Nielsen is reporting today that teens have more than tripled mobile data consumption and also continue to hold top spot as the most engaged mobile messaging segment.

The report states that “In the third quarter of 2011, teens age 13-17 used an average of 320 MB of data per month on their phones, increasing 256 percent over last year and growing at a rate faster than any other age group”.

While this deluge of data consumption seems immense, messaging still remains the largest teen behavior in the mobile space, with the number of SMS/MMS messages reaching 3,417 per teen. Let me just say that again…3,417 texts per teen—seven messages per waking hour, according to the study. Um, WOW!

Marketers out there surely have their eye on this segment for a plethora of mobile marketing opportunities, or should. No doubt this channel is a credible and immensely important way to reach a generation that thinks texting is faster than making a phone call.

[via Nielsen Wire]

Today, FunMobility introduces a new app to its menagerie of fun, called FunChat, which blends chat, multiplayer HTML5 games, virtual currency, rewards and achievements into a realtime user experience for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android.

While these are all great features, FunChat’s coup de grace (for me, anyway) is the fact that it contains the first mobile pranking engine. That’s right, FunChat users can push audio pranks to smartphones, like wolf whistles, Bronx cheers, and angry pigs, for example, even if the phone is in standby mode or you’re not running FunChat. Man, how did Ashton Kutcher not get to this first? I thought he was a tech evangelist.

FunChat offers customizable chat through ‘Chattitude™’, a feature that enables users to personalize the chat experience with neo-anime avatars, chat bubbles, and a host of virtual goods for every personality, mood, or occasion you can think of. Users can take advantage of these customizations in a “public party” or with friends in private.

The app’s multiplayer HTML5 game rooms include casual games like concentration, carnival duck shooting, match-3, racing, and more, optimized for HTML5 on iPhone and Android devices. Within the FunChat app, users can compete for FunGold, the app’s virtual currency, which is earned playing games and messing around on the app and can then be redeemed in-app to get goods and prizes like avatars, chat bubbles, and pranks.

The key here is that these game rooms are also part chat rooms, so users can boast about their in-game accomplishments, heckle opposing players, challenge their friends to gaming duels, or shower them with praise for shooting a whole raft of ducks — all in realtime. With a game-ified chat UI, pranking, and in-app virtual rewards, FunChat is attempting to build an addictive social gaming experience that encourages a ton of activity and interaction that appeals to young people.

Obviously with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and the escalating use of text messaging and games (mobile consumers in the U.S. send 187 billion texts a month), FunMobility is smart to combine text messaging, chat, and gaming all in one app. Texting and chat within a mobile app is an inherently social and game-ified experience, and a lot of messaging apps (as I wrote about GOGII recently) are thinking about how best to blend these complementary features. So TextChat is smart to get into the game relatively early.

In the end, it seems that what will distinguish these social and game-ified messaging platforms is how users react to the different UIs and designs — each create a distinct user experience — and it’s all about what makes sense to you. For me, FunChat looks great. And certainly sprinkling “Fun” everywhere is never a bad idea when it comes to brand messaging. Of course, it also helps that FunChat is free on iOS and Android, as is in-app chatting and messaging.

Oh, and developers are welcome, too: “A key ingredient to the ‘secret sauce’ behind FunChat lies in our HTML5 multiplayer game engine that enables high-quality games to be played concurrently between native iOS and Android clients and browsers,” said Adam Lavine, CEO of FunMobility. “This proprietary game engine is part of our extensible FunChat Mobile Engagement Platform which allows developers to easily make open-standard HTML5 games that run on both the iOS and Android platforms, offering consumers new ways to share, discover, and play together in real-time”.

Check out FunChat on the App Store here.

The keyboard looks sort of like the RIM multi-tap keyboard of yore and at $16 I can’t imagine these are anything but a close-out from some forgotten time when kids didn’t have cellphones.

Product Page via OhGizmo via RedFerret

According to the report, 88% of teenagers with cell phones are texters. “Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.” I usually send less than 100 texts per month, so these kids are really texting!

Most of the report confirms my anecdotal observations, but there’s some interesting nuance in the findings. Girls text more than boys, and a quarter of teens have made or received a phone call during class. The most surprising item, to me, was that “Teens whose parents limit their texting are also less likely to report being passengers in cars where the driver texted behind the wheel or used the phone in a dangerous manner while driving.”

