On 14 October 2012, around 8 million people logged onto YouTube to watch Felix Baumgartner make his record-breaking skydive to Earth, the natural conclusion of the seven-year, $20 million Red Bull Stratos project. The livestream event would have been even larger had demand not out-stripped server capabilities.
Smokey Bear - it first appeared on a public-service fire-prevention advert on 9 August 1944 with his famous warning: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires”. The campaign has continued, with minor variations, to the present day!
An advertisement for a book seller was found among the rubble preserved at Pompeii, the city that was destroyed and buried by ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Prior to this, inscriptions by Babylonian merchants dating back to 3000 BC can be considered the first “written” advertisements.
Thomas Newcomb’s Publick Adviser (London, UK, 19 May - 28 September 1657) was the first newspaper devoted entirely to advertising, aimed at “all persons that are any way connected in matter of buying and selling”.
In 2015, $600 billion was spent on advertising globally. (That’s around $100 for every single human on Earth!)
Within 16 days of release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Infinity Ward/Seldgehammer Games, 2011) had grossed $1 billion.
Spanning 32 years 3 months, between its first and most recent releases, Flight Simulator is the longest-running series of them all. Originally released by developer subLOGIC in October 1979 for the Apple II, the game was subsequently acquired by Microsoft and distributed for PCs as Flight Simulator 1.00 in 1982.
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the computer company Bolt in Massachusetts, USA, sent the first email. It was an experiment to see if he could exchange a message between two computers, and it was Ray who decided to use the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from their location. The message read “QWERTYUIOP”. (The first instance of the @ sign dates back to 4 May 1536, when an Italian merchant used the symbol to refer to amphorae, a unit of measurement.)
Iceland has the highest percentage of individuals using the internet.
As midnight struck on New Year’s Eve 2012, the number of tweets per second from Japan and South Korea hit 33,388. The phenomenon may be partly explained by the Japanese custom of sending New Year’s cards, or nengajo.
The name insure.com was sold in October 2009 to internet marketing firm QuinStreet for $16 million.
Http cookies were invented by Lou Montulli while working for Netscape in 1994. Their first use on the internet was on Netscape’s own website, checking if users were first-time visitors or had used the website previously.
The masks worn by the “hacktivists” of Anonymous depict Guy Fawkes - a member of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British parliament in 1605. The mask was designed by artist David Lloyd for the graphic novel ‘V for Vendetta’.
This International Women's Day, our office manger Claire Cole outlines some of the key ways that Remerge supports female employees
November was Wellness Month at Remerge and brought some surprising revelations
How do you know if your company really cares about you? I unintentionally put Remerge to the test.