One definition of the shallowness of the modern world is that the focus at this week’s Nokia World conference will no doubt be on which handsets Nokia releases and whether or not they have an iphone beater tucked up their Nordic sleeves.

But more interesting than all this hardware is the pre-announcement last week of Nokia Money.  To quote from the press release, Nokia Money:

“…will enable consumers to send money to another person just by using the person's mobile phone number, as well as to pay merchants for goods and services, pay their utility bills, or recharge their prepaid SIM cards.”

This promises to bring simple 24-hour banking services to a huge number of people, particularly in the developing world.  Globally there are about 4 billion mobile phones, but only 1.6 billion bank accounts.

If Nokia can pull this off, then I think this would be a Very Good Thing. Of course, not as interesting as whether the Spotify app is approved for the iPhone </irony>, but decently cool all the same.

I’ve recently been playing with Wolfram Alpha, which pulls in some great statistical information when you search on a first name, including the age distribution of the name and the average age of people with a particular name.

All this makes me think that you could make some pretty reasonable assumptions based purely on a first name.

Take ‘Gordon’ for instance.  Most famous Gordon is probably our current prime minister.  Wolfram Alpha’s search on Gordon shows the birth dates of Gordon over time (US only data, unfortunately):

And from that data, you can generate another graph showing the age distribution of people called Gordon:

So the average age of an American called Gordon is 58 – which co-incidentally is the age of Gordon Brown.

Turning to David Cameron, David is a much more common name – but even so the average age of all Davids is 50.  Not a million miles away from David Cameron’s real age of 43.

So OK, if I could get hold of UK data this would be more interesting.  But my basic thought is that if your email address contains your first name, marketers could probably make a pretty good stab at guessing your age.

I’ve recently been playing with Wolfram Alpha, which pulls in some great statistical information when you search on a first name, including the age distribution of the name and the average age of people with a particular name.

All this makes me think that you could make some pretty reasonable assumptions based purely on a first name.

Take ‘Gordon’ for instance.  Most famous Gordon is probably our current prime minister.  Wolfram Alpha’s search on Gordon shows the birth dates of Gordon over time (US only data, unfortunately):

And from that data, you can generate another graph showing the age distribution of people called Gordon:

So the average age of an American called Gordon is 58 – which co-incidentally is the age of Gordon Brown.

Turning to David Cameron, David is a much more common name – but even so the average age of all Davids is 50.  Not a million miles away from David Cameron’s real age of 43.

So OK, if I could get hold of UK data this would be more interesting.  But my basic thought is that if your email address contains your first name, marketers could probably make a pretty good stab at guessing your age.

Today’s launch of Firefox 3.5 is the latest shot in the long struggle for domination in the browser market. 

The data below – from AT Internet Institute - shows that Firefox has steadily been growing its market share in Europe, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer.  Disappointingly for Microsoft, Internet Explorer’s market share actually dropped in March, coinciding with the long-awaited launch of IE 8.

The same AT Internet research, from April 2009 shows the stark differences in the popularity of Firefox around Europe.  Of the five major European economies, the UK shows the lowest penetration of Firefox with 17% market share – compared with 30% in France and 42% in Germany.

This competition is driving some genuine innovation in the browser market, which is great to see.  Compare and contrast with the situation around email, where Microsoft is lazily exploiting Outlook’s monopoly position to resist innovation and ignore web standards.

A month since our last celeb chart, so what’s new?

Last month I confidently predicted that Richard Bacon would soon be top five – and naturally I was wrong.  He has almost doubled his follower count, but only makes it to number six.

The story instead is of the rise of musicians, with Lily Allen and Imogen Heap both easing into the top five – replacing Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. 

With Coldplay now massively out at the front of the pack, it seems that Twitter could be replacing MySpace as the primary way for musicians to connect with their fans. 

Finally one big new entry to the chart – Eddie Izzard rocks in with 250k followers – an unfortunate omission (although he was born in the Yemen, so possibly doesn’t count!).  With Eddie’s arrival, Rob Brydon (46k) drops off the chart for the time being.

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions.  It excludes searches from a contestants own country, because you can’t vote for your own entry.

Personally I’ll be impressed if Google can pull this off.  As any student of Eurovision knows, simple ‘popularity’ ranks quite a bit behind the simmering stew of post-cold war politics across Europe in terms of influence on voting.  So the countries of the former Soviet Union may hate Russia at a governmental level, but the large numbers of Russian diaspora guarantee a healthy slug of votes flowing back to Mother Russia.

Presumably search volume – and hence accuracy – will improve closer to the final on the 16th May.  Right now Google has Turkey and Norway neck and neck for the win, just ahead of Greece.  The punters on Betfair have the same top three, but with Norway clearly ahead of Greece and Turkey. 

Ashton Kutcher became the first person to top one million Twitter followers on Friday (and three days later is up to 1.23 million!), so it must be time for a quick look at our UK celebrity chart.

So what’s new.  Well Imogen Heap is new, although only because I forgot to include her – she has been on Twitter almost exactly a year and has added 100k followers in the past month, so my bad.

Neil Gaiman soars into the top three – and were it not for Stephen Fry I think we would talk a lot more about the way he uses the web.  Russell Brand is also up into the top five, now ahead of Jonathan Ross.

Finally keep an eye on Richard Bacon – at current rates of growth, he will be easing into the top five in a week or so.

As ever, please point out any errors or omissions – either comment here or tweet me on twitter.com/miketeasdale.

The Guardian has been running a regular feature where readers choose a bet on a sporting event and compete against a betting expert and a former sportsman.  This week for instance you can choose a bet for Fulham vs Liverpool on Saturday (with the people opting for a Liverpool win).

Update: By the way, the crowds got it right once more – Liverpool won one – nil with a goal in the 92nd minute. The ‘expert’ was spectacularly wrong, with a prediction that Liverpool would score in the first ten minutes of the game.

The Guardian has been running a regular feature where readers choose a bet on a sporting event and compete against a betting expert and a former sportsman.  This week for instance you can choose a bet for Fulham vs Liverpool on Saturday (with the people opting for a Liverpool win).

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Fry has at long last been overtaken at the top of the UK celebrity twitter chart by Coldplay.

We also have two new entries into the top five – Russell Brand eases into fourth place and Neil Gaiman has added almost 100,000 followers in a couple of weeks to get to fourth place.

Neil Gaiman is the only author in the top twenty, which is a bit of a surprise – good to see that his career has survived the dreadful job I made of editing his very first book!

Another big mover is Richard Bacon who has added 50,000 followers in the past two weeks – I set up a Twitter account a couple of days ago and he was one of the suggested people to follow, along with Al Gore, Perez Hilton and Miley Cyrus, so that might explain his sudden leap in popularity.