loose wire | blog – Page 41 – Jeremy Wagstaff: ex Reuters/BBC/WSJ etc. Now consulting and writing. Blogging here since 2001

Slow connection: Myanmar test for IT crowd

By jeremy | May 29, 2012

Here’s a piece I did for Reuters on the state of IT in Myanmar. The Economist pipped us to the post slightly, but always nice to know other people are thinking along the same lines.

Myanmar has fewer phones per capita than any other country and probably the fewest Internet connections, and that has regional telecoms and IT companies licking their lips.
But behind those statistics lies more than simply a virgin market waiting to be tapped. Myanmar has been run by generals for decades, leaving not only pent-up demand for connectivity, but also a complex web of interests and a unique ecosystem of technological make-do. All of which will require careful navigation by would-be investors.
A recent gathering of techies in Yangon’s Myanmar Info-Tech complex illustrates the promise, changes and problems Myanmar presents as the next frontier for investors.
The meeting was organized by a loose triumvirate of business-oriented folk, bloggers and the country’s IT diaspora. It was a so-called barcamp – an unstructured conference and chat-fest whose format was dreamed by up California techies tired of the exclusive, closed-door meets that are a regular feature of Silicon Valley.

Rest of the story at reuters.com

On the ropes, Apple’s China nemesis still dreams

By jeremy | May 29, 2012

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Here’s a piece I wrote with Lee Chyen Yee about the man and company behind the iPad trademark battle in China.

(Reuters) – Yang Long-san, Apple’s nemesis in a battle over the iPad trademark in China, once strutted the expo halls with dreams of market dominance. His company, Proview, may now be in ruins and his most valuable asset a disputed trademark, but those dreams remain intact.
“My biggest wish is to resolve all these frustrating problems and put them behind me,” Yang said in a recent telephone interview. “If we can resolve all the problems we have now and I have a chance to make a comeback, I’d still want to overtake my old competitors.”
Much of that will depend on whether he wins a long-running dispute over ownership of the trademark in China – Apple’s second-biggest market by revenue. Although a recent decision by the Shanghai district court to reject Proview’s demands that Apple stop selling the iPad was a setback for Proview, the case is still to be heard in the higher court in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong Wednesday.
A decision against Apple there would set a precedent that would create an uphill battle in other cases in lower courts around China. Local media have said Proview is seeking up to 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in compensation.
Proview’s fortunes may currently be the polar opposite of Apple – one has creditors at the door and the other is the world’s most valuable listed company – but both illustrate how the fickle world of technology can make or break a company.
Yang and Proview rode the first wave, when every home and office desk had to have a computer, and a screen. For Apple, the last decade has seen it ride the crest of a new wave where the computer moved from a commoditized, clunky desktop to a fashionable mobile consumer device.
Proview may now be a shadow of a company, trying to convert its last major asset into cash, but it was not always so. “They definitely existed,” says IDC analyst Rhoda Alexander, who covered them for a while. “They were a significant manufacturer and a major player.”

The full story can be found at reuters.com

The Blogging Revolution is Over, But That’s Not the Point

By jeremy | February 20, 2012

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I was digging through some of my old columns the other day, trying to see if I had predicted anything right. Here’s what I had to say 10 years ago this month, about a new and still obscure habit called blogging:

I’d like to think that blogs do what the much vaunted portal of the dotcom boom failed to do: collate, filter and present information from other sources, alongside comment. Bloggers — those that blog — will be respected as folk who aren’t journalists, or experts in their field, but have sufficient knowledge and experience to serve as informal guides to the rest of us hunting for stuff on the World Wide Web.

There’s not much money in this, though doubtless they’re likely to upset the media barons who realize that their carefully presented, graphics-strewn home pages are being bypassed by blog-surfers stopping by only long enough to grab one article. But that may be the future: The editor that determines the content of our daily read may not be a salaried Webmaster or a war-weathered newspaper editor, but a bleary-eyed blogger in his undershirt willing to put in the surfing time on our behalf.

I called it, to the bemusement of my friends and media colleagues, the blogging revolution. I was, it turns out, both right and wrong.

