Posts Tagged “drive”
Cisco has announced new tools as part of a drive to make security more Read Full Story…
Electronics giants LG, Sony, Samsung, Toshiba and Hitachi, along with several Read Full Story…
Feb
26
2010
 
It’s not our fault: Decoding Palm’s memo to staffPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
It’s been a tough year for Palm. The company is betting everything on its new handsets, the Pre and the Pixi – but with sales not doing as well as expected, the company issued a profit warning yesterday. To explain what was happening, chairman and chief executive Jon Rubinstein sent out a memo to the company’s staff. As is typical with these things, it was largely stuffed with corporate speak and coded messages – so I’ve come up with this handy paragraph-by-paragraph translation that might help explain what Palm thinks is going on.
Hey guys! Whatever I say, don’t forget we’re in this together.
We’re not selling as many phones as we thought we would: sales were flat despite the fact that we started selling handsets with Verizon – America’s second-biggest phone network (with 91m users) – in January. We were expecting sales to go up. They didn’t. This could be awkward.
Given how sales have gone over so far, we’d probably need to double our sales in the next three months to satisfy our original targets. Let’s be honest, that’s not happening, is it?
People aren’t buying enough of our phones. And networks don’t want to order phones that people aren’t buying.
(Before we go on, I’m going to sugar the pill. Over the past year or two we’ve been burning through our cash reserves like crazy – having some money in the bank buys us some more time. That’s awesome news!)
Yes, it sucks – but the pain you feel today is nothing compared to the pain you would have felt if we’d suddenly announced in a few weeks that we’d missed our targets by 30%.
We’ve been trying to work out what’s gone wrong…
…and we’ve decided it was Verizon’s fault.
In fact, we think they’ve done such a bad job that we’re trying to school them so that they actually know what our products do. Plus, we gave it a cool name that implies we’re taking action!
Not many people know we exist – but when they know we exist, we sell a few more handsets. That’s got to be positive, right?
We need to get better at a few things – largely the “making things” part, and then the “selling things” part. Perhaps some of you haven’t been as focused as you need to be (yeah, I’m talking to you).
I’m not firing anyone… yet.
Give me a few weeks to prepare before asking me anything.
I secretly watch lots of cheerleader movies.
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Feb
23
2010
Mobile phone sales down but iPhone climbs to third in the smartphone marketPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Mobile phone sales fell by almost 1% last year, according to Gartner researchers. However, sales of smartphones grew, thanks to the success of the BlackBerry, iPhone and Google Android phones Mobile phone sales declined by 0.9% to 1.211 billion units in 2009, but grew by 8.3% in the final quarter, according to Gartner. “The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. Over the full year, Nokia remained the market leader, shipping 441m phones. However, it lost 2.2 percentage points of market share, falling to 36.4%. Nokia was followed by Samsung (19.5%) and LG (10.1%) from South Korea. In fourth and fifth places, both Motorola (4.8%) and Sony Ericsson (4.5%) saw big declines in market share. In the smartphone market, Nokia’s high-volume sales kept Symbian in first place with 81m units shipped for a market share of 46.9%, down from 52.4%. Research In Motion — known for its BlackBerry smartphones — came second with 19.9%, an increase of 3 percentage points on 2008. Apple’s iPhone more than doubled its unit sales to take the third spot with 14.4%, an increase of 6.2 percentage points, iPhone overtook Microsoft Windows Mobile, which dropped 3.2% percentage points to take 8.7% of the market, with only 15m units shipped. Google’s Linux-based Android software did well, shipping 6.8m units for a market share of 3.9%. However, sales of other Linux smartphones fell. Adding Linux and Android together, Linux only gained half a percentage point (from 8.1% to 8.6%). Gartner principal research analyst Roberta Cozza said Android’s fourth-quarter growth should continue, but some suppliers had “expressed growing concern about Google’s intentions in the mobile market”. If this led them to change their product strategies, “this might hinder Android’s growth in 2010.”
