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Hazel Butters
Prompt Communications

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Technology Update

By Lance Concannon

Analyst provokes tech-media flame war with iTunes report

Earlier this week some quarters of the press seized upon a report from Forrester Research which seemed to indicate that iTunes sales suffered badly in the first half of this year. But the full story wasn't quite as clear cut as all that, and it wasn't long before conflicting stories on the validity of the research started to emerge.

The Guardian's coverage is balanced and rational, presenting both sides of the story fairly well. There are numerous arguments against the report's findings, including that it's sample size was too small, and it didn't include a wide enough range of data to be useful. Tech news site, The Register, follows up on the story with a piece claiming that Forrester has since tried to distance itself from the initial reports.

Public beta of Adobe CS3 could boost Mac sales

It's not all bad news for Apple this week, as the Apple Insider blog reports that Adobe's plans to release a public beta of version 3.0 of its popular Creative Suite package of graphics tool could increase Mac sales.

Graphics professionals have been slow to move to Apples newer line of Intel powered Mac Pro workstations, since Adobe has not yet produced a native Intel version of Creative Suite. But since Adobe has now decided it's time to produce a version of the industry leading graphics manipulation software specifically for the Mac/Intel platform, it's highly likely that this will give these machines a significant sales boost.

Yahoo! and IBM take on Google with free search tool

In a move widely seen as a direct attempt to challenge Google's dominance in the enterprise search space, Yahoo! and IBM have teamed up to offer a new search tool for corporate users. OmniFind is a tool designed to allow businesses to search through their vast mountains of internal documents. The entry level tool is offered free of charge, but is limited in the number of documents it can query - by contrast, Google's search appliance which currently dominates this market costs $2000 for the entry level version.

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Consumer Technology Update

By Dave Wilby

Blogging approaching critical mass claims Gartner

Tech analyst firm Gartner is already heralding the beginning of the end for blogging, claiming the social media phenomenon will decline after 2007. The BBC has plucked this piece of wisdom out of a list of predictions Gartner has made for next year in its annual headline seeking sack of seasonal analysis. Gartner believes that the number of blogs will level out at around 100 million during the middle of next year, claiming that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs. Analyst Daryl Plummer even goes as far as to suggest that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

The BBC retorts that blog tracking firm Technorati recently estimated that 100,000 new blogs and 1.3 million blog posts were being created every day. We'll keep this cutting on the wall and check back with Gartner in July. Although we fully support the notion that the familiar web log format will inevitably be superseded by a new generation of innovative content models in time, we can't go along with Plummer's guesswork on this occasion. Nearly every blogger we know has started and closed half a dozen or more blogs to date and will undoubtedly close another and start a freshly themed effort before Gartner's summer deadline. In yet another difference between blogging and traditional print, such peaks and troughs are simply not black and white. You can have your say on the Gartner Predicts blog! Haha.

Video games are dangerous : FACT

Nintendo's marketing engine is chugging along beautifully. We've run three Wii stories and twice that number of Wii puns in the last couple of weeks. It's genuinely hard not to. However, is all publicity really good publicity? Probably, but let's try and throw a spanner in the Nintendo works and see what happens.

There are reports from around the globe this week that while the Wii has succeeded in its mission to get usually sedentary gamers out of their bean bags, the energetic waving about of the Wii's new wand-like remote control is creating its own breed of sporting injuries. The Times has collated a nice selection of calamitous case studies, which include a wide array of accidents, including black eyes, cut fingers, bruised heads, pulled muscles, smashed windows and broken TVs. Nintendouch! Nah, it's no good, we still want one in the office...

A Zune what now?

Under increasing fire from the media over its lacklustre entry into the high-end portable media player marker, Microsoft has gone on the offensive, claiming that the Zune is on target to sell a million by the middle of 2007. SFGate is as underwhelmed with the news as anyone else. The Zune went on sale for $249.99 in the US in November and is expected to cost around Ł150 when it arrives in the UK mid-January.

However, media reviews and public response have been negative or non-existent, with major concerns over Microsoft's approach to digital rights management, clumsy software and a lack of model options. Apple owns 75 per cent of the MP3 hardware market and has sold about 65 million iPods since the launch five years ago. From July to September this year alone more than 8.7 million iPods sold for $1.56 billion in revenue, and the new iPod shuffle and iPod nano are flying off the shelves and into Christmas stockings as we type.

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Marketing Update

By Elissa Fry, Lisa Facinelli and Sally Forge

The Devil communicates via Prada?

Fashion worshippers rejoice! Prada is designing the ultimate fashion accessory in conjunction with LG Electronics, which will see mobile phones go all designer! Brand Republic reports that Italian fashion house Prada is working alongside LG to create a stylish handset that will give the already existing LG phone a bit of a revamp. LG is hoping to tap into a greater share of the consumer market with this alliance and Prada. It's accessorise, accessorise, accessorise all the way baby!