Blogging was huge: so big, in fact, it led to the publisher I was then working for being bought by another, and me looking for another job. Blogging, it turned out, was the spearhead of a much bigger assault on the citadel of the media barons and we all know the results of that. But blogs themselves have themelves been superseded: Those companies that got rich realised that, like the people selling shovels and buckets to gold diggers, it was better to make money from the process of generating content than to actually produce the content itself. Facebook, Amazon and Google, of course, don’t actually produce any of their own content, but they seem to be doing well monetizing the distribution of it.

But that doesn’t mean blogging is dead. Although no one got into trouble for suggesting it: A survey by the University of Massachusetts shows that for the first time since it started looking five years ago, fewer of the fastest growing companies of the Fortune 500 are blogging—in 2010 half were, and now only 37% are. Pew found something similar among younger people.

Of course, blogs were never about quantity. Indeed, the more blogs there were, the harder it was to follow them. In that sense, microblogging—twitter, Google+, etc, where the emphasis is on a limited number of words—and presence sharing tools such as Facebook, where you’re encouraged not to write at length but simply to share brief thoughts, commentary or media, are an indirect reaction to the explosion of blogs.

Frederic Filloux, a French newspaper man, looked at mainstream media’s use of blogs and calculated recently that "too many blogs hosted by large media brands seem loose or rarely updated."

But I was also wrong about another thing: I thought blogs would serve as guides to the web. And many do: They highlight interesting stuff that others are saying. They curate, in the argot of the web. But actually the really good ones—the ones that keep traditional media on their toes—are those which actually dig up new stuff. They actually break news: Florian Mueller, a German patent consultant and campaigner, runs a blog about the ongoing patent wars between mobile phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung that is based on original reporting from the court rooms and documents. It’s considered the place to go to learn about and understand what is going on. His twitter feed has 10,000 followers.

Then there’s the anonymous blogger who has doggedly pursued the financial problems of Glasgow Rangers football club for a year, laying out in detail the decline of the club—details the mainstream press seemed reluctant to carry themselves. The blog gets 100,000 page views a day, and the most recent post has more than 3,000 comments. In a recent piece he wrote for the Guardian the author of the blog wrote:

In a world of free information, where most blogs die alone and ignored shortly after birth, the very popularity of rangerstaxcase.com carries a message about modern Scotland. It is a story of the unmet need for the straight story, uncorrupted by the sinister Triangle of Trade that renders most of what passes as news in Scotland’s media outlets as worthless.

There are not many of these examples, but that, perhaps, is the point. These people are amateurs in the sense that they don’t make money from their work, usually. But they’re professional in that they rise or fall on their words—the research they put in, the clarity they bring to the subject—and while the blogging revolution may be over, but if all we’re left with are these blogs, I reckon it was more than worth it.

The Tablet is the Computer

By jeremy | January 25, 2012

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One thing discussed often and at great length in nerdy circles these days is this: Is the tablet—by which we really mean the Apple iPad, because it created the market, and presently accounts for nearly two thirds of it—a computer. A PC, if you will?

Some say that the iPad is not really a computer. It has no keyboard. People don’t sit at desks to use it. It lacks the horsepower of most of today’s computers. So they think it’s a big smartphone. I think they are wrong. They misunderstand what is happening.

This is not hard to see in action. Wandering around an airport cafe the other day, everyone had at least one device. But those with an iPad were by far the most comfortable, whether curled up in an armchair or sitting at a table. And they were doing everything: I saw one guy watching a movie, another writing a letter, another CEO-type playing Angry Birds. I was thrown out of the cafe before I was able to finish my research.

At the hairdressers no fashion magazines were being read: Everyone was cradling an iPad, oblivious to the time and their hair being teased into odd shapes.

So let’s look at the data.

Surveys by comScore, a metrics company, point to what is really happening. In studies in the U.S. last October and of Europe released this week [Registration required], they noticed that during the week tablet usage spikes at night—as computer usage drops off. So while during the work day folk are using their PCs, come evening they switch to tablets. (Mobile usage, however, remains flat from about 6 pm.) The drop in PC usage is even more pronounced in the U.S., while tablet usage in the evening continues to rise until about 11 pm:

In other words, people are using their tablets as computers. Not as mobile devices. Not as replacements for their phone. They’re using them, in the words of a friend of mine, as a replacement to that ancient computer sitting in the corner gathering dust that gets booted up once in a while to write an email or a letter to Granny on.