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Feb
23
2010
AT&T Plans Innovation Centers for Mobile and Wired BroadbandPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
AT&T has announced plans to establish innovation centers to drive the development of next-generation devices, applications and equipment that expand the capabilities of mobile and wired broadband. Read Full Story…
Feb
21
2010
Orange and T-Mobile merger finds favour in BrusselsPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
• European commission set to approve plan to create UK’s largest mobile phone company The merger of Orange and T-Mobile looks set to get the go-ahead from the European commission after a last-minute deal was thrashed out over the weekend to secure the future of 3, the UK’s smallest mobile phone network. The merged business would be the UK’s largest mobile phone company, with almost 30 million customers, and Orange and T-Mobile have agreed to hand back some of the mobile phone spectrum it would own in order to allow this to be used by rivals to run super-fast wireless broadband services. The commission has yet to inform the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) about its decision, and the merger could still face a challenge from Vodafone and O2, which are understood to be “lukewarm” about the concessions made over spectrum. The commission’s decision is a blow to consumer groups that had been campaigning for authorities in the UK to investigate the deal. This month the OFT formally requested jurisdiction to investigate the merger from the commission, which had until 1 March to give a decision. The OFT will tomorrow publish the reasons why it had asked to be allowed to run its own investigation, although the commission now believes it has dealt with any concerns. It was the OFT’s request that spurred Orange and T-Mobile into action. Fears that the merger, announced last September, would become clogged up in the UK’s lengthy competition procedure led both companies to come up with a solution that met the concerns of the commission about the deal. The OFT and Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, were extensively consulted by the commission during the process. The main concern was about the merger’s effect on the future of 3, which has driven price competition in recent years. However, over the weekend, 3, which is owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, signed a new deal with T-Mobile and Orange, which will give it access to 3,000 more mast sites across the UK over the next few years, bringing the total to 16,000, the largest 3G network in the country. Second, the UK authorities and Brussels were concerned about the level of control that the merged company would have over the scarce resource that is wireless spectrum. Specifically the merged group would have the vast majority of the spectrum granted in the 1990s, when Orange and One2One were launched, at 1800MHz. As reported by the Observer a week ago, T-Mobile and Orange have agreed to hand back a quarter of the spectrum the merged group would hold. Neither 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, O2 nor the OFT would comment. The OFT will tomorrow give its reasons for asking the commission whether it could have jurisdiction over the case, in a stock exchange announcement. A copy of its reasoning, seen by the Guardian, makes it clear that the OFT’s main concern about any deal was also the future of 3. “The OFT considers that any weakening/elimination of Hutchison 3G would effectively result in a reduction of vertically integrated competitors from five to three and cause significant detriment to competition in mobile retail telephony,” the document reads.
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• Phones with the new software will appear at the end of the year
Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer is hoping that 7 will turn out to be a lucky number again. With Windows 7 helping to bury the ghosts of the poorly received Windows Vista in its core PC market, the software group is hoping to repeat the trick with a new version of its software for mobile phones, a device that has refused to yield to the firm’s attentions despite almost a decade of trying. Windows Phone Series 7 is the result of a complete overhaul of Microsoft’s vision of the mobile phone. It has abandoned its attempts to turn mobile phones into mini-PCs, focusing instead on giving users easy access to social networking, music, video and mobile phone applications. Coincidentally Ballmer’s presentation, at the mobile industry’s annual trade show in Barcelona came hours after the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia revealed a tie-up with chipmaker Intel that is headed in the opposite direction. The two companies have pooled their software development resources to create MeeGo, a free software platform which they reckon will pave the way for the next generation of wireless communications devices. Both companies have Apple, Blackberry and Google, with its Android mobile phone platform, firmly in their sights. Fierce competition has eroded Nokia’s share of the market over the past year, and Microsoft fears that if it cannot get back in the game now, it may never manage it. Ballmer admitted that Microsoft, which has failed to gain any significant share of the mobile phone market, had been forced to “retool and reform” its mobile phone software two years ago. “There is no doubt that the phone market is highly competitive, highly dynamic, super-exciting,” he said. “There was no question in our minds… that we needed and wanted to do something that was out of the box, clearly differentiated from our past and clearly differentiated from other things that are going on in the market.” “We’re taking a big step,” he added. “I hope seven’s our lucky number.” The first phones using the new software will not appear until the end of the year and Microsoft is being very prescriptive about what they should look like, which has raised questions about whether handset manufacturers will be willing to make Windows Phone devices that they will be unable to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. Manufacturers including HTC, LG and Samsung have, however, signed up, while Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile and Orange are all likely to sell the devices in the UK. The proliferation of so-called open source software platforms – such as Android – has raised the question of whether Microsoft, which still charges hardware manufacturers a licence fee to use its Windows Phone software, should adopt the same model. Refusing, as ever, to actually name Apple, Ballmer spoke about “vertical competitors” – companies that make devices as well as the software that sits on them, such as Apple – saying “their model is really clear, it’s sell devices. We sell software to companies that make devices” and that is not going to change. “My mother used to say to me, if something is free, you should take a look and find out what the real cost is.” Nokia, however, has become a convert to the idea of open source platforms. Having bought out its partners in smartphone software developer Symbian and made that available free to all developers and hardware manufacturers, it announced a tie-up with Intel under which it plans to do the same for the next generation of mobile devices. Nokia was already working on an open source platform for so-called internet tablets, called Maemo, which it used in its recently launched N900 phone. Now it is merging it with a similar programme which Intel ran for laptops, called Moblin, into a new platform called MeeGo. “It is the future of how we think people are going to use computing,” said Renee James, Intel’s head of software and services. “From Intel’s perspective, we see expansive growth which brings new users to computing and at the heart of that has always been software innovation and that happens when there is a stable platform that developers can bet on being there long-term. So I consider this critical to the long term growth initiatives of Intel.” The first MeeGo devices will start appearing in the second half of the year, but Intel already has hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and Samsung making laptops for its existing open source platform and they will all be moved over to MeeGo. “They have understood the only way to beat Microsoft, Google and Apple is to do it through scale – get the platform to more devices,” according to John Strand, owner and head of Strand Consult after the announcements at the Mobile World Congress fair. Immediately dubbed MeeToo by some analysts, MeeGo will create an open source software platform which Nokia reckons will be used in a new generation of wireless devices. Both companies want to attract a wide range of operators, handset manufacturers and software developers. “This is not a closed club,” said Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s head of devices. “We are inviting everyone into this. “MeeGo will create a new strong single platform that will drive the future of mobile computing.” The announcement of MeeGo, however, immediately raised questions about the future of Symbian, but Öistämö stressed: “This is very consistent with Nokia’s software strategy. Symbian is the perfect environment for democratising the smartphone, what MeeGo allows is the future of mobile computing … well beyond what can be done with smartphones today.” The deal may raise some eyebrows at Google, however, as Intel’s chief executive Paul Otellini has sat on the Google board since 2004.