Napster crosses the Atlantic

US based Napster Mobile has jumped ship and is launching in Europe later this month, following a deal with O2 Ireland. NMA and Marketing Week both report that the deal will see O2 offer Napster's music subscription service as well as the company's image and ringtone catalogue to 1.6m Irish customers. Napster already uses wireless carriers, Cingular in the US and DoCoMo in Japan, with this transition to pastures new, Napster will offer subscribers a choice of 3m songs to purchase from its catalogue, hosted by Ericsson, via NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service platform. Sadly there are currently no plans to launch Napster Mobile in the UK.

Mobile users say 'yes' to music, but still 'no' to video

Telecom TV (free subscription) has reported from Hong Kong at ITU Telecom World 2006 that Telefonica has put its much-publicised plans to launch mobile TV services on hold - "until a raft of problems and issues relating to subscriber 'concerns, demands and needs'" is sorted out. It would appear that paid-for mobile TV services are still low on the list of consumers' priorities.

However, New Media Age has commissioned a report which has found that young mobile users are very enthusiastic about sharing music on mobiles - a third of 8-13 year-olds have swapped tracks via Bluetooth. But it appears the youths, already well-versed in the practice of illegal online music downloading, only voluntarily participate in this type of barter providing it remains a non-commercial activity; and so operators may have trouble persuading young users to pay for any musical contents, says NMA.

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US Media Report

By Heather Lynch

Circulation numbers of online magazines may be mussed, as Entrepreneur.com was caught including pop-up windows as reads or visits.

Neilson/NetRatings noted the problem in May when it changed the statistics of the magazine's site, plummeting from 7.6 million readers to 2 million unique visitors according to the New York Times.

Entrepreneur's clever use of articles on the uninvited windows smudged the line of "reads" and emphasises the need to distinguish between visitors and unique visitors when calling hits "readers." Many online publishers want to up their circulation stats to bring in ad revenue, and Entrepreneur.com is not alone in employing pop ups.

The Washington Post Co. is selling its portfolio of tech magazines, PostNewsweek Tech Media, admitting that the titles were not profitable. The titles, bought by 1105 Media for an undisclosed sum, include Government Computer News, Washington Technology and the IT event FOSE. include Government Computer News, Washington Technology and the IT event FOSE. The Post Co., also owners of Newsweek and Slate.com, is not moving to sell its other assets however, according to VP Ann McDaniel.

PC Magazine and The Princeton Review conducted a study, due out in PC Magazine's December 26 issue, which rates US universities in terms of their tech-savvy. Of the Top 20 Wired Colleges, Villanova came in first and Cambridge's own M.I.T. came in second.

UK Media Report

By Annie Kasmai

Sources at News International have said that the company will not be bidding for the newspaper distribution contract with the London Underground. Earlier in the year, I reported that it was thought that News International and Associated Newspapers would bid for the contract to distribute their freesheets through the Metro bins on the Underground.

Apparently News International believes that their rival, Associated Newspapers, is not bidding for the contract either. However, Steve Auckland, head of Associated's free newspaper department, has insisted that they are in the running for the contract.

Previously this year, we reported that the BBC had plans to launch a weekly news magazine and we can now report that this launch is planned to take place by April 2007. The publisher has already been in talks with distributors regarding securing news stand space for the weekly magazine.

Henry Tucker, deputy editor at PC Answers, is leaving the publication to join the British Computer Society (BCS). Tucker has been at the publication for three years and he will leave on 15 December 2006. He will start in his new role at the BCS on 18 December 2006 and one of his tasks will be to work on the membership magazine ITNOW.

Future is currently advertising for a replacement but in the meantime editor Simon Pickstock and staff writer Tanya Combrinck will look after Henry's duties.

Gordon Smith has become the new FT.com deputy news editor. Smith was previously assistant UK companies editor on the FT.com newsdesk.

Web 2.0 Watch

By Fiona Blamey

Publisher Friday Books has come up with a zeitgeisty stocking filler: a book of 'the best writing from the Web' of 2006.

The Blog Digest 2007 claims to be "the ultimate anthology of blog writing from the last twelve months". Compiled by Brit blogger Justin McKeating, it rounds up some readable and entertaining blog entries from better and lesser known British bloggers and sorts them into cheery festive categories like War, Death and Politics.

If, as the book claims, there are now seven million bloggers in the UK, it should find a ready audience - if only among people who want to find out if they're in it. But by isolating blog posts from their original medium, the book effectively destroys what the editor himself considers to be so special about the blogosphere: its interactivity.

"The comment function on your blog allows [readers] to leave messages agreeing or disagreeing with your [post]," says McKeating, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his book prints blog posts without their comments. "This creates a dialogue that becomes part of the article. The piece changes constantly and becomes almost a collaborative work."

The ability to chat with bloggers and their commenters is indeed something that sets blogging apart from the established media, creating a conversational environment where all voices can be heard. A book of the year's best blog posts may provide some light diversion while the turkey digests, but for a real flavour of what blogging is all about, we recommend you save yourself £8.99 and hang out in the blogosphere itself.