We are less than a month into the new year and it hasn’t been such a happy one for quite a few of the world’s big tech names. I shall try and do this chronologically so that I don’t get accused of favoritism. Or, more likely, unfavoritism.

14th January – Google: Don’t (get caught) be(ing) Evil!

So 2 weeks into the 2012 and we get the first hit: reports from Kenya accused Google of some very bad business practices. The company involved, Mocality, who are a business directory for local Kenyan companies, had been getting some strange calls from  some of their customers who had been contacted by Mocality’s partner and wanting to help out with their website projects. This was strange because Mocality a) Mocality don’t have a partner, and b) they don’t make websites, they’re just a business directory. They managed to trace the calls from the “partner company” back to a company in Kenya who said they were Google. I can tell you are smelling the suspiciousness already. “Hmmmm” you’re thinking “someone is calling themselves google and trying to use another business directory to poach customers” and you would be thinking the same thing Mocality did. So, in a fit of ingenuity, they set up a stig operation: they set up some false companies on their directory which had phone numbers back at their HQ. When these phones rang, low and behold, it was “Google”, saying that they were working with Mocality and trying to sell some web based services! “Haha!” said Mocality, “we’ve caught you!”. So they contacted Google and said their was some company impersonating them and trying to poach Mocality customers. Google looked into it and…. nope, it turns out it was Google’s Kenyan company GKBO being pretty underhanded.

(via gadgetcrave.com)

Mocality’s CEO, Stefan Magdalinski, blogged “Since October, Google’s GKBO appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted.”

So, what did Google have to say? Nelson Mattos, their head of Emerging Markets wrote an abject apology “We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”

I don’t think this story is over yet. I’ll keep you posted!

18th January – Don’t drop the SOPA!

Admittedly, this story isn’t so much about a tech company failure as it is about the US government failing tech companies. So, Wednesday the 18th Jan was an international protest day against the Stop Online Piracy Act that the US government was trying to pass into law. I’m not going to go into exactly how SOPA would work and all its bad points – you can look that up on wikipedia for yourself – I’m going to concentrate on the dramatic blackout day it caused. As a protest against the act anyone visiting wikipedia would have found and black page telling them it was unavailable as a protest against SOPA. This must have annoyed thousands of students and journalist who were trying to “research” their work. Alas, if you went to Reddit you would have got a similar black page. So to with twitpic, Mozilla and WordPress. With Google and others their logos were blacked out in protest. All pretty affective stuff. Wikipedia sayd that some 162 million people tried to access their site and failed, all of whom would have read the reason why. Thats a lot of people unhappy with SOPA. And it seemed to work. For now. Every country has their own version which will try and do similar things to stop online piracy. None of them are particularly effective or accuarte. No doubt the US will come back with another, similar bill soon. Lets hope someone explains to them how the internet works, sooner.

20th January – Megaupload implode

SOPA might not have been effective but that didn’t stop the FBI throwing the toys out of the pam and shutting down Megaupload a few days later. They say that the site was being used to share media illegally and so seized the domain. Any visitors going now are greeted with:

The FBI: Subtlety since 1908

Megaupload’s CEO Kim Dotcom (I’m going to pretend that’s his real name and he has one of the best cases of nominative determinism EVER!) has been arrested in New Zealand and has not been granted bail. Its expected he’ll be extradited to the US in a month or two. It’s a real shame because he had already proposed a great way of providing revenue for artists even from pirated and freely available media. But because that doesn’t provide the music and film companies with money then they are not interested.

25th January – O2 shmo2 (ok, I’m running out of pun-filled headers)

(via crave.cnet.co.uk)

And finally, yesterday was a bad day for the british service provider O2, who had been sending every website you visit your phone number! To be fair, it was only if you visited the site on your mobile and through a non-wifi connection, but its still pretty bad. Apparently the “mistake”came about because they had altered some setting somewhere and the info was automatically sent to every webpage between the 16th and 25th Jan. This was all spotted but a rather clever and nice guy called Lewis Peckover who came up with a simple bit of code on a website that showed you if O2 were sending everyone your mobile number. O2 were quick to respond and have now fixed the problem, although they do admit that some “preferred partners” do still get sent your number. Hmmmm…. And apparently it might not be just O2, there are some reports that Orange have been doing the same thing.

Oh well, lets hope things get better from here. Have a great week!

*Clearly “interesting” is a very subjective concept, but seeing as you are reading a blog on a web design company’s site I am going to go ahead and just presume you might have a passing curiosity.

