Unlike me, Google has started its Christmas buying early, having splashed out $750M on Admob this week. Google also just announced an upgrade to Latitude that supports location history tracking and location alerts (e.g. to notify you when friends are in the vicinity). These events are related. They’re moves in a massive emerging war to own mobile contextual information and applications which will include location-specific advertising and many other location-related business models. Apple are behind in this location game, but I expect MobileMe will get more sophisticated. Expect a future mega-vendor battleground between Google, Nokia, Apple, maybe Microsoft and a few others.

I expect a lot of very interesting location-aware business models will emerge. Back when my daughter was young there were several (failed) attempts to build a business around tracking children. Part of the problem was that most kids don’t want to be tracked, but I always felt that these businesses failed partly because they didn’t take a sophisticated enough view of the opportunity. It’s not about tracking kids, it’s about selling location. The real business opportunity is to get kids and their parents bidding against each other for access to each other’s location. When kids are young their parents can outbid them, but as they get older the kids can afford to hide from their mum or dad and have reasons to do so. Eventually, as the kids grow up and go to college the parents will pay to hide their location from their kids because the only reason for a 19 year old to look for a parent is to borrow money.

However, in my attempts to avoid artificial snow what I really want this week is a mapping application that can show me nearby shops that have festivity-free zones. I’d pay for that.

The culprits I am forced to name and shame are the UK supermarkets Sainsbury and Marks and Spencer. I felt I deserved a bit of luxury and indulgence, but in a modest way as we’re in a recession, so in both cases I bought their premium coleslaw. And the first thing I found when I put it on my plate is that the pieces of cabbage were far too big. They didn’t fit on my fork or in my mouth. And coleslaw isn’t easy to cut up on a plate; the cabbage pieces aren’t aligned so I couldn’t slice them all with a couple of elegant knife strokes. Oh no, I had to waste ages cutting in lots of different directions just to get a practical mouthful. How difficult can it be to set the cabbage chopping machine to produce pieces that fit on a fork? Do the people who create this stuff actually eat their own products?

Sainsbury had another nasty surprise in store for me. Their “premium” coleslaw contains parsnips and fennel as well as cabbage. What are these obnoxious alien vegetable invaders doing in my coleslaw? I hate parsnips, if I’d wanted them I’d have asked for them. I’m used to consumer electronics companies loading their products with random features I never use, but at least I can ignore them. That’s hard to do with coleslaw; have you ever tried separating parsnips from cabbage when they’re both camouflaged by gobs of mayonnaise?

Please excuse my little lunchtime rant, and if you work for a UK supermarket go hire an industrial designer to take a look at your coleslaw. And, be vigilant. Bad design is lurking in unexpected places waiting to ambush you.

New Zealand to ban phone based navigation systems while driving. A couple of mobile news sites reported that NZs forthcoming ban on the use of mobiles while driving extends to handset-based navigation systems even if they are mounted in a cradle. This proposed law apparently forbids using a mobile for anything other than making or receiving a call, and only then if the handset has a car kit. But how can a handset-based system be any more distracting than a Garmin or TomTom? Especially if it uses voice navigation where you don’t need to look at the screen. I can even think of situations when a handset makes a better – and safer – navigator than a dedicated in-car GPS, e.g. because it has better live traffic news. And what does this law mean for GPSs like the Garmin Nuvi which have built-in cellular, are they banned too?

However it’s not all bad because it looks as if making VOIP calls from your laptop using WiFi or WiMax is fine while you’re driving because the law specifically talks about mobile phones, not mobile devices.

This is typical political woolly thinking born of technological ignorance. Legislating against a technology rather than a principle is almost always misguided because technology evolves faster than principles. Doing anything that distracts you while driving is bad, it doesn’t matter whether it involves a handset, a GPS, a WiMax internet tablet or your PSP.

Marketing people are often only loosely attached to reality, and they seem to have difficulty understanding this clear definition so let me remind them of something: Wimax is not 4G. Neither is LTE. LTE-A will be 4G, and some future Wimax version may be 4G compliant, but today it isn’t. (Mis)marketing culprits who talk about WiMax as 4G seem to be everywhere including Sprint, Clearwire, and Craig Wireless to name but a few.

Marketing people aren’t the only culprits abusing the “4G” term. A fellow industry analyst – thankfully not from Gartner – was recently quoted as saying: “… fuel the 4G communication lifestyle that consumers are striving for….”.

This is a triumph of marketing over reality. Have you ever met a consumer who is “striving for a 4G lifestyle”? Do your kids come up to you and say “daddy, why don’t we have a 4G lifestyle like the folks next door”? Could you maybe hire an interior decorator and a stylist to upgrade your home and wardrobe to a 4G lifestyle? For those who can’t afford that option buy a bumper sticker saying “My other car has a 4G lifestyle”. And what is a “4G lifestyle” in any case? Does it mean I can receive video spam instead of email spam, and the tweets arrive in a microsecond instead of a millisecond? And if this mythical 4G lifestyle involves hi definition 3D video calls from my mother in law I don’t want any part of it.

