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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?

At the risk of being burned at the stake, I believe not. There is noth­ing in the iPhone launch announce­ment to sug­gest it will cre­ate mar­ket dis­rup­tion. Sure, the iPhone looks beau­ti­ful. The user exper­i­ence looks prom­ising (unless you like tex­ting one handed). And yes, it can do clever things. But noth­ing dis­rupt­ive. Noth­ing to unsettle the status quo in the way iTunes unsettled the music industry. Noth­ing so dif­fer­ent that you can’t wait for the end of your con­tract before bin­ning your exist­ing hand­set. And noth­ing to war­rant the enorm­ous pri­cing bur­den the iPhone will have to carry.

Apple are facing stiff com­pet­i­tion this time. Nokia, Motorola, Sam­sung and Sony Eric­sson may not all have the cache of Apple, but they are much beefier brands than the rag bag of com­pet­it­ors Apple white­washed in the MP3 mar­ket. How­ever, my heretic view is not foun­ded on the rel­ev­ant strengths of phone brands (even though we do work for Nokia). It is based on the dynam­ics of the industry. Among Nokia’s many reas­ons for suc­cess are their rela­tion­ships with net­work oper­at­ors around the world, their supreme global logist­ics oper­a­tion, and their sheer eco­nomy of scale. Apple have none of these. Someone put me right here, but Apple are not exactly renowned for their part­ner­ship skills either? I can only ima­gine the scene when they real­ise the net­work oper­at­ors have a com­pul­sion for instruct­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers which fea­tures must go into their next product.

Of course, many of the faith­ful will queue overnight to sat­isfy their addic­tion to own all things shiny and Apple. At the launch, Mr Jobs proudly reminded devotees that there are 100 mil­lion iPods in the world. He omit­ted to men­tion the two bil­lion Nokia mobile devices in the world, with the Finns adding to them at a rate of 350 mil­lion in 2006 alone.

So if you guys in Cuper­tino aren’t real­ist­ic­ally expect­ing to take on Hel­sinki, what are you expect­ing to do? Is this a defens­ive manœuvre against MP3 play­ers in phones? If it is, you are one tardy bunch of Cali­for­ni­ans. Or is it the real­isa­tion that much of your future busi­ness will be wrapped up in mobile computing…of which voice com­mu­nic­a­tion is a crit­ical com­pon­ent? Or are you hid­ing an industry dis­rup­tion up your sleeve which will yet turn the entire mar­ket upside down?

I guess whatever your answer, it will be a reflec­tion of your faith.

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:

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

• The iPhone is offer­ing some rad­ic­ally new ideas (e.g. the touch-screen inter­face) that will shake up the industry.

• The iPhone is a niche offer­ing that isn’t going to keep Nokia awake at night.

I think there are ques­tions about the scale of Apple’s ulti­mate ambi­tion. And I sus­pect it will slowly dawn on the world through this year what a massively power­ful and resource­ful global dis­tri­bu­tion machine Nokia has built – with an con­com­it­ant acknow­ledge­ment of what an under-appreciated asset this machine is.

I also think there’ll be a rue­ful admis­sion from Apple that, yes, the mobile busi­ness has turned out to be alto­gether trick­ier than we anti­cip­ated. In the short term it’s going to be very inter­est­ing to see how the Apple-Cingular (or should that now be Apple-AT&T?) rela­tion­ship plays out.

In the long-term – in the unlikely event that any­one is inter­ested — my per­sonal hunch is that the iPhone is the last huzzah of the old order. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing things i.e. a walled garden hermetically-sealed black-box approach.

When the iPhone was announced, someone at Ban­ner sent an excit­able email sug­gest­ing that this should become the agency’s stand­ard mobile device. To which our esteemed Fin­an­cial Dir­ector sent a tart reply: “On your bike.”

In con­clu­sion, there­fore, I have to say, firstly, I think our Fin­an­cial Dir­ector is bang-on. Secondly, I’d be very inter­ested in see­ing the Apple iBike. Now that could really be some­thing and, as we all know, Apple is no longer just a com­puter company.

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.

WiMAX is often talked about as the holy grail of last mile / ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity. The abil­ity to have a robust broad­band con­nec­tion wherever, whenever. We’ve already covered Singa­pore’s plans to offer full WiMAX cov­er­age to every single per­son and busi­ness by 2015. It’s an ambi­tious plan and has some way to go (espe­cially if like me, users can’t get speeds over 20 kB/sec when down­load­ing from their site).