So, to give you a top down view, Gartner’s analysis showed that computer sales fell 11.4% during the 3rd quarter of 2011 compared to the same time in 2010. Worst still, it was consumer sales that dragged that figure down as they fell 18.8%! So, is this a sign of the economy? Unlikely as its not like the global recession is new, we are not in a particularly worse financial place than we were a year ago, the problem is more a lack of growth than an actual decline (although now we’re getting into Phd level Economics so I’ll stop there).

Is the problem therefore actually one of computer life span’s? Are computers now lasting longer with the same level of technology compared to a few years ago when new games, new operating systems and a drive towards photo-realism saw the amount of RAM required by a household PC become intolerable within 2 years? Possibly – Dell, one of the largest consumer PC manufacturers, has sold its most popular range, the Inspiron, with a base level of 2Gb RAM for 3 years. But then that would equate to a steady decline in sales, rather than a sudden single year dip.

They don't build 'em like this anymore!

No, where we have to look is at another set of figures released at the same time, and thats to do with phones. Or more specifically smartphones. They grew 42%! Now this is a huge amount but it might not be that surprising with the leaps and bounds that smartphones are developing (probably somewhat similar to the mention above of PC technology growth a few years ago), mainly driven by the OS developments by Apple, Android and, to a lesser extent, Windows (who’s share of the smartphone market actually FELL from 2.7% to 1.5%!!).

And its my creative use of revealing these phone stats (for dramatic “journalistic” purposes), that shows something about those computer figures: the only two companies who have shown any real growth in the computer sector are Asus, who have been hugely successful in creating cheap, fast and small laptops, and…. Apple, who have also helped drive the smartphone market.

...They build 'em like this instead!

So with these two sets of stats together we can maybe see the beginning of a shift in the landscape: people aren’t just using their smartphones to access the data out and about that they would use their PC to access at home. They are starting to not bother with the PC at all. Is it maybe starting to become just the harddrive-with-a-screen where they can dump all their music, pictures and video, ready to be placed onto their “main” computer that they keep in their pocket. With there no longer being a need to drive superfast technology into a home PC, then there is less need to update it. And with cloud storage becoming ever more prevalent and accessible how long will it be before there is no need for the box at home, or even a “cumbersome” laptop to drag around with you?

Now I don’t doubt for a second that I could be wrong about this and that this time next year, once the global economy has sorted out all its problems – Greece will once again be famous just as a nice holiday destination and #Occupy is how people will refer to Starbucks – once all that is back to the norm then maybe we will see a rise in home computer sales. But I really doubt it.

The one bugger in all this Gartner data is that it never mentions where tablets fit into all this. Now those will be some interesting* figures to compare and contrast against the PC market!

*Please see previous note regarding “interesting”.

Have a great week!

Even its branding is dull (via www.fco.gov.uk)

But, and its a big but, from reading the official info, blogs by people there and companies involved I kind of get the impression its a little bit of a conference for those that either don’t understand, or worse, fear the internet, and those who wish to make money from this incomprehension.

Firstly its the name, more specifically the ‘Cyberspace’ bit. I mean, really? It’s 2011 and you are referring to the internet, the online world, the technology industry as ‘cyberspace’?! You guys are gonna have your minds blown when you see the iPhone in 7 years! Admittedly I do have a… penchant… for naming conventions as we have seen here and here. But I still feel from the outset that this name suggests a group of 50+ year olds getting together in suits to discuss how this black magic is a threat.

I am clearly at the cutting edge of technology

Even if we ignore the name and look at the content it still feels heavy on the “fears” with not too much of the “hope” and “vision”. And this is purely systematic of a lot of those who are attending: internet security experts. They make their living by ensuring that governments, companies and individuals are somewhat defended against online crime. Now I’m not suggesting that the internet is a risk free flowery meadow filled with good pixies and chocolate unicorns, but these people’s principle concern is to make sure that threat, crime and detriment are at the forefront of the minds of those who make large decisions about how the internet is run and governed nationally and internationally.

Honestly, I have no vested interest in telling you your very lives are under threat.

This view of the conference is apparently a common one and something that the Foreign Office is keen to calm, saying “The Foreign Office has been keen to play down expectations of real outcomes from the conference, stressing that this is just a starting-point”. If thats the case then is it really that useful? It kind of makes it one of those meetings that we have all been to where nobody is sure why they are there and then it just turns out that this is a meeting to let everyone know what will be discussed in future meetings. Great.

