No WhatsApp behind the wheel please!

 Using social media or calling people while driving is a common sight nowadays but even the simplest distraction behind the wheel can put a young driver at risk.

Dialling cell phones, checking SMSs, eating and talking to passengers - this multi-tasking among teens while driving greatly raise their risk of crashes and/or near-crash incidents, says a new study.

"Novice drivers are more likely to engage in high-risk secondary tasks more frequently over time as they became more comfortable with driving. The increasingly high rates of secondary task engagement among newly-licensed novice drivers are worrisome as this appears to be an important contributing factor to crashes or near-crashes," warned Charlie Klauer, group leader for teen risk and injury prevention at the transportation institute's Center for Vulnerable Road User Safety in Virginia, US.

Traffic studies show that drivers from 15 years to 20 years of age represent 6.4 percent of all motorists on the road, but account for 11.4 percent of fatalities and 14 percent of police-reported crashes resulting in injuries, said the study conducted by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.

"Any secondary task that takes the novice driver's eyes off the road increases risk. A distracted driver is unable to recognise and respond to road hazards, such as the abrupt slowing of a lead vehicle or the sudden entrance of a vehicle, pedestrian, or object onto the forward roadway," added the study, published in the journal New England Journal of Medicine.

Klauer and her team compared the results of a one-year, 100-car study with drivers between 18 and 72 years of age with an average of 20 years' experience and an 18-month study of 42 teens who had drivers' licenses for less than three weeks.

Participants from both studies drove vehicles outfitted with data acquisition systems, including cameras and a suite of sensors which collected continuous video and driving performance data for the duration of both studies.

A secondary task was considered a contributing factor to any crash or near-crash event if it occurred within five seconds prior to or within one second after the event, said the study.

The data revealed that compared to experienced drivers, novice drivers engaged in secondary tasks less frequently during the first six months.

However, they matched experienced drivers between months seven and 15, and were engaged in non-driving tasks more often than experienced drivers during months 16 through 18 - a two-fold increase in risky distractions during the last three months of the study.

"Newly-licensed novice drivers are of course at a particularly high crash risk, in part because driving is a complicated task and novices tend to make more mistakes when learning a new task," said Klauer. 

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Google kills file-sharing apps Bump and Flock

Smartphone file-sharing apps Bump and Flock have announced that they will be discontinued at the end of January.

US internet giant Google bought the startup behind the apps, Bump Technologies, in September for a deal reportedly worth between $30 million and $60 million.

"We are now deeply focused on our new projects within Google, and we've decided to discontinue Bump and Flock," Bump co-founder and chief executive David Lieb wrote in a blog post late on Tuesday.

On January 31, Bump and Flock will be removed from both the App Store and Google Play, after which neither app will work and all user data will be deleted.

Over the coming weeks, users can export their data by opening either app and following instructions. They will then receive an email with a link containing their photos, videos, contacts and other data.

Lieb thanked users for their feedback, enthusiasm and support over the years, saying it "brought much meaning to our work."

"In many ways, Bump was a revolutionary product that inspired many subsequent advances and helped push the world forward," Lieb wrote. "We hope our new creations at Google will do the same."

The Bump application lets smartphone users easily share data by gently knocking knuckles while holding devices.

Flock software taps into smartphone location-sensing technology to note when friends are in proximity of one another and lets them contribute to sets of photos reflecting shared experiences such as a concerts or sporting events.

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Snapchat, Vine among top smartphone apps of 2013

Snapshot, Vine, and Candy Crush Saga earned coveted spots on smartphones this year, making them among the most downloaded apps of the year.

There are more than a million apps on Apple Inc's App Store and Google Inc's Play store, the two dominant marketplaces for apps, which see billions of downloads each year.

This year, the most downloaded apps were new takes on communication, gaming, and entertainment, according to mobile app experts.

"2013 was a really interesting year in terms of maturation, milestones and new trends," said Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at Fiksu, a mobile marketing company based in Boston. "The most downloaded apps were in familiar categories, but offered new twists," he added.

While old favorites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - available for iPhone, Android and other devices - continued to be popular ways of communicating with friends, Snapchat eclipsed them in downloads in 2013, becoming the sixth most downloaded free app of the year on the App Store, according to Apple.

"Snapchat went from being a niche app to achieving much more critical mass, so much so that Facebook was reportedly willing to spend billions of dollars to acquire the company," said Palli.

With Snapchat, users can send photos and videos that disappear shortly after they are viewed.

Launched in 2011, the app's user base continued to grow rapidly in 2013, with over 13 million people using the app in October, according to the lastest available estimates from global information and measurement company Nielsen. In December alone, over 400 million pieces of content were shared through the app, according to Snapchat, based in Venice, CA.

Vine, a video sharing app released earlier this year by microblogging company Twitter Inc, was the fourth most downloaded free app in 2013. The app, for iPhone, Android and other devices, allows users to share videos under six seconds in length. Nielsen estimates over 6 million people in the US were using the app in October of this year.

Snapchat and Vine fall into a category that mobile analytics firm Flurry calls camera-enhanced messaging, which they said grew eightfold in 2013.

"The communications category underwent phenomenal growth this year. Messaging apps like Snapchat, Line, Kakao (KakaoTalk) and WeChat are all exploding and becoming bigger than the carriers in their home countries in terms of users," said Simon Khalaf, chief executive of San Francisco-based company Flurry.

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