Stat of the Week Winner: December 1-7 2012

Thanks for your nominations last week in our Stat of the Week competition. We’ve selected Daniel Croft’s nomination of fascinating text message statistics on the advent of 20 years of text messaging:

“Wednesday was the 20 year anniversary of the first text message to have been sent, and so in response both Telecom and Vodafone have released some surprising information.

“Vodafone users sent 7.3 billion texts last year while Telecom was just under 7 billion. Thats 14,000,000,000 plus texts a year. Thats 38,000,000 a day spread between a population of 4,400,000… 8 texts per person a day. Or 2920 texts per person a year.

“A statistic that I would love to hear on this would be just how many of those 14 billion texts are just ‘LOL’.”

(A reminder that in our competition fine print, we state that we will not award Stat of the Week for a statistic coming from anyone at the University of Auckland outside the Statistics department. You can still nominate and discuss them, but the nomination won’t be eligible for the prize.)