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 manoeuvre 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.