It always amazes me to watch teens text. The back-and-forth aspect of texting makes certain kinds of conversation more fun (say, flirting); but it’s so inconvenient for any kind of meaningful dialog. I don’t understand why the kids are willing to string out a conversation across minutes and hours, and dozens of texts, when a simple phone call of the same content would last less then five minutes. I guess I’m getting old…

And while there’s no nationwide texting ban for regular drivers, Uncle Sam has just decreed that anyone driving a large commercial truck or bus anywhere in the country can be fined up to $2,750 if caught texting while in motion.

According to Reuters, “research by trucking regulators” indicates that sending and receiving text messages causes drivers to take their eyes off the road and that drivers who text while on the road “are significantly more at risk of getting into an accident than someone who is not texting.”

Why this theory needed to be backed up by actual research is unclear.

U.S. bans texting by truckers, bus drivers [Reuters]

Couple problems here. First, I don’t own a home and I’m not looking to buy one anytime soon. Second, I’d probably look for a reputable lender. Nicholas also said, “You can basically assume that if someone has a 718 area code they at least have a small knife on them at all times.” I’m just not comfortable meeting with knife-wielding mortgage lenders at this stage in my life.

Third, I’m not going to blame AT&T for this particular message. I can’t say for sure that they sold my phone number – I doubt they did. If anything, my new number is someone else’s old number – a number that could have been entered into one of thousands of web forms, reputable or otherwise. Whatever the case, it’s out there now.

I will, however, blame US wireless carriers in general for charging people to receive text messages, wanted or unwanted. If I didn’t have an AT&T texting plan – I do, I pay $5 per month for 200 messages – then I would have had to shell out 20 cents to receive this unsolicited text. So it’s either add a texting plan or pay for every text message that gets sent to me. What a racket.

Now to be fair, I could turn off text messaging completely by calling up AT&T customer service and telling them to nix all text messages to and from my account. But what if I was a guy who wanted the ability to send a few text messages each month? I’m exactly that guy.

I’m okay with spending 80 cents to send four text messages every month, I’m not okay with paying 20 cents for each text message that my dumb text-happy friends want to send me and I’m really not okay with paying 20 cents for Liberty Mortgage to invite me to a Beat It-style knife fight over a mortgage I don’t need.

If someone calls me and I don’t answer, I don’t use any of my plan minutes. That makes total sense. If someone sends me a text message I don’t want, my options are to either pay 20 cents or to add what I believe to be a wildly-overpriced texting package.

Doesn’t seem right.

Looks like the Obama Administration, which really ought to be focused on getting Americans like me affordable health care (unless doctors now accept World of Warcraft Gold as payment, lol!), has set its sights on eliminating the scourge of distracted driving once and for all. Case in point: Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood is holding a summit this week that has the ultimate goal of “finding ways to eliminate texting while driving.”

We’ve learned over the past few months that plenty of people admit to texting while driving, while at the same time seeing several studies indicating just how dangerous that actually is. We’ve implored y’all never to text and drive, but suffice it to say that not everyone reads our fine words.

The summit will include a series of recommendations that state (and federal) governments can then take and turn into laws suited for their own jurisdictions. Should State One ban texting while driving, while State Two only bans talking while driving? A whole lot of that, yes.

For example, my very own Senator, Sen. Chuck Schumer, has a bill floating around Congress that would ban texting and e-mailing while driving. Of course, enforcing such a ban is another matter entirely—what, are bankrupt state governments supposed to hire more police officers to patrol the highways? Though I get the feeling that the threat of breaking the law will prevent most folks from texting and e-mailing while driving, provided such a law is passed. Pass the law, and watch the numbers drop just because, generally speaking, people like to obey the law.

And let’s be real for a second: who are you talking to/texting back-and-forth with/e-mailing while on the road that you need to do so while on the road? You really don’t need to text your friend “yo what’s going down tonight?” while doing 80MPH on the highway.

Never one to be ahead of the curve, the AAM (Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers) announced today that they are are supporting the ban on “text messaging using a hand-held device or calling using a hand-held device while driving a motor vehicle.”

They’ve come to this conclusion after the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute conducted a “100 Car Study” that found that minimizing eye-off-the-road time is critical to the design of any feature added to car. This study apparently took 10 years and over 100 million dollars about $20 and a trip to the mall to complete.