To be fair, there have been one or two positive highlights form it: namely a discussion on Internet Freedom which featured Google’s Head of Freedom of Expression (!), John Kampfner from Index On Censorship and a Yemeni online activist. Mr Kamfner made excellent points about the problems faced by policy makers, namely how British PM, David Cameron, was keen to shut down Blackberry during the riots over the summer until William Hague pointed out how that might look after our complaints about dictatorships during the Arab Spring.

My overall impression of the conference was that there was a lot of talk about how scary and threatening the internet is and a general consensus that there needs to be a collective decision on how o go about fighting that threat. Its just that nobody has the faintest idea how you go about fighting internet threats as a group. But then the guy who set it up, John Duncan, thinks I’m wrong.

Have a great week!

As I mentioned last week, with any Android or Windows phone it is always hard to tell what is the phone and what is the OS which, although to some is a minor point, to many it will be the deciding factor when choosing what to spend your £25+ a month. Unlike last weeks Android/Samsung launch, which was all Android software on a blank Samsung canvass, the Nokia offering is a much more entwined mis of hardware and OS. That means we’re not really discussing what Windows is bringing to the market, more what this model of Nokia phone – the Lumia 800 / 710  -  along with this version of Windows OS – 7.5 ‘Mango’ – has to offer, and to be perfectly honest this isn’t a site that discusses every model of phone release (although the last 3 weeks would contend that!).

Anyway, enough of the intricacies and on with whether its actually any good. First up, the Windows name: ‘Mango’. Thats not as good as ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ but more interesting than ’5′.

Everything I know about Windows' new smartphone OS

Thanks. Join me again next week.

Not really! So what is this Nokia/Windows hybrid offering? Well the first thing that struck me is that a lot, and I mean A LOT, of the initial info is about the look, the “range of funky colours“, the fact its “stylish and smart” and Stephen Elop’s (the head of Nokia) claim its “just beautiful”. Ummm… the expressions “Show us, don’t tell us” and “Style over substance” are leaping to mind. Why do you have to keep telling us about how good it looks? Surely thats something we can see and judge for ourselves. That really worries me. And I don’t think that worry is unfounded.

Funky! Fresh! Vibrant! Useful? (via pocketnow.com)

The Apple 4S/iOS5 and Samsung Nexus/Android 3 ‘ICS’ launches were all about features. What great new things they could do, how they were better than their competitors and how its going to change your life. Its looks are a secondary, or lower, concern. Everyone knows Apple has a history of designing nice stuff, but thats because they launch it and you can see it. they don’t really harp on about how “cool” or “funky” they look.

And what of the new features? Well pretty much everything they talked about was Nokia derived:

Nokia Maps: Interactive location based services

Nokia Drive: Real-time navigation software

Mix Radio: Live music streaming

Liveview: And Augmented Reality (AR) service

Nokia Pulse: This integrates social networking with your location

To be honest, if those didn’t read like an excited features list, its because it isn’t. They are all just Nokia app effectively. Ones that Android/Apple have had available for ages. And because they are ALL Nokia features, I have no idea of Mango is any good.

When Stephen Elop took over at Nokia he famously released a memo that described the company as standing on a “burning platform” and it could either take a dive into cold water or get consumed. This was meant to be their dive; a refreshing new start for the company that was once Emperor of the phone market. But this is more just a bit soggy. I have no doubt they well sell a lot of models and at a vastly undercut price to Apple, but they wont sell enough. Not by a long way. Nokia is such a huge monster of a company that it needs to be THE biggest seller in the market and to achieve that they needed to launch something radical, clever, feature rich and innovative. Not just a new touch-screen phone in pretty colours.

Ahhhhh... good times

Don’t get me wrong, I like Nokia I really do, I have such great memories of a lot of my early phones and ,in my humble opinion, until about 2006 they were by far and away the best, most well thought out phone manufacturer in the world. they just did it better than everyone else. But the game has changed, and they haven’t. I really, really hope that they are trying to make a huge overhaul of themselves and that this is the last remnants of the old Nokia, the follow-the-leader Nokia, rather than the innovative, fresh and diverse Nokia. Unfortunately I think they will be gone as a western world phone creator within 5 years.

