use instant messaging, while adults turn first to e-mail.
- About 20% of teen IM users have used IM to ask for or accept a date; 16% have used it to break up with someone.
Wow !! 25 IM chats per day ! 75% of teens send more IM than emails ! 30% can’t imagine life without IM ! Do we need more proof that IM is the future of communication?
I commented a lot in the past about the future of IM in the corporate world, and some of the popular entry barriers to adopt corporate IM. Teens are the workers of tomorrow. Even today we see more university graduates, straight from campus, hired to consulting firms, venture capital and investment banking – they are used IM as a primary communication tool, and expect to find it in the workplace.
Again, before wrapping up, another short video, courtesy of SNL (BTW – I’m going to the NBC tour next Monday, the 8th – Hey, I’m a tourist on vacation, what can I say… ;-).
Check out the host… LeBron James !
Oh, one more, the monologue:
