Monday, February 23, 2009
A recent study found that only 30 percent of people who purchased an iPhone app actually used it the next day; for the same group, only 5 percent were using it 20 days later! And those are for paid apps; the stats get worse for free apps.Only about 10 percent of iPhone applications appear to retain an audience over time, and most of those are games, entertainment applications such as movie listings, and things like Facebook ("their user sessions must be off the charts," Pinch Media CEO Greg Yardley said).
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Police to receive new helicopters
The new state-of-the-art helicopters will help police protect communities and tackle crime.
A total of nine police forces will have access to the new aircraft, under the latest round of funding for police air operations.
One of the helicopters will be used as part of a trial project to enable neighbouring police forces to work together by sending the nearest available aircraft to incidents across force borders.
Statement from the Policing Minister
Announcing the new aircraft funding, Home Office Policing Minister Vernon Coaker said, 'Air support units play a crucial role in helping police protect communities against crime.
'They help officers with a wide range of operations, from searching for offenders or missing people, to assisting other emergency services with transporting injured people.
'I am pleased to announce that we are building on the success of our existing fleet of police aircraft with these new helicopters, and that we are strengthening the way forces work together to make best use of the resources available to them.'
The police aircraft fleet
The police aircraft fleet comprises 29 light and medium twin-engine helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft, operating from 29 units in England and Wales.
Police aircraft use hi-tech daylight and thermal imaging cameras to search for offenders who run off from crime scenes, assist in vehicle pursuits and look for vulnerable missing people.
The helicopters are also fitted with 'Nitesun' - a powerful searchlight to help find offenders in the dark and also to floodlight accident scenes.
The helicopters can be used to transport critically injured people to hospital at night, which air ambulances are not equipped to do. They are also fitted with 'Skyshout' - an airborne public address system used to pass critical messages to the public or emergency services.
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Microsoft laid over close to 1,400 employees last month. A letter went out this week to some of those employees letting them know they were overpaid, and asking for them to give some of the money back.
Word on the street is that the overpayment issue effected a good number of those employees, and some employees might have also been underpaid their severance from the company, which also isn’t exactly exciting.
Microsoft informed affected employees via a letter that most received Friday. The letter didn't explain why the overpayment happened, just told previous employees how much money they owed Microsoft and how they could go about paying the company back. Pretty harsh.
The letters employees received did give them the number for Microsoft customer service to call if they had questions, although that number was closed for the weekend so they're SOL until Monday morning.
Labels: economy, helicopter, iPhone, iphone app, Microsoft
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