Launch of the Wells People app

Brand new Wells People app for your iPhone. Download it for free at http://itunes.com/app/localpeople.

The app will allow you to access all the Wells People web pages you love whether you are at home or on the move. It is so fiendishly clever, not only can you keep up to date with minute-by-minute news from Wells but, at the flick of a nifty dial, you can receive all the relevant local news and services in the local area in which you find yourself.

So if I fancied a bit of a road trip to Tiverton I could immediately find the funkiest folk club, the tastiest tandoori and the trendiest fashion boutique in which to purchase the appropriate threads to wear to the establishments. It could also prove useful if you find yourself in a strange town with your car running on vapours…

But in our excitement, we got to thinking, what is Wells’s take on technology? Are we Somerset folk riding on the cusp of the digital mobile revolution? And if not why not?

Looking at the growth of other online phenomena, the stats simply astound. Over 200,000,000 searches are made on Google in one day; 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; £534,000,000 was generated from UK e-retail in one day last year; the number of unique URL’s in Google’s index has exceeded 1 trillion, (I am not going to even attempt the amount of noughts I need for that figure)! By comparison, downloadable apps by mobile internet is in its infancy, but unlike natural evolution it doesn’t take aeons for the digital embryo to adapt, infiltrate and dominate the species. Mobile phones have been offering richer internet experiences model on model for years, notably by increasing mobile internet speeds through the advent of 3G, and high-speed downloads accessible via mobile broadband. But it took the iPhone to really capture our imagination about what we can do with our handsets, and to spawn the boom of the ‘app’.

Calling on Wellspeople, let’s see if we are representative of these stats!