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Feb
15
2010
MWC 2010: Vodafone and Verizon hook up to push M2MPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Vodafone, Verizon Wireless and nPhase today announced a strategic alliance Read Full Story…
The GSMA combines with 24 network operators and opens Mobile World Congress 2010 with a drive to establish a common standard for handset platforms, and to simplify a fragmented software market for developers Read Full Story…
Feb
03
2010
Google’s Android code deleted from Linux kernelPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
“Go fork yourself!”After removing Google’s Android driver code from the Linux kernel, Novell Fellow and Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has argued that Android is incompatible with the project’s main tree.…
Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work Read Full Story…
Feb
03
2010
Calling all cheaters to the naughty step | Open threadPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Mobile phones are said to drive an increase in GCSE and A-level exam cheating. Have you ever cheated at school? The number of pupils caught trying to cheat in their GCSEs and A-levels by smuggling in mobile phones rose by 6% last year. Last year, 4,400 penalties were issued to students for “exam malpractice”:
Ofqual pointed out that cheating remained extremely rare, with the number caught equivalent to 0.03% of all the exams sat. Have you ever cheated at school by bringing a calculator to your maths exam, or having a sneaky peek at your neighbour’s answers? Is cheating at an exam an essential part of education?
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Jan
29
2010
Deadlock could drive World Cup online in SingaporePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Singapore’s telecommunications giants SingTel and Starhub could be cut out of broadcasting the football World Cup, forcing fans to view matches live on the internet unless a deadlock over rights fees can be resolved. Read Full Story…
Jan
29
2010
Deadlock could drive World Cup online in SingaporePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Singapore’s telecommunications giants SingTel and Starhub could be cut out of broadcasting the football World Cup, forcing fans to view matches live on the internet unless a deadlock over rights fees can be resolved. Read Full Story…
Jan
28
2010
Apple iPad: UK phone operators vie for dealsPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Several mobile phone carriers keen to sell Apple’s iPad in the UK Steve Jobs has fired the starting pistol in the race to bring the iPad to the UK, with several mobile phone operators and retailer Carphone Warehouse interested in selling Apple’s new tablet computer to consumers this side of the Atlantic. Jobs announced on Wednesday that a version of the device that can access 3G mobile phone networks as well as Wi-Fi will start shipping in the US in April under a deal with AT&T, which already supplies the iPhone in North America. Mobile phone companies in the UK – O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – are looking to strike similar deals in Europe ahead of a launch later in the year. Andrew Harrison, UK chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse, welcomed news of the Apple device, adding: “To me, the really interesting thing is what we are seeing is devices designed with how the consumer uses the internet very much in mind, rather than just a computer that was made for business use trying to fit the consumer.” Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest independent mobile phone retailer, was Apple’s exclusive third party retail partner for the iPhone and Harrison obviously hopes to repeat the experience with the iPad. “Our perspective is we play in the world of connectivity and particularly mobile connectivity and this device fits well within that; we think there will be a whole range of them. This is an extension of a smartphone perhaps even more than it being a smaller PC. It is much more in the territory that we operate in,” he said “We have done a phenomenal job with the iPhone and smartphones in general and bringing connectivity is something we would be delighted to talk to Apple about.” But the AT&T deal shows that Apple may be approaching the involvement of mobile phone operators with the iPad in a very different way from the way that it uses them for the iPhone. Traditionally, mobile phone companies “subsidise” the up-front cost of hardware – usually mobile phones, but increasingly laptops – in return for persuading a customer to sign up to a long-term contract. The operator assumes it will make the subsidy back over the life of the contract. That is how the iPhone is sold in the US and Europe, while even Google followed this model with its Nexus One, signing a deal with T-Mobile in the US which sees the phone’s $529 price tag fall to $179 in return for signing a contract. Vodafone is expected to sell the Nexus One in the UK at roughly the same price point as the iPhone. Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499. But with the iPad, Apple has forced AT&T to give up on persuading customers to sign long-term contracts. Instead the iPad will effectively be available on what in Europe would be seen as a 30-day rolling SIM-only contract such as those offered by O2 and Vodafone. Customers have two pricing options in the US, a mere 250MB of data for $14.99 a month, or unlimited data for $29.99 a month. That means that while the basic version of the iPad – without wireless capabilities – will start at $499, the 3G version of the device will start at $629. Under the traditional operator model, the 3G version of the device would have been cheaper. “It does not look as though it has the traditional subsidy model,” said Harrison. “If you put Wi-Fi and 3G in it, it is actually more expensive not less expensive.” In a note on AT&T following the news, Jonathan Schildkraut, analyst at Jefferies & Co investment bank said the tariffs are “in line with the current data add-on options available with voice packages, and well below the roughly $60 plans currently offered by wireless carriers for a laptop card. The prepaid plan can be activated directly from the iPad and, because there is no contract, can be canceled at anytime.” “Given the prepaid nature of the service associated with this product, including the no contract/cancel at any time feature, we expect that AT&T would not have to subsidise the device. We would view this as a significant positive – given the large subsidy associated with the iPhone (estimated at up to $400). Additionally, this would imply better overall economics around the device (without the initial margin dilution of an iPhone sale),” he said “The flip-side, of course, is that the usage patterns of this type of device are unknown. However, given the multimedia capabilities, and the video functionality in particular, we would assume that iPad could be another network hog. This could drive incremental congestion issues on AT&T’s already strained network – leading to further network dissatisfaction, and potentially a need for ongoing higher levels of capital spending”. In other words, not getting people to sign a contract gives the operator very little chance to factor the potential cost of future infrastructure investment into its pricing plans. Then there is the worry that applications which allow internet telephony – such as Truphone and Skype, which are already available on the iPhone and will port to the iPad – will further erode the network’s profitable voice and text traffic. Apple initially sold the iPhone through exclusive partners in the US, UK, France and Germany, but for the iPad the British mobile phone companies are not expecting Apple to offer exclusivity. None of the mobile phone companies was willing to comment on the iPad. Incidentally, anyone who already has a wireless broadband “dongle” under a long-term contract and is thinking about buying an iPad and putting the SIM card from their laptop card into the iPad will be disappointed. The iPad is the first mass-market mobile device to use micro-Sim cards, which are smaller than the current range of Sim cards and were designed for small consumer gadgets such as Birmingham-based Lok8u’s range of wireless-enabled wrist watches. The iPad is also likely to prove a major headache for makers of similar devices, especially Taiwan’s Asus which recently announced plans for its own tablet, and Nokia which last year unveiled a “booklet” computer with built-in 3G. There are also understood to be several tablet computers running Google’s Android software in the works, with France’s Archos rumoured to be planning to release one in March.
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‘I clocked you chatting at 120 words per minute, sir’Police use radar guns to snare speeding drivers. Now Nokia has adapted the technology to improve the way people interact with mobile phones.…
The power of collaboration within unified communications Read Full Story…
Wev gt rslves a cnvyDrivers of vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds have been banned from sending text messages while driving in the US, in a move welcomed by everyone.…
What is your recession sales strategy? Read Full Story…
Jan
21
2010
Hard times turn us to gaming, but not everyone will be a winner | Victor KeeganPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Companies may look to cash in on the upcoming mobile market rather than invest millions in video games. Will it work though? Monopoly – the game – has had a long and complicated pedigree. It first gained traction in the 1930s, partially stimulated by a need to escape from the economic woes of the depression. If it has an equivalent today it is Farmville, available on the social website Facebook, which claims an astonishing 74 million regular users. It is the most successful of a number of similar games on Facebook which are themselves part of a wider boom in gaming during the recession. Farmville is like a real farm. If you don’t crop your harvest in time or feed your cartoony animals regularly then you face disaster. Like Monopoly it is power-driven to the extent that everyone wants to beat competitors and have the biggest farm. Like Monopoly its success has been generated by its users. Parker Brothers, who later acquired the rights, famously turned Monopoly down in 1934 as “too complicated, too technical … took too long to play”. They listed “52 fundamental playing errors”, and it was only later when they became of aware of huge demand spontaneously generated by the public – which the small company which then marketed it couldn’t cope with – that they changed their minds and bought the company and earlier patents. Gaming would probably be on a roll anyway but during a recession there is an added impetus to play video games you already own more intensively rather than spend money on entertainment or to savour some of the burgeoning free games on offer. The boom is difficult to quantify partly because aggregated statistics for all forms of gaming are difficult to find but also because so much of it is free. We are experiencing an explosion of games based on the “freemium” model whereby publishers give it away in