VODAFONE REPORTS INCREASED 'MINUTES', DATA USAGE - Irish customers spent more time on the phone and sent more text messages over the three months to the end of June than during the same period last year.
Minutes of voice calls per month were up 4.6% and the number of text messages sent by Vodafone's Irish customers rose by 15%.
In an interim management statement for Q2 released today, Vodafone said that average revenue per user is down 6.3% on the same period last year, to just under €33 a month. This is an increase of 1.9% on the Q1 figure, which the company attributed to greater data usage.
Vodafone's customers in Ireland sent 15% more messages in Q2 compared to the same period last year and, at an average of 224 messages sent per customer sent far more than the European average of 109.
1.49 millio texts were sent by Vodafone Ireland customers in the quarter.
*** LOW TAX BURDEN BOOSTS MICROSOFT PROFITS - Microsoft followed its tech peers Apple, Intel and Ebay in announcing quarterly sales and profit figures which came in well ahead of analysts' expectations last night.
The company, which is Ireland's largest multinational employer, posted a €5.87 billion net profit. Microsoft credits strong sales of its office software and its XBox 360 games console division but also a substantial reduction in its tax rate brought about in part, said the company, by the fact that it is routing more profit through Ireland.
*** CLUES ABOUT ECONOMIC BUBBLES IN JOURNALISTS' VOCABULARY - New research show that there are clues about economic bubbles to be found in journalists'vocabulary.
The research, which was undertaken in the school of computer science in UCD, showed that as a bubble develops, there is a narrowing in the language used by journalists, with fewer verbs and nouns used to desribe what is happening.
Mark Keane, chair of computer science in UCD, said that the language used by journalist becomes tighter and tighter during this period.
He said that there were much fewer nouns, showing that people were, more and more, talking about the same things. This means that they are ignoring other things, he said. He said that a somewhat similar effect was noticeable in an economic downswing, in that his team found a convergence just before the economy hit its lowest point.
