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The num­ber of exhibitors at CeBit in 2006 was 6,167….which was about 1% down on the 6,246 that exhib­ited in 2005. No news there then. Except when you start to look at the break­down of exhibitors by coun­try. The num­ber of exhibitors from China increased from 304 to 396. That’s a 30% increase if you’re not so hot at men­tal arith­metic. You might not feel that’s news either. We’re con­stantly reminded that the Chi­nese are poised to take over the world any day now. The People’s Repub­lic is cur­rently the world’s fourth largest econ­omy, sec­ond largest at pur­chas­ing power par­ity, third largest exporter and importer, con­sumes a third of the world’s steel and almost half of the world’s con­crete, So why is it such a strug­gle to name even a hand­ful of Chi­nese tech­nol­ogy brands. Lenovo, China Mobile, China Telecom…….erm? One clue might be that most of the exhibitors at Cebit in 2007 will be com­po­nent man­u­fac­tur­ers. Now I’m fairly cer­tain that the Chi­nese know how to take these com­po­nents and assem­ble them into shiny fin­ished prod­uct. So why aren’t they doing just that and sell­ing them over here? One the­ory is that the Chi­nese don’t get West­ern brand­ing. Another might be that the home econ­omy is boom­ing and there­fore rep­re­sents a bet­ter risk/return than try­ing to mus­cle in on estab­lished mar­kets over­seas. Either way, if you’re plan­ning on vis­it­ing CeBit this March, it might be wise to brush up on your Mandarin.

I con­fess. Mine is one of the ani­mated voices debat­ing the future of Apple in the mobile phone indus­try. But I’m the heretic deny­ing that we’re wit­ness­ing the birth of the Mobile Mes­siah. I have much love for Apple (even if sit typ­ing this on a Sony Vaio). They have a knack of dis­rupt­ing mar­kets through intel­li­gent and beau­ti­ful design. And the desir­abil­ity of their brand is sec­ond to none. So they should be well placed to thrive in the mobile phone busi­ness. Right?

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Few top­ics have inspired as much ani­mated con­ver­sa­tion within the agency recently as the launch of the iPhone. There are even rumours – which I can nei­ther con­firm nor deny – that two senior Ban­ner exec­u­tives have staked a rea­son­ably hefty sum of money on whether or not Apple will still be in the mobile phone busi­ness in three years’ time.

Atti­tudes so far seem to fall into three main camps:

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• Apple has a new shiny prod­uct and I want one. It’s a mobile phone? It doesn’t mat­ter, I want one anyway.

Pipex has announced its sec­ond com­mer­cial trial of WiMAX in the UK. This is great news. Well it is if you live in War­wick. Oh and work for War­wick Coun­cil. You’ll be able to get an 8meg con­nec­tion wher­ever you roam (within War­wick that is). They also plan to roll out the trial to those out­side the coun­cil as well as to that dig­i­tal hotbed, Leam­ing­ton Spa.

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Tak­ing the long-term per­spec­tive, which is worse:

1. The news that North Korea has test-detonated a nuclear bomb, or

2. The real­i­sa­tion that, in the near future, peo­ple every­where will be watch­ing TV clips on their mobiles and annoy­ing the hell out of other peo­ple who are try­ing to get on with their lives?

If, like me, you think the answer is 2, then the news com­ing out of this week’s Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) won’t make you feel much bet­ter. The show appears obsessed with TV. Last year, yet again, it was HDTV; this year, it’s the many dif­fer­ent ways to get TV onto your mobile, not to men­tion IP-enabled TV sets.

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Over on Improb­a­ble Research they’ve been con­duct­ing an exper­i­ment on what unlikely items will make it through the US Postal Ser­vice sys­tem and actu­ally reach the intended address. The items were mainly unwrapped with a tag con­tain­ing the right postage and the address. They ranged from feather dusters and foot­balls through to ten­nis shoes, a ski, a coconut, a brick and a deer tibia among others.

The results were pretty amaz­ing – 64% of the items were deliv­ered. This appears to back up all those sto­ries you hear about weirdly addressed let­ters find­ing their way to their recip­i­ent through hell and high water. (The next time I want to get to Man­ches­ter, I may sim­ply affix the postage to my fore­head and loi­ter near the near­est post box.)

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Val­ley­wag has a use­ful round up of some research by Media Sur­vey that asked jour­nal­ists and key blog­gers what they want from com­pa­nies look­ing to pitch sto­ries. It fea­tures Wired, Busi­ness­Week and The Reg­is­ter among others.

My favourite comes from Andreas Kluth, the Economist’s Bay Area Tech­nol­ogy Correspondent:

Be “rare, rel­e­vant and short.”

Nice.

There’s an inter­est­ing bit of research in the lat­est British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Soci­ety’s bul­letin (always worth a read – RSS feed here). Researchers have shown that most people’s gen­eral bias towards the left-hand side of space could be dis­tort­ing their responses to surveys.

In a sur­vey ask­ing stu­dents to rate their expe­ri­ence of uni­ver­sity, the researchers used a 5-item Lik­ert scale rang­ing from def­i­nitely dis­agree to def­i­nitely agree. Except of course they swapped the direc­tion of the scale for half the recip­i­ents (in that sneaky psycho-research kind of way).

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Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

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