the hope that at least 5% of players will trade up to a paid model or else trigger advertising revenue. The boom is being experienced everywhere except on the bottom line. Widespread redundancies among traditional publishers and developers are coinciding with a surge in demand in other sectors. The casual gaming site miniclip.com of Hatton Garden, London, was at one stage claiming 50 million unique users a month, while Getjar.com, another UK-based indie company, claims to be the biggest app downloader after Apple. Playfish.com, another big casual gaming site, was bought for $275m in November by the games giant Electronic Arts, which has experienced a sharp drop in profits. And Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 made $1bn in its first couple of months, which is a result comparable to the unprecedented success of the 3D blockbuster film Avatar. What seems to be happening, despite the huge success of some titles, is a switch from expensive video-based games to cheaper-to-produce ones residing on mobile phones, online, or on social networks – which is where all the eyeballs are anyway. It is reckoned that more than half of iPhone users are playing games. Morgan Securities says demand for online gaming will double annually for a few years, to $800m this year and $1.6bn next. It has been presumed that the centre of gravity for gaming will switch to Apple’s app store (which this month added a version of Grand Theft Auto to its growing games portfolio) but now the outlook is not so sure. The success of Facebook has raised the prospect that social networks could be the place people go to for games. The iPhone, for all its undoubted success is still a minority sport. The mobile guru Tomi Ahonen reminds us that “only 0.7% – yes less than 1% – of all who have a mobile phone on the planet, have an iPhone”, and in any case apps only work on smartphones which so far only account for about 14% of the installed base of mobile phones (but, of course, are growing fast). Developers are finding it increasingly difficult to make any noise among the avalanche of apps in the iPhone store, let alone any money. Apple’s disclosure that total downloads have exceeded 3bn is an amazing success story, though not as big as it looks once you have allowed for the fact that most downloads are free and the figures also include downloads of updates. Games embracing Google’s Android operating system – based, unlike iPhone apps, on open source – could offer serious competition to Apple; as could Nokia, which is still the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world by a distance. Companies faced with investing millions in new video games or much smaller sums in the mobile market – towards which everything, including social networks, are migrating – may well take the cheaper option. Either way, a lot of companies are likely to go under before the wheat is separated from the chaff. In this market, the consumer is still king.
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Jan
12
2010
Letters: Rational response to radiation risksPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
In your report (Radiation health threat overstated – Oxford professor, 11 January), Professor Wade Allison appears to advocate changing the way radiation risk is calculated. In fact, the problem lies with how regulation deals with radiation risk. All radioactive discharges are required to be optimised (ie reduced) so as to be as low as reasonably achievable. This principle has been used by regulators to drive extreme expenditure on reducing minuscule risks. In the work of nuclear site clean-up, many projects have suffered huge cost increases and delays from demands to reduce doses of well below 10 microsieverts a year. The calculated risk from this dose, if that was the only risk you ever took, would give you a median life expectancy of around a million years. The removal of disproportionate expense on radiation dose reduction does not require a change in the process for calculating risk, merely a rational response to the risks that are calculated. Professor Gregg Butler University of Manchester • The experts’ views on the “reason to be fearful” of low level radiation (Report, 11 January) do indeed inspire fear. In particular, Susan Short’s stereotyping of protesters with “high-risk lifestyles” (why have I never met any of them?) neither inspires trust in, nor does it accord with the necessity of, objective scientific appraisal. Val Mainwood Wivenhoe, Colchester • Simon Jenkins (The proliferation of nuclear panic is politics at its most ghoulish, 8 January) is to be congratulated on his splendid article, citing two important books which address irrational horror of “radiation”. He suggests that this is down to decades of misinformation, prejudice and ignorance, which scientists have allowed to continue clouding our judgment, and he is dead right. But a minor example of just such misinformation, amounting to disinformation given the thrust of his article, has crept into his own story, namely the implication that mobile phone “radiation” is the same as nuclear radiation. Radiation is anything that radiates, be it sunlight, x-rays, heat from a stove or waves from a radio transmitter – it is the latter that emanate from mobile phones. Even if these are harmful (unlikely), they have nothing to do with nuclear radiations or the (exaggerated) hazards they might present. This is exactly how misinformation gets around; mobile phones are not mini-reactors, so let’s not get paranoid over nothing. Dr Nick Wrigley Boscastle, Cornwall • The question one needs to ask is why the US and Britain are spending