Before you watch this be warned it’s pretty graphic. I’ve seen plenty of people swerving because of texting – one guy I saw was on his old, ratty Nokia rolling from lane to lane as he texted whoever was most important in his life while traveling 75MPH on I75 in Ohio – and this PSA really shows what can, and probably will happen, in a terrible number of texting-while-driving cases.

The PSA was made by the Gwent police department and is part of a 30 minute movie. This 4 minute tidbit is enough to make me rethink checking Google Maps on the iPhone let alone SMSing “WTF LOL” to anyone.

via Giz

Only marginally less hilarious than the man who ran into a tree while Twittering comes this story of a Staten Island teen who fell into a manhole while texting. Her story isn’t quite as funny because she’s suing the Department of Environmental Protection for leaving the manhole uncovered and unattended.

While it may seem overly litigious to sue for something that could have easily been avoided by, you know, paying attention, doctors at Staten Island University Hospital did express some concern that the teen, Alexa Longueira, may have damaged her spine during the five-foot fall. Also, she lost one of her shoes.

Thankfully, the sewer was empty at the time Longueira fell in although she said “it was putrid” and let’s not forget that she lost her shoe, which now carries little to no resale value.

Staten Island girl falls down uncovered manhole [silive.com via Neatorama]

A new survey shows that 1 in 4 Americans text while driving. That’s not good news for road safety, no sir.

The survey, which was conducted by Vlingo, says that 26 percent of people admit to texting while driving—the implication is that plenty more people text while driving than admit to doing so. (Note: Polls are created with this type of “are they telling the truth?” scenario in mind, so it should make a huge impact on the final percentage.) The poll surveyed 4,800 people.

Only a few states here in the U.S. ban texting while driving, including Washington state (the first state to ban the dangerous activity) and New Jersey (home to housewives or something).

The problem is that texting while driving isn’t seen as an inherently dangerous activity, at least compared to something like drink driving; everyone knows that’s a no-no. “What’s the harm in sending out a text while I’m behind the wheel?” Well, mister-think-you’re-Fernando-Alonso, any time you take your eyes off the road that puts everyone in danger, and not just you. All it takes is one stray maneuver and you’re looking at a huge pile-up.

So, in conclusion, just knock it off already. That, or Greg will get really sad. We don’t want that to happen, now do we?

According to the Survey, Americans sent over 1 Trillion text messages in 2008, almost triple the number (363 million) from 2007. That works out to roughly 3.5 billion txts per day, or almost 13 messages per wireless user (the survey reports that there are “more than 270 million wireless users” in the US) per day.

When you factor in the increasing popularity of smartphones (iPhone 3G, T-Mo G1, BlackBerry Storm, yadda, yadda), Twitter’s pop culture explosion, and the extra 15 million new wireless subscribers in ’08, among other factors, all of a sudden 13/per doesn’t really seem all that staggering.

Even so, we’ve officially entered the Age of Trillions (stimulus package, anyone?). Gone are the days when Billions (yes, with a capital B) seemed unfathomable. But alas, I digress. Here are a few more fun facts:

[W]ireless revenues showed impressive year-to year gains, as wireless data service revenues for the year 2008 rose to more than $32 billion. This represents a 39% increase over 2007, when data revenues totaled $23.2 billion. Wireless data revenues for 2008 amounted to nearly 22% of all wireless service revenues, and represent what consumers spend on non-voice services.

Other highlights of the survey include: wireless customers using more than 2.2 trillion minutes in 2008, an increase of 100 billion minutes from 2007, and record-breaking six-month wireless service revenues of more than $75 billion with annual service revenues reaching $148 billion by year-end 2008.

Reuters is reporting that text messaging may have had something to do with a recent train crash in California that killed 25 and injured 135. Cell phone records show that the train’s conductor received a text message at 4:21:03 PM, followed by the crash at 4:22:23 PM. The idea is that he got the text message, looked down to read it, and missed the trackside signal. The commuter train then collided with a freight train.

Whether text messaging was the culprit or not, California train workers have now been temporarily banned from using cell phones at work. Temporarily? It’s a train, make it permanent. Many states make it illegal to text while driving, why should a train be any different? You don’t see bus drivers texting (I hope).

To the girl who almost slammed into me as she was texting away on her phone while driving last week: regardless of the crazy face you made and the nasty words you mouthed through your windshield, that was your fault. California agrees with me.

Just yesterday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation outlawing the reading or writing of text messages while driving. Starting January 1st, the first violation will set you back 20 bucks, with a 50 dollar fee every time after that. Not mentioned in the legislation is a secret rule where everyone you’re text-driving near gets to pull over and punch you in the face.

A report recently came out that says parents and teachers are not communicating. Parents blame their busy schedules for not being able to meet with teachers.The report also said that parents know more about their bank accounts then they do about their kid’s report card.

The reason for this is simple. The information about your bank account is readily available online and via text messaging. Parents are now demanding the same level of service for monitoring their child’s progress in school. Teachers could text or email updates to parents once a month or have a site they can post updates too.

I’m sure students find the idea of an RSS feed of their quiz results just thrilling!

A small airplane in Ireland suddenly found itself in a dilly of a pickle of a jam when it "lost all onboard electrical power, communications and weather radar soon after take-off from Kerry airport," according to The Irish Times.

The twin-engine Piper contained a pilot and four passengers. The pilot was unable to make contact with the nearest air traffic control tower, so he tried his cell phone. He was able to contact the air traffic control tower in nearby Cork, but he eventually lost contact.

The pilot turned to text messaging instead, telling the tower that he was planning to land at the Cork airport. The air traffic controller sent text messages back and forth with the pilot, guiding him towards the airport safely. The landing gear had to be lowered by hand and the plane was able to fly in front of the control tower to confirm that the landing gear had been lowered successfully.

The 30-year old plane eventually landed and everyone onboard was safe. Unfortunately, the amount of text messages sent by the pilot ended up costing far more than the airplane was worth, so it would have been cheaper for the pilot and the four passengers to jump out of the plane wearing parachutes.

I kid. But seriously, those text messages are expensive. I would have called my mobile provider first and added unlimited texting. Just saying.

[via Slashdot]

Ken Dunkin, the representative who introduced the bill, says texting in the street is no laughing matter:

“This legislation is not laughable. On the surface it’s like, ‘Oh wow, what is this?’ But it’s becoming more and more of a common problem with people haplessly crossing an intersection and almost killing themselves.”

He also sited two pedestrian deaths in New York city that might have been related to texting-while-walking. If New York wants to pick up the bill I hope they also ban staring-up-at-tall-buildings-while-walking and stopping-at-the-top-of-the-subway-stairs-to-look-around.

And in case you still wanted to laugh at the thought of the dangers of walking, I mean texting, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued a warning this week about the how its possible to hurt yourself when you’re not paying attention to where you are walking. And an ER doctor in Texas reported that she’s treated people who injured themselves texting while riding Segways. Oh wow, Segways!

photo care of GeekSugar

Schwartz was able to accurately tap out a ridiculously long phrase in 60 seconds.  

According to LG, the winning phrase was:

"Does everybody here know the alphabet? Let’s text. Here it goes … AbcDeFghiJKlmNoPQrStuvWXy & Z! Now I know my A-B-C’s, next time won’t you text with me?"

Not to take anything away from Schwarz — that phrase is definitely impressive — but the contest was only open to people with activated, full QWERTY phones made by LG.

via I4U

Some people out there are under the impression that they’re the only ones using text messages in the US. Turns out it’s become more popular than you might think, with 301 billion texts forecasted total for 2008. But the SMS’s time in the sun might be over before the zenith, as mobile IM is set to overtake it, or so the analysts say.

I don’t think that’s going to happen this year, and you can find out why on CrunchGear.

Someone sent out thousands of text messages encouraging recipients to call Mr. G. Raff and a number of other animals at the Houston Zoo. The message includes the number to the Zoo’s main switchboard. No one knows who set up the prank, but the giraffe is already set up on two dates with nice ladies from the Houston area and could be mating shortly.

UPDATE – More information straight from the emu’s mouth. The Houston Zoo just emailed us:

Actually, if you picked up the story from Dial-a-Phone they didn’t get it quite right. It was Dublin Zoo that received calls related to hoax text messages that told recipients G. Raff or Anna Conda wanted to talk to them. At Houston Zoo our text messages were all variations of the “Somebody’s looking for you” theme. Go to www.chron.com to see the Houston Chronicle’s story about our hoax text message experience.