Art, Culture, Entertainment
Debuted on December 17, 1989 The Simpsons is the longest running prime-time comedy series in the history of US television. The Simpsons show also holds the record for most guest stars in a television series.
The characters of this family conceived by Matt Groening are named after members of his own family.
The main characters of The Simpsons have yellow coloring to attract the attention of channel hoppers.
Since its debut The Simpsons has won over hundred of awards, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the show Marge Simpson "posed" naked for Playboy issue released in October, 2009.
Homer's exclamatory catchphrase “D'oh!” was included in the online version of The Oxford Dictionary (but without the apostrophe).
The idea for The Sims, life-simulation computer game, is believed to be based on the experience of its creator Will Wright. His house was destroyed in 1991 in a firestorm and his family had to move and start afresh.
The first game of this franchise was released on February 4, 2000 and as of February 2005 it has shipped 16 million copies worldwide which made it the best-selling PC game in history.
The Sims franchise holds the record for best-selling computer game franchise of all time with over 100 million copies of Sims 1, 2, 3 and all expansion packs being sold worldwide to date.
In addition to extraordinary sales the game also has been a success in other ways - attracting casual gamers and female gamers. According to statistics, female gamers make up approximately 50% of all audience.
Google's name is a play on the word “googol”, which means the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.
As of December 31, 2005, Google employed 5,680 full time employees. Google employees are known as Googlers, and they are a very diverse team: one operations manager is a former neurosurgeon, one software engineer is a former rocket scientist. As Google has in its philosophy: “You can be serious without a suit.”
In 2002, American Dialect Society members voted "google" the "most useful" Word of the Year. In 2006, the verb “to google” was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.
The idea of SMS – short message service began to be discussed in the the beginning of the 1980s, but the companies started to develop its commercial possibilities only in the early 1990s. However, the initial growth was slow as the companies could not work out the reliable systems of charging for this service. In 1995 there were only 0.4 messages on average per GSM customer per month.
But once procedures were in place the texting skyrocketed. By the end of 2000, the average number of messages reached 35 per user per month, and on Christmas Day 2006, over 205m texts went out in the UK alone.
Today, this service is used by 74% of all mobile phone subscribers, or 2.4 billion people.
In some languages SMS is used as a synonym for a text message, or even a verb, though technically speaking SMS is a certain communication protocol, and some companies use different protocols for sending and receiving text messages.
IKEA is a retailer selling low-price furniture, home accessories, bathrooms and kitchens around the world.
IKEA was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad in Sweden. The name IKEA comes from the initials of the founder's name (Ingvar Kamprad), farm where he grew up (Elmtaryd) and his home village (Agunnaryd).
Founded in 1943, IKEA today has over 235 stores in more than 30 countries and more than 110,000 co-workers (this is the exact word they use in egalitarian IKEA).
A survey in 2007 ranked 80-year old Ingvar Kamprad the second most admired man in Sweden.
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