billions of dollars to prevent states such as Iran acquiring the technology to produce nuclear weapons. I am sure the politicians, as well as Simon Jenkins, know that the risk of a nuclear attack by such states is negligible and meaningless. Political leaders in the US and Britain suffer from “colonial arrogance” syndrome. Sufferers are incapable of tolerating such countries having an independent foreign policy. Total obedience is required at all times, threatening military action if those countries do not toe the line. Becoming nuclear states renders the threat of military action by America and Britain no longer credible. I am sure if Iraq had had nuclear weapons America and Britain would not have been so eager to attack. Dr Adnan Al-Daini Exeter • According to your report (Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor dies aged 93, 7 January), the Hiroshima bomb killed “80,000 people instantly and another 60,000 in the months that followed”. According to Simon Jenkins, the threat from today’s far more powerful nuclear weapons is “minimal and containable”, as “their blast areas would remain limited” and “human settlements are resilient to aerial bombardment”. Relentlessly upbeat, he also claims that the death toll from Chernobyl was “no more than 60″ and the risk from climate change is “improbable”. These bizarre assertions would be comical if the subject matter was something other than the fate of millions. Ben Ayliffe Senior nuclear campaigner, Greenpeace UK
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Jan
08
2010
Watching the predictions: how did I fare in forecasting 2009?Posted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
Netbooks taking off, 2 million people with dongles, an iPhone upgrade in autumn and the demise of Vonage … where was I right and wrong about the year just gone? Now we can get 2009 into perspective, and the hangovers have worn off (less so the credit card bills, perhaps), let’s see how my tech predictions for 2009 went. Time to tot up … Prediction 1: At least three companies will withdraw from the PC manufacturing business. They didn’t. Did they? That’s 0/1 Matthew Wheeler points out that MPC did. MPC? “Edge PC owned by Micron Tech, then MicronPC, sold to Gores Tech, changed to MPC, sold to Hyperspace of Utah, then Chap.11,” he explained. And of course there’s Psystar, which thought it could put Mac OS X onto generic boxes, and got told by a judge it couldn’t. (These are hardly the big names I was originally thinking of, though.) And Psystar is still offering T-shirts, according to The Register. In fact, companies didn’t withraw from the PC-making business; instead, seeing how desktops and even standard laptops weren’t making money, they shifted to netbooks, which saw explosive growth. Lesson: manufacturers like making things. The shift to making netbooks was a sort of evolutionary episode in the punctuated equilibrium of the computer business. Prediction 2: There will be more “netbooks” – aka ultraportables, aka liliputers, like the Asus Eee PC – than ever, and their sales growth will far outpace that of the PC market. Bullseye. PC market growth: 1.3% (or -7%, depending whose numbers you like). Netbook market growth: almost 100% (by revenue). 1/2 Prediction 3: Sun Microsystems won’t have a near-death experience, but it’s going to keep shrinking. True. Being the subject of a (wished-for) takeover by Oracle hasn’t made it grow. 2/3 Prediction 4: Vonage will die. I’m sorry, guys, but your income statement shows you have debts of $276m, cash of $112m, and are paying “interest” (on the debt) of $5m per quarter, which means losses of $7m per quarter. That’s just not sustainable, and debt isn’t going to get cheaper to service, either. Completely wrong. Vonage is still going. I have no idea how. 2/4 Prediction 5: Palm will come close to death, but advance sales of its Pre webphone, plus a little more money from its venture capitalist backers, will save it. Its latest figures show that it didn’t do well, and the Pre hasn’t actually been fabulous. But the money from the venture capitalists has certainly helped. 3/5 Prediction 6: Twitter will find a way to charge for its service, from at least some users, and so move towards at least revenue, if not yet profit. Its growth will become explosive. Tricky, this. Twitter’s growth did become explosive, helped along by Oprah, and Iranian election, and so on. Is it charging you or me to use it? No. Is it, however, charging Microsoft and Google to use its database for their “real-time” search engines, putting it squarely into revenue and, arguably, profit? Yes. Can we call Microsoft and Google “Twitter users”? I don’t see why not – I’ve previously argued that it should charge for use of its API, and charging those two giants for that is good enough. Prediction 7: Many – as in thousands – of IT jobs will be lost. Lots will go in finance as that industry shrinks; but there’s a general trend now where small companies are beginning to rely on cloud services from companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Those don’t need a lot of people. (Ever seen a job advert to work on a cloud service?). (The point about this was that the jobs were being lost in developed countries, of course, rather than in total all over the world.) Has there been a dramatic uptick in the number of IT jobs? Not thinking so. 5/7 Prediction 8: IT will more and more resemble the building business. Either you specialise, or you’re coordinating the project, or you’re doing simple, low-paid work that someone from another country can and will do for less. This ties in with the one above. Cloud-based