The one thing they do have going for them (which might seem them revived in 7-10 years) is that they are being quite smart with another new launch: Asha. These are cheap, Blackberry-esque smart phones for the developing-world market, namely India and China. Will these countries want to buy something thats not wanted in the developed world? Who knows, but if they do then there are 2.5 billion potential customers there and that could see Nokia transform its image. Especially whats the Indo-Chinese alliance rules the world.

So after that thought, I come onto the other piece of news I started with: Amazon’s financial reports. Primarily its the fact that their profit is down 73%. That is a HUGE amount for the worlds biggest retailer. This, they explain, is because of the investment they have put into the new Kindle range. Unfortunately that wasn’t enough to encourage that stock market and their shares fell 12% over night.

Along with an iPhone this is your future (via techradar.com)

Unbelievable. Seriously. It scares me how short-sighted investors can be (ok, so the current world recession should have been a bit of a clue). Amazon is one of the few mega-companies that is doing almost everything right: they are setting up an infrastructure for the future. This is exactly what Apple was doing with the iPod and iTunes 10 years ago and they now have more money than the US government!! Amazon are definitely going to be one of the future global corporations who control goods, information and electronic infrastructure. Trust me, in 20 years time when all the oil is gone it will be the Googles, Amazons, Apples and Facebooks of this world that will be posting profits like BPs.

Sorry for all those rather dark words. Hopefully everything will be more cheery next week.

TTFN.

First off it is worth explaining to any current Android mobile handset users how the OS has jumped from 2.x, or ‘Gingerbread’, to 4.0 ‘ICS’. For anyone running an Android tablet device this is much clearer as they have been used to OS 3.x ‘Honeycomb’ for about 12 months now. Basically Google have always run separate mobile handset and tablet OS’s as they have always been different entities. And this has been done quite rightly, as with a few exceptions like Samsung, there have actually been very different manufacturers for both. Acer, Dell, Archos etc have all been prolific tablet creators as these devices were seen as a new form of laptop – their playingfield – rather than large phones. But Android has now bought together the best bits of Gingerbread and Honeycomb for a unified handset and tablet OS. In Google’s own words they want this new OS to “Enchant me, Simplify My Life, and Make Me Awesome”.

And jolly tasty it is too! ICS brings a whole host of nifty new features to market including…

Multitasking - makes a woman of a man. Great! (via Techradar.com)

Multitasking: having different apps open at the same time and being able to slide between them.

Face Unlock: turn your device on, smile at the camera and it unlocks.

Notifications: these are displayed either along the control bar at the bottom of the screen or from a pull-down at the top.

Camera updates: Zero lag time, filters and a panorama stitching programme.

Android Beam: a really useful one this, with Near Field Communication tech you can share contacts, pictures, URLs etc.

Google+ integration:  this is now built into every aspect of the OS so you can share, hangout and discuss anything.

Voice Typing: this voice command system allows you to dicate emails, open apps etc.

Too ugly. Denied! (via BBC/Getty)

So, the initial outlook is good and incredibly useful. The Face Unlock, Multitasking and Beam features are probably the kind of additions that will sway those deciding between an iPhone and Android device and are items that will almost certainly make their way, either through app form or iOS updates, to Apple product in the coming year. However, there are still some shortcomings which will need to be improved pronto if Google want an even bigger share of the smartphone market. The Voice Typing is nowhere near as good as Siri – in a test this morning the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, did a direct comparison. In a quiet room he dictated the following paragraph to both Voice Typing and Siri:

It’s a challenge that has occupied scientists for decades and promised huge fortunes to anyone who could solve it. I’m talking about speech recognition, back in the news because it is one of the most significant features of Apple’s latest phone. Will it remain an amusing party-trick – or become the key way in which we communicate with computers?

So, Siri got this:

“It’s a challenge that has occupied scientists the decade and promised huge fortunes to anyone who could solve it stop I’m talking about speech recognition back in the news because it is one of the most significant features of Apples latest phone STOCK will it remain unamusing party trick or become McKee way in which we communicate with COMPUTERS?”

I would give that a 9/10 – you can clearly see what was meant to be said and there are actually only 3 wrong words and the failure to punctuate twice.

Meanwhile Voice Typing got this:

“If I started the decade and poets 14th avenue and hope It stops on Interstate recognItIon back In the news because It’s 1 of the most signIant pIctures of apples latest phone got the wIll remaIn In the musIc of the trIck or become a keyway computers.”

Ummmm… If I was feeling generous I would give this 3/10. But I’m not, so it gets 2/10. There are more incorrect words than correct and it makes absolