First the ridiculous.  I keep an eye on developments in the semiconductor space as part of an interest in emerging trends and technologies. So I happened to glance through a press release from a semiconductor manufacturer (whose name will be omitted to spare their shame!) and found myself crying (and almost laughing at the same time!). The press release related to the use of the companies specialist chips in wind turbines and contained the following paragraph:

At the heart of this system is ……. deleted…….. embedded in the data acquisition hardware …. deleted …..sub-assembly part affixed to the turbine’s nacelle. Delivering core processing performance up to 333 MHz/2 GFLOPS with support for IEEE 32-bit/40-bit floating point and 32-bit fixed point operations, …..deleted…… processors employ an enhanced Single Instruction, Multiple-Data (SIMD) architecture to provide the real-time processing bandwidth and atomicity required to keep these subsystems running in precise coordination.

Now my semis colleagues earnestly assure me that this is all very relevant stuff and fail to see the absurdity. Come on guys! This is about a chip being used to make wind turbines more efficient. Great news! Issued at the same time that the world’s leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to address climate change this was a week when green issues were front and centre. Ergo, this was a glorious opportunity to link a piece of technology with global environmental issues. Save the whales! Save the Polar Bears! Save the Planet! Nope, let’s just hit them with the technobabble! Sorry – this was a missed opportunity of major proportions – 0/10 – Must try harder in future!

So it was with great surprise that I came across a poster for a new notebook from HP whilst charging through Heathrow airport in the same week, en-route to visit clients (yes, I know it isn’t very green either – sorry planet!).

It contained just one big word – “ENVY”.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. No tech specs. No tech babble. No features. No functionality. Just a good old-fashioned appeal to my emotions. Hooray! Tech advertising finally catches up with the rest of the discretionary spending items like cars, clothes, holidays, food and the rest. “Buy me and make everyone envious!” – now there is an appeal to tug at the purse strings. At least one notebook manufacturer (or at least their advertising/marketing people) have realised that there are higher order appeals than technology and they need to do something other than proclaim they are faster, cheaper than the rest. Well done to you all! 10/10 – Has reached new heights in imagination this year.

More on the notion of value in the new year!

Happy Holidays!

In fairness, the goofy glasses are pretty high tech these days, with fancy LCD shutters turning on and off at warp speed to control what images I receive and confuse my brain. But at a couple of hundred dollars a set would you want to leave them on the sofa for the next teenager to sit on? I think not. They are heavy, they are ugly and they are definitely not cool!

Over the next few weeks I will be looking at and commenting on a whole variety of 3D technologies and giving my verdict, but on this one I’m prepared to stick my neck out and give it a full blown raspberry!

What do you all think? Will they catch on? Will I be forced to appear in public with goofy glasses as penance for my stupidity and lack of imagination? We’ll see!

But as YouTube grows it is also maturing and an increasing number of organisations are starting to investigate its potential as a communications channel for serious content to an otherwise hard to reach audience. In the modern world of news clips and spound bytes, video is an essential element on the marketing mix and YouTube makes uploading, distributing and accessing content remarkably simple. Blogging about the facial recognition capabilities in Apple’s new iPhoto ’09 earlier this week reminded me of a discovery I made just before Christmas. When, in the course of researching global trends I discovered that no less a body than the World Economic Forum (who organise the annual event in Davos, Switzerland (28th Jan through 1st February 2009) attended by world leaders, business leaders and even the odd celebrity or two) now has a channel on YouTube!

Admittedly, this is no ordinary collection of home video clips, but a slickly presented site integrated into YouTube and being used to spread the message and solicit input and opinion. Judging from the fact that the lead video has now been viewed over 290,000 times, it is attracting a fair amount of attention. Mind you, let’s put that in context. Some of the most watched videos on YouTube have now passed 100 million views to date, so there seems little liklihood of YouTube going all serious on us yet!! Nevertheless it demonstrates that YouTube is now being recognised as a valid and viable communications medium. Even Gartner analysts can be found on YouTube with short explanations of their latest research, although we still have a way to go to reach 100 million hits! 

In various conversations with organisations on a recent trip “down under”, a number of them revealed that they were seriously experimenting with putting promotional and instructional video material on YouTube. For tourist authorities and the like, the opportunity to reach out to potential visitors without the hassle of having to host video themselves is very appealing. Closer to home I recently found that my teenage daughter routinely uses YouTube as an alternative to Google (or other search engines targeting text-based information) when looking for instructions – such as how to use complex software products such as Adobe’s Photoshop.

The point of all this is simple. No organisation can now afford to ignore video sites like YouTube as a potential communications channel for reaching out to their user and prospect base. It certainly doesn’t replace existing information channels, but can you afford to miss out on any new prospect in the current economic conditions?

Once the initial excitement has died down it will be interesting to see the extent to which these new means of organising (and to some extent searching) images will start to trickle up the food chain into the enterprise computing environment. Better and easier ways to tag images and to make more effective use of the metadata does open up some intriguing possibilities for mash-up type applications (the first of which will probably start appearing in days!).

Now the focus will shift east towards the delights (!) of Las Vegas and CES. From all the early announcments and leaks it seems that thin (VERY thin) is going to be big (or at any rate, bigger than it was last year) when it comes to flat screens. Not too much of a surprise there. The fact that you can still get a (decent) hotel room in Las Vegas probably says more about the overall trend for this CES – caution and frugality seem to be the order of the day.

But times are changing. Many business technology buyers have already moved beyond the trade show and thanks to the internet, social networks, YouTube and the rest, consumers can find out all they need to know (and see it as well) without having to leave the comfort of their own home. Let’s face it, the best days of the big trade shows are over, and the current economic crisis is only going to accelerate the decline. Apple have long since abandoned other computer shows around the world, their exit from MacWorld was pretty much inevitable.  

Speculation is rife as the conspiracy theorists move into overdrive: Steve Jobs health?; Succession plans?; Nothing new to announce? All pretty pointless – Apple will remain as tight lipped as ever as to the real reasons and their strategy has served them well over the past years. Most likely Apple just got tired of having an externally imposed timeline for product releases. Sure, the MacWorld keynote has served them well – remember the iPhone launch in 2007 which stole all the headlines away from that other huge technology fest, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – but in todays video enabled, internet linked, socially networked world they could still broadcast Steve live to a global audience. And with some of the most valuable retail space in the world (with sales per square foot five to ten times greater than most other upscale outlets) they have built their own direct face-to-face channel to the consumer.   

I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs showmanship and stage presence, and I will miss the excitement of the MacWorld keynote, but I’m not going to waste time speculating on hidden meanings.