services mean that setting up a business that relies on downloads, for example, is simple. (Twitter caches your pictures on Amazon’s S3 service, for example.) Are IT people becoming multi-specialists? Or finding it harder to get general work? We’re still hearing that there’s a skills shortage in IT – but the shortage is at the top end, in the project coordination side, or in getting the services set up. There’s less demand for bodies. These days, you either specialise, or get out. Though I realise that this could be described as my biased view, without data. So let’s call it a half. (Data either way to prove or disprove very welcome.) And now we come to that ever-popular subject, Microsoft. It certainly was pushed out for the end of the year; October 22 is good enough. While you could argue that it’s not perfect, it’s considered by lots of people to be very, very good. And it certainly has corporate customers very interested in an upgrade. Come on, that’s solid. Prediction 10: Microsoft will buy chunks of Yahoo (after being forced to overbid by challenges from Google), which will raise yowls of pain from all over the web. And then in six months people will have forgotten all about it. Microsoft did buy chunks of Yahoo – well, sort of. Specifically, it bought the right to put its ads against search, which it would do. Google didn’t challenge it at all. Though this one sounds right, when you examine the detail, it’s wrong. Prediction 11: XP will finally be declared dead once Windows 7 is released, because a version of Windows 7 will be made to run on netbooks. Yes, Windows 7 is made to run on netbooks. XP hasn’t formally been declared dead (apart from the fact that it’s been declared dead ages ago) but it’s vanishing. Prediction 12: Internet Explorer will continue to lose share to Firefox, Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome. Oh, yes, that did keep happening. Firefox has reached historical highs. And Internet Explorer (all versions, cumulative) keeps slipping. Prediction 13: No Zune phone, and no Zune in Europe either. Can I claim two? No? Damn. There was a moment in November where I worried – er, hoped – no, worried that there might be a Zune in Europe. But it turned out that Microsoft was just using the name, a bit, for its online video marketplace in Europe. Microsoft hasn’t launched a Zune Phone (it’s doing badly enough with Windows Mobile without trying to make its struggling music player mimic the iPod’s transition into the iPhone) and the Zune remains an idea that has yet to make sense in the US, let alone Europe. UbiquityPrediction 14: Dongles will fall in price, and data charges will too as the phone networks realise that it’s a great way to tie people to lucrative contracts without having to subsidise them with mobile phones. So they’ll become pervasive. Let’s put a number on it: 3 million users, PAYG or contract, by the end of the year. Result: true, and data charges have as well. There are actually about 13 million mobile data users in the UK. How many dongles? At least 3m of them, surely. Prediction 15: Being able to transfer sound and, increasingly, video around your home between different devices will become more important, and more and more products will appear built around the DLNA standard to assist it. It’s an enduring mystery why this hasn’t been more visible. But in fact more and more people are moving video around the home. What do you think the iPlayer is all about? Except, of course, they don’t tend to link it to their TV. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii though are changing this, by offering iPlayer (PS3, Wii) and film (PS3, Xbox) streams. That’s not, though, what I’d imagined, which is people actually storing data centrally in their home and shifting it. Though “more” DLNA products have appeared (I loved the LaCie 1TB NAS drive, for example, which has DLNA compatibility). My feeling though is that this hasn’t happened. Prediction 16: Femtocells – which improve mobile reception inside homes and businesses by providing a mini-cell, and pushing the data over your broadband connection – will struggle because the mobile companies will price them wrong, thinking they should be a niche, and hence expensive, product. I also said during the year that femtocells weren’t going to make it, which brought lots of plangent cries from femtocell companies saying that no, really, 2010 was the year they were aiming at. I was sent a femtocell to try. (Thank you, Vodafone. Afraid I made little progress.) Have you seen a femtocell anywhere? Anywhere at all? (Mobile phone company employees and femtocell manufacturers excluded.) I think this can’t be anything but correct. Prediction 17: Mobile networks will tout phones on the basis that they let you contact your friends on Twitter – rather than last year’s favourite, Facebook – via the data connection. (SMS will remain too expensive for Twitter to use outside the US.) Facebook remained the powerful force and the reason people wanted to connect: plenty of phones were marketed on the basis that you’d be able to check Facebook; none that I saw on the basis on twittering. (A classic case of early adopter over-optimism about Twitter’s penetration on my part – though it has completely entered the language, having been used in a scene in Gavin and Stacey.) And Twitter re-introduced SMS updates outside the US. So wrong on both counts. LinuxPrediction 18: Advocates will declare that 2010 is going to be “the year of desktop Linux” while the bugs are ironed out this year. This was bound to fail. Linux advocates always say that this year is the one when desktop Linux is going to take