With summer coming to an end and school underway, it’s only natural we’d look for things to celebrate in September to keep our spirits high! This week we not only found an article on some great alternative holidays to keep in mind for September, but we also look into consumers TV habits when curled up in front of the TV, and an article on the Web Impact Index’s most recent stats.

15 Offbeat Holidays You Can Celebrate in September

There’s been so much talk of back-to-school lately, so we were delighted to find Mental Floss and their 15 other reasons to celebrate this month! For example, did you know this Sunday September 9^th is National Grandparents Day? It’s also Wiener Schnitzel Day! See what else we have to look forward to in the full article here. Personally I’m pumped for Talk like a Pirate Day on the 19^th – all those in agreement say “Aye!”

TV-Smartphone Combo Dominates Multiscreen Consumption

It’s hard to imagine a time when boredom existed, now that people have so many handheld devices at their disposal. Gone are the days of channel surfing it seems.  Ad Week revealed that when consumers are watching TV, 77 percent of the time they have another device in hand, and 49 percent of that time it’s a smartphone. What are people doing on their phones? Email, browsing, social networking, and gaming ranked highest. Check out the full article for what the most popular consumption device combos are, and what this tells marketers about consumer habits.

PCs Preferred to Smart Devices for Web Use in Canada

A few weeks ago we released the latest instalment in our series of Innovation Reports, looking at the generation gap between parents and kids when it came to technology. This week, eMarketer picked up on our infographic and covered the story in an article focused on ecommerce across mobile devices. In addition to our findings, eMarketer estimated “there will be 10.5 million smartphone users in Canada by the end of 2012, with that figure growing to 16.4 million by 2016.” Read the full article here.

Canada Ranks Fourth in Web Impact Index

What is the Web Impact Index exactly? It looks at internet access and infrastructure, and then indicators are grouped into three sub-categories: Web content and Web use scores; communications and institutional infrastructure scores; and political, economic and social impact scores.  Of 61 countries, it makes use of 85 indicators to determine just how much the Web affects a country. See who took the top 3 spots in The Telecom Blog’s full article.

Kelly is a regular contributor for Redboard.