LG has been running a contest to find the person fastest at SMS text messsaging in America. The conetst has been run with MTV and is in its third year. This year 250,000 had joined the contest. They have just had the finals and the person with the fastest fingers is Kate Moore, a 15 year old girl from Des Moines Iowa (no relation to our Alan Moore). The story has been on CNN and even the Wall Street Journal covered the news.
The teenager won a 50,000 dollar grand prize. The runner up was another teenage girl, 14 year old Morgan Dynda who also made the finals last year. A nice detail from the finals was that for all the "SMS grammr" and abbreviations used in SMS (and IM and Twitter etc) - the winning texting test was to type correctly some lyrics from the song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" so these girls also know how to type correctly..
Related info. 42% of American teenagers now can type text messages on their phones, blind, according to Harris Interactive. And how addicted is Kate Moore to text messaging? Get this - she averages 14,000 SMS text messages sent per month! 14 thousand? That means 466 SMS sent per day. For every hour she is awake, it is 29 per hour. Assuming she also receives the same level of response SMS messages from her friends, that means she is looking at a message on her phone every minute of every day that she is awake (and no doubt reads SMS text messages in her dreams too..). Meanwhile LG has said they intend to expand the texting contest to become a global competition. Great!
If you want to understand SMS text messaging, the most widely used data application on the planet, read my analysis of the SMS phenomenon including numbers and stats of users, revenues, etc in: 3 Billion use SMS, what does that mean?
Congratulations Kate Moore, you are the fastest American at SMS text messaging.
UPDATE - No way! CNN just reported that Ms Moore had only had a mobile phone for 8 months before winning the championship. Talk about a fast learner as well as fast texter. Any smart company out there wanting a one-person walking test lab for the 7th mass media, hire this lady now..
A little typo here Tommi: "14,000 SMS text messages sent per day". I guess it should be "per month". Long live SMS flat rates :-)
Posted by: Martin | June 23, 2009 at 06:49 AM
What type of phone did she have? I'm curious to know if the keypad ergonomics had anything to do with this versus other keypads.
Posted by: otoburb | June 23, 2009 at 05:08 PM
HI Martin and otoburb
Thank you for the comments.
Martin, oops, yes, 14,000 per month, not 14,000 per day. Ouch. Will go correct that right away. Thanks! Yeah, 14,000 per day, gosh, that would be one every 4 seconds.. Even sending one word to the same person would be rough to maintain a speed of one every four seconds.. Thanks. Will go fix now.
otoburb. I wish I knew. My guess is - her being a 15 year old, that its a basic T9 phone, not a Blackberry for example, but I don't know. As this contest was not just speed but also accuracy (and texting blind etc) then a full QWERTY keypad is not that critical. A T9 keypad is actually much faster to learn - this seems counter-intuitive as is almost everything about SMS - but yes, T9 is far faster to learn than real QWERTY.
Also they don't use predictive text, obviously. The contest includes mis-spelled words, for example using a single letter as a capital letter in the middle of a word spelled in lower case letters, like this spelLing and they had to spell that also correctly (with the typo correctly replicated).
But yeah, she learned to become the fastest SMS texter, against 250,000 others, and did it learning to text in 8 months. Many or her rivals had been sending a hundred messages per day for many years.. This girl has to be particularly gifted in her finger dexterity..
Thank you both for writing
Tomi Ahonen :-)
Posted by: Tomi Ahonen | June 25, 2009 at 01:34 PM
What an amazingly random competition!
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