Now not everyone is using tablets like this. The first surveys of tablet usage indicated they were using them as ‘TV buddies’—things to play with while watching TV. But this still doesn’t quite capture what is happening.

One study by Nielsen found last May that 3 out of 10 Americans were using their computer less frequently after buying a tablet. What’s surprising about this figure is that it’s higher than for all other devices—including gaming consoles, Internet-connected TVs and portable media players. Given the plethora of games and stuff you can get for a tablet, surely more people would be saying that they use these devices less than their netbook, laptop or desktop, now they have a tablet?

That survey was done when less than 5% of U.S. consumers owned one. A year on, that figure is much higher. Pew’s Internet and American Life Project reported on Jan 23 that the number of American adults who owned a tablet grew from 10% to 19% over the holiday period; although their data may not be directly comparable with Nielsen’s it sounds about right. And represents an unprecedented adoption of a new device, or computing platform, or whatever you want to call it.

(Pew also surveys ebook readers and finds the same results. But I think we’ll see a serious divergence between these two types of device. Yes, some tablets are good for reading and some ereaders, like the Kindle Fire, look a lot like a tablet. But they’re different, and used in different ways. I think that while the market will overlap even more, they’ll be like more like the laptop and netbook markets, or the ultrabook and the PC market: they may do similar things but the way people use them, and the reason people buy them, will differ.)

This is rapidly altering the demographics of the average tablet user. Back in 2010, a few months after the first iPad was launched, 18-34 year olds accounted for nearly half the market, according to another Nielsen report. A year on, that figure was down to a little over a third, as older folk jumped aboard. Indeed the number of 55+ iPad users doubled in that period, accounting for more than 25-34 year old users.

(Pew’s figures suggest that while older folk have been slower to adopt, the rate of growth is picking up. Around a quarter of adults up to the age of 49 now have a tablet in the U.S. (a shocking enough figure in itself.) Above 50 the number comes down. But the telling thing to me is that the rate of growth is more or less the same: about a fourfold growth between November 2010 and January 2012. While a lot of these may have been gifts over the holidays, it also suggests that the potential is there.)

So it’s pretty simple. The tablet, OK, the iPad came along and reinvented something that we thought no one wanted—a tablet device with no keyboard. But Apple’s design and marketing savvy, and the ecosystem of apps and peripherals, have made the tablet sexy again. Indeed, it has helped revive several industries that looked dead: the wireless keyboard, for example. ThinkOutside was a company in the early 2000s that made wonderful foldable keyboards for the Palm, but couldn’t make it profitable (and is now part of an apparently moribund company called iGo).

Now look: the website of Logitech, a major peripherals company, has the external keyboard and stand for the iPad as more or less its top product. Logitech reckon a quarter of tablet users want an external keyboard, and three quarters of them want their tablet “to be as productive as their laptop.” Most peripheral companies offer a kind of wireless keyboard, and there are more on the horizon.

And as BusinessWeek reported, the highest grossing app on the iPad appstore this Christmas wasn’t Angry Birds; it was a program for viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents, called QuickOffice. The app itself is not new: it’s been around since 2002, and a paired-down version came preinstalled on dozens of devices. But people wouldn’t shell out the extra $10 for the full version—until the iPad came along. Now they happily pay $20 and the company sold $30 million’s worth in 2011. (BusinessWeek links this to growing corporate interest in the iPad but you can see from comScore’s data that this is not necessarily correct. The tablet is a personal device that is mostly used outside the office.)

So. There’s a new industry out there, and it’s for a device that’s not a phone, though it has the same degree of connectivity; it’s not a desktop, though it should be able to do all the things a desktop can do; it’s not a laptop, though it should make the user as productive as a laptop can. And it’s many more things besides: a TV buddy, a sort of device to accompany your downtime in cafes, salons or on the couch.

Gartner, a research company, reckon that from about 17.5 million devices sold in 2010 there will be 325 million sold in 2015. An 18-fold increase. In the same period the annual sales of notebooks will only have doubled, and desktops will have grown by, er, 5%. Hard not to conclude from that that the tablet, OK, the iPad, is going to be everyone’s favorite computer—replacing the desktop, the laptop and whatever ultrabooks, netbooks or thinkbooks are the big thing in 2015.

(Update: This was written before Apple’s results. Tim Cook has confirmed the PC is their main competitor.)