What I like about the Singa­pore approach is that there is a clear vis­ion behind it. A sense of the greater good such a pro­gramme can achieve. Pipex’s, by com­par­ison, seems to be all about tech­nical feas­ib­il­ity and com­mer­cial viab­il­ity. These are both good things, of course, and to be expec­ted from a com­mer­cial organ­isa­tion. They’re just not that excit­ing (and the pro­spect of the ser­vice being pro­moted even­tu­ally by David Hassle­hoff frankly makes me a little nauseous).

But, you have to hope the pro­gramme is a suc­cess and spurs other pro­viders to launch sim­ilar plans. And the pro­spect of high-quality ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity is excit­ing. Of course, if you’ve paid out mil­lions on a 3G license, it might be a little less so.

Sources: Telecoms.com (regis­tra­tion required) and The Register

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.

“He had as much ima­gin­a­tion as a pint-pot,” Shel­ley once said of his fellow-poet Wordsworth, and he wasn’t being com­pli­ment­ary. Sift­ing through the announce­ments from CES, I’m start­ing to think a sim­ilar lack of ima­gin­a­tion must apply to lead­ers of tech­no­logy companies.

Is this obses­sion with TV the best the con­sumer tech industry can come up with? Why are all these com­pan­ies work­ing so hard to turn us into a planet of brain-addled pass­ive con­sumers, agog for whatever digital enter­tain­ment dull media com­pan­ies con­des­cend to pipe through to us?

The mes­sage appears to be this. We are going to hell in a hand-cart but, luck­ily, the hand-cart is now fit­ted with a Sling­Box. And we’re meant to be grateful?

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.)

I won­der what the DM implic­a­tions of all this are. If any­one wants to try this out with a deer tibia cam­paign in the near future, I’m will­ing to give it a go if you are.

Source: Boing Boing

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).

The res­ult was that the stu­dents using the scale that star­ted with ‘def­in­itely agree’ chose that as their answer 27% more often than those with the scale begin­ning ‘def­in­itely dis­agree’. This is, by anyone’s stand­ards a pretty sig­ni­fic­ant shift.

I can’t help won­der­ing what implic­a­tions this could have for the way we struc­ture inform­a­tion in advert­ising. It’s inter­est­ing that so much of the tra­di­tional emphasis in ad circles is on the right hand page. Even within a DPS, there is a def­in­ite bias towards the right. Maybe this is all, well, wrong.

Some­thing to think about.

You can read the BPS art­icle on the research here.

Order the full find­ings report here.

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:

• I’ll start on safe ground. Dis­en­chant­ment with the Win­dows OS (its cost, secur­ity prob­lems, new licens­ing issues etc) will con­tinue a pace. Vista won’t live up to the Long­horn vis­ion seen here (I love the “Com­ing Octo­ber 2003″ line). Of course, loads of people will still buy it and it will a boon for PC and memory upgrade vendors.
• As a res­ult, PCs and laptops pre­loaded just with Linux (and a shed-load of open source apps) will begin to take off, prob­ably with a new brand / sub-brand begin­ning to make a name for them­selves by spe­cial­ising in this area.
• HD DVD will win the format war. Yes it’s early days but I think Blu-ray will suf­fer from Sony’s proprietary/lock in tend­en­cies des­pite being tech­nic­ally super­ior (funny how every art­icle about this brings up the spectre of Betamax).
• The Google brand image will wobble as it struggles to live up to the “don’t be evil” prom­ise all while try­ing to utterly dom­in­ate the mar­ket. (As an aside, while people point to this man­tra as some­thing highly aspir­a­tional, I can’t help think­ing that not being evil is the very least a brand can prom­ise.) The Google OS and Google Office how­ever will take off big time (see the Win­dows pre­dic­tion above).
• Social search (eg Wink and StumbleUpon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many people who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.
• Clean tech will be huge with the largest area being energy pro­duc­tion. The big money will go into large national-scale pro­jects but micro gen­er­a­tion will become a grow­ing polit­ical issue in a “let’s stick it to those black­mail­ing us over oil” kind of way.
• Last but not least, I will get my run­ning time down to a reg­u­lar 9min mile pace (yeah right).

Check back in a year for a good laugh at my expense. In the mean­time, have a won­der­ful 2007.