off. Ubuntu got plenty of fans, especially for version 9.04 in April. Prediction 19: But in fact the sales of netbooks running Linux will mean that it’s best-selling year for desktop Linux ever. Then again, this one was bound to succeed. Desktop Linux has had so few avenues for sale that it wasn’t going to fail to have its best-ever year once a few machines with it were sold. Of course, I overlooked the popularity of Android, Google’s mobile phone operating system, which is Linux. Had I forecast that mobile Linux would have a standout year, that would have been a really worthwhile prediction. Still: ApplePrediction 20: Let’s start with a banker. No self-replicating worm for Mac OSX or the iPhone’s OSX by the end of the year. Correct. It always is, year after year. Prediction 21: Snow Leopard will be released for sale in May 2009 … this date means it will have been slightly more than the average delay for OSX releases since Leopard’s release in October 2007 – which leaves time for an announcement and release schedule. Wrong. Wrongy, wrongy, wrongy wrong wrong. Snow Leopard was released in August 2009. Prediction 22: Snow Leopard squashes down application sizes, and uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) to help processing. But why would you want to do that? It feels oddly as though Apple is imagining a Flash drive-based machine able to run Snow Leopard, with a comparatively weak processor that uses the GPU to hide the fact. Plus it owns a chip design company. Even so, I don’t think it will offer a tablet computer. Or a netbook. Neither fits with its strategy – which is all about the iPhone, and pricey computers. Apple turned up its nose at the idea of a netbook. (Even if I did suggest that it should. Yes, accuse me of wanting it all ways.) It also didn’t announce a tablet computer in 2009. (2010, ah, perhaps different.) Prediction 23: Apple will charge for the Snow Leopard upgrade – just as much as it has for previous upgrades. Yes, it did charge – but not as much as for previous upgrades. That’s a miss. Prediction 24: ZFS won’t be built into the kernel for Snow Leopard; it’ll be an optional install, for server honchos. In fact, ZFS has disappeared from Apple builds. The cause seems to be intellectual property problems. Ah well. It would have been a nightmare. Prediction 25: Steve Jobs will remain chief executive through the year. That might sound like an obvious prediction. It isn’t. Hmm – technically, he was the chief executive, but he stepped aside to have a liver transplant and recuperate for six months. This prediction was made amid all the rumours of Jobs’s illness at the tail-end of 2008. The rumours were that he would have to step down because of the condition (at that time, still a secret). My feeling was that it wasn’t such a big thing. Turns out it was a Big Thing. I think this is half-right – no more. Prediction 26: The iPhone hardware won’t be updated before the autumn. The iPhone 3GS was released in June, and Stephen Fry reviewed it in the same month. June is not autumn, not even in the southern hemisphere. Prediction 27: The iPhone software will be updated to 3.x, which will bring copy-and-paste and photo messaging. About time. It was, and it did. Finally. EnvironmentPrediction 28: Oil prices are diving, but electricity is still not getting cheaper. Expect more companies – even quite big ones – to reduce their in-house server usage in favour of outsourced pay-per-process services offered by Microsoft, Google and Amazon. This is the move to cloud computing, and it’s one-way traffic at present. Do you know of anyone who has brought their computing back in-house from the cloud? Free Our DataPrediction 29: The government will take a deep breath and acknowledge that it must make a significant part of Ordnance Survey’s data available for free unfettered reuse – and will do it. I was there at 10 Downing Street when Gordon Brown, flanked by Tim Berners-Lee (he invented the web, you know) and Martha Lane-Fox, announced precisely that. Actually, I’d have traded all the other predictions for this one – but this one is a great one, a huge year-end bonus to the Free Our Data campaign and to everyone who is going to benefit from it. ProcessingPrediction 30: In 1992 I wrote a feature based on some analysts’ predictions about how in five years we’d all be using speech-to-text input for our computers. We didn’t. … [but] by the end of the year, we should see programs able to turn the ad-hoc spoken to the written almost faultlessly. Er, we didn’t. From the revelation of the people behind the curtain at Spinvox, to the nearly-good-enough-but-not-perfectness of Dragon Dictate on the iPhone, we’re still some way off perfect trasncription. (Believe me, we’re always looking for one so we can turn our Tech Weekly podcast back into words for the hard-of-listening.) So that’s 19/30, or 63%. For comparison, in 2008, my predictions hit 20.5/30, or 68%. Look, what’s a mark and a half between friends? Certainly not statistically significant. Basically, what I think we’re seeing is that you can rely on me to be wrong about one-third of the time. You can decide whether that’s better or worse than a weather forecaster. (The Met Office suggested there was a 1-in-7 chance this would be a cold winter in its long-range forecast.) And what about the things I missed? The biggest was Google – the rise of Android, and the announcement of its Chrome OS for netbooks. That’s going to be huge this year, I think – so come back for my predictions for 2010 next week. Oh, and tell me what other important events of 2009 I missed.
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