And the gold medal for tech goes to…

By Claire Ayles

London has been a pretty special place to be this Summer (if you ignore the weather).  It kicked off with a bit of patriotic flag waving in honour of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and is drawing to a spectacular close at the moment, with the world’s second largest sporting event  (in terms of athlete numbers at least), the Paralympics.

In between, of course, we had the Olympics, which was the best ever.  That’s not just me (a proud Londoner and sports fan) speaking, even Australians said so, and that’s got to be hard to admit considering a) they pulled off Sydney 2000 and b) we’re British.

But it wasn’t just the sport that I found so utterly amazing, the technology behind the games was equally impressive.  Here are just some of my favourite Olympic tech facts.  Let me know if you have others.

• Contrary to popular belief, Usain Bolt did not win everything this Summer. His 200m winning performance may have bagged him yet another gold, but it only fuelled 80,000 tweets per minute.  Yes, only. When the Spice Girls donned their Louboutins and climbed on top of those cabs in the closing ceremony, Twitter went crazy, with 116,000 tweets per second about the world’s most famous girl band. 

• A mind boggling 150 million tweets were sent about the Games in total, it’s just a shame the trolls took most of the headlines.  For me, Twitter was invaluable and definitely the quickest way to find out who won what and who dropped the baton, although I did prematurely celebrate a Tom Daley Gold due to some duff Twitter information.

• The London 2012 official site became – for a while at least – the most visited sports site in the world, dealing at one point with almost 97,000 page views per second.  In all, 13.1 million unique visitors went to the website during the two weeks of the Games.

• The BBC revealed just how our viewing habits are changing, labeling London 2012 ‘the multi-platform’ games. 1.5 million people downloaded its smartphone app in the first week of the games alone and, in the same period, its website dealt with 29 million requests for online video content.  These requests peaked during the working week, with people presumably trying to get a sneaky glimpse of Wiggins et al whilst at their desks.