Let’s strike a blow for truth and sanity by starting a campaign for real 4G. If it’s not ITU-compliant it’s not 4G.

First the cost of e-books. A quick calculation based on bookshelf capacity suggests my wife and I have over 3,500 books scattered around the house, I’d guess at least two thirds are recent enough that they’re still in copyright. Probably half the books are ones we both read, so if we both had an e-book reader we’d need two licenses for current volumes. So if we assume $10 per e-book that works out at about $34,500 to replace p-books with e-books assuming equivalent volumes were available. And that also assumes the out-of-copyright books are free, which is probably over-optimistic.

E-book readers are going to get a lot of use, so they’ll probably only last a couple of years, therefore we’d have to pay a few hundred dollars each every two years to get a new reader. (In reality we probably need two readers each, a big A4 one at home and a small one for planes and travelling, but the DRM models haven’t caught up with that need yet). And when e-book file formats evolve or we switch reader brand to something with different DRM then in the worst case we’d have to spend tens of thousands again to replace the e-books with new more modern ones. No way.

Buying the e-books isn’t the end of the story. Even if we make the unrealistic assumption that we could obtain e-versions of all the books that we currently own that’s a lot more books than will fit on a reader like a Kindle. So we’re going to have to maintain offline copies somewhere. I could (maybe) trust a cloud service provider with this job, but I don’t like that option for reasons I discussed a while back. If I own e-books on digital media I’m going to have to maintain backups, and keep refreshing them. My colleague Valdis Fikis pointed out that so-called “persistent” media isn’t really that persistent compared to the life of a book. He estimates the following media lifetimes:

Hard disk: 3 to 5 years

DVD or CD: Up to 7 years if you buy a good quality product, less if you’re a cheapskate

Tape: (yes, it still exists), 7 to 10 years if you treat it kindly

So every few years I’ll need to remember to copy my e-book library. iPod has shown us just how painful it can be to back up and restore media libraries or transfer DRM protected media from one device to another. And I just don’t want that hassle. Books don’t deteriorate, just blow off the dust and they can be as good as they were a hundred years before.

In Gartner we talk a lot about total cost of ownership (TCO), but I think in the consumer product space we ought also to talk about total pain of ownership (TPO), And for me both the TCO and TPO of e-books are way too high. Old-fashioned p-books are more robust, lower cost and a lot easier to own. I’m much more likely to buy an e-book reader as an alternative to all the magazines and newspapers which I read once and throw away. That would not only be more convenient but also more environmentally responsible.

It’s my birthday today (I won’t mention my age because it’s too depressing), so a few days ago I decided to treat myself to a new manbag. Anyone who’s seen me present at Gartner conferences will know I’m a scruffy Brit with very undemanding fashion requirements so I thought this would be easy. I had a vision of something a little smarter than a PC bag that I could take it to meetings and would look reasonably professional. When dressed for business I tend towards exceedingly boring grey or blue suits, so black felt like the right colour. And because I didn’t want anything too cheap and nasty I thought that leather was probably the right material. So like most guys I started the shopping process with a clear specification: a black, leather smartish manbag that could fit a netbook or my small laptop. Ought to be easy – or so I thought.

I started the manbag search last week in Heathrow T5 while waiting for a plane, the good news is they stock black leather manbags, the bad news is they were in the Harrods store and cost £350, more than a netbook. My wife or daughter might contemplate £350 on a handbag, but that’s a step too far for a fashion-challenged guy like me. So yesterday I went to my local shopping centre and roamed around John Lewis, a usually reliable UK retailer who stocks pretty much everything….. except black leather manbags. And the recession seemed to have eliminated every other luggage shop in the mall. I could probably buy a bag online, but personal accessories are like clothes, I want to see before I pay.

This is a killer problem for the netbook business, because if you can’t carry it you can’t use it. And if you can’t use it, there’s no reason to buy it. So maybe the netbook manufacturers should appreciate they aren’t in the business of manufacturing personal electronics. They’re in the business of facilitating personal access to services. Ensuring a good range of boring black leather manbags for ordinary guys like me is far more important to their success than using the latest Atom chip.

Disconnecting file sharers. The UK government has acted against the recommendations of its own advisers and is apparently contemplating a law which allows broadband disconnection from people who pirate music and media. As I pointed out a while ago when discussing similar French proposals this is a “solution” which may keep the media industry happy but has more holes than Swiss Cheese. It assumes that a broadband connection is associated with an single person, which is wrong as most are shared. Should a house or family be punished for the actions of an individual, even if they didn’t even know the piracy occurred? It assumes you know who the user of a broadband connection is, which is untrue half the time as there any number of internet cafes, free WiFi connections in pubs and restaurants, free WiFi in libraries (provided by the same politicians as a public service), prepaid mobile broadband and so on. Is the government so naive they believe that shutting off someone’s home broadband will prevent them accessing the internet and stealing media?

