What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Make a cup of tea? Turns out, more and more early birds are hitting the web.

- Internet companies have been reporting that, in the US, people are booting up earlier than ever. Arbor Networks says that web traffic declines between midnight and 6am, but gets a huge kick at around 7am. Verizon Wireless reports the numbers of text messages sent between 7am and 10am has risen by 50 per cent in a year, although Americans have been later to take up texting than their British counterparts.

- Part of this is down to new technologies. iPhone owners can check Twitter in seconds. BlackBerry users wake up to their phone alarm in the morning, then scroll to their e-mails. But families are also more tech-savvy than ever. One parent in Michigan admitted he used texts to wake up his two sons. “I could just walk upstairs,” he told The New York Times, “but they always answer their texts.”