It’s just more political inconsistency, on the one hand my government is proudly announcing its plans to provide universal broadband and on the other proudly announcing its plans to take it away from people.

Free WiFi on Scottish trains and buses. Another techno-political oddity, this time from Scotland where politicians from the same party that’s proposing to cut off the file sharers have proposed that free WiFi should be available on Scottish trains and buses. This seems to be part of an environmental strategy based on the assumption that better connectivity on buses and trains would mean less cars on the road. This is another example of a policy proposal only loosely coupled to reality. Scotland is a wonderful country with some of the greatest scenery in the UK, but much of it is mountainous with large areas lacking 3G coverage, so short of putting a satellite uplink on every bus it’s not obvious how this proposal could be implemented. I guess also that many politicians don’t travel on buses, because at commuting times most of them are pretty crowded with standing room only. If you can’t get a seat you can’t work on a laptop or mobile so the WiFi is academic. If the real goal is to get cars off the road then maybe simpler solutions like reducing fares or providing more buses and trains would be more sensible.

A survey I saw a few years ago claimed the average UK one-way commute was about 20 minutes, which is hardly time to boot up Windows let alone do any work. But I guess it’s plenty of time to download some pirated music thanks to the generosity of the open source community who have kindly provided tools like SymTorrent for mobiles.

1. Buy a smaller lighter mobile. Small things use less material than large ones. If you want a mobile containing 15% less nasty stuff buy one that’s 15% smaller & lighter.

2. Trade down, buy a cheap and simple mobile. Things cost money because they consume resources and manufacturing effort; the amount of which is very approximately correlated with carbon production and environmental by-products. Cheap mobiles are likely to have a smaller environmental footprint than expensive mobiles because they have smaller screens, less components a smaller battery etc.

3. Any new mobile you buy, however green, will have contributed some CO2 and pollution to the environment. So don’t buy a new mobile, keep your current one. Or maybe get a cast-off from your kids. You’re a grown-up adult now, you don’t have to prove anything, you can afford to look uncool. If your friends don’t understand the concept of retro chic and you feel self conscious using a scratched old handset install a wallpaper image that says “I’m using an old phone to save the planet” and leave it lying around conspicuously to impress people.

4. Strike a blow against all those aggravating people who tell you to unplug your mobile charger to save the planet. Leave that charger plugged in, you know it would annoy them if they found out. If you really want to save energy switch off a light. A 60W bulb running for an hour uses the same electricity as an idle charger running for 5 days. New generation chargers are even better.

5. If you really want to reduce charger power consumption…. talk less. When the charger is actually charging your phone it uses 10x as much power as when it’s idle. So the less you charge, the less CO2 you generate. Also, your friends will be grateful for the extra peace and quiet.

6. Phones with solar cells are probably more environmentally damaging than ones without. So don’t buy one. It’s all because of the embodied energy required to manufacture the cells; for more details take a look at a blog I wrote on this a while back. In any case, leaving your phone in a sunny spot for 2 days every time you need to charge it up is hardly intelligent.

7. Subject those “green” adverts to a bit of rational analysis. “80% recyclable” only means something if the product is is actually recycled. Do you really believe the folks who collect your garbage actually dismantle every dead handset into teeny pieces to recycle them all? And is biodegradable plastic really a good thing? A handset case made from degradable plastic just decomposes and puts carbon back into the environment. Land fill plastic locks that carbon away for hundreds of years.

I really do want to save the environment. But I hate it when people try to fool me with pseudo-green marketing.

My big worry here is that Google won’t be radical enough. For example I don’t think any new OS will be secure or maintainable if it uses the current Windows or Linux driver model. But fixing that problem gets you into difficult territory because it needs a new peripheral hardware architecture – e.g. one where peripherals have built-in web servers to set options. And that means changes not just to software but the whole market for peripherals and add-ons.

We only get one chance every decade or two to fix basic operating system architectures. I hope the folks at Google will be courageous enough to do something really radical.

But in fact you’re not saving the planet. The hidden problem here is the embodied energy. I.e. the energy taken to manufacture the solar cells and supporting electronics; this also generates a CO2 debt which will likely never be repaid during the life of the phone because the solar charging is so ineffective. So not only are buyers of the phone paying for an ineffective feature, they’re also deluding themselves if they think they’re being green, because the embodied energy debt makes a solar handset less environmentally sound than a well engineered conventional handset with a modern charger. As far as I can tell it’s just greenwashing. And if any handset manufacturer reading this believes I’m wrong please send me the calculations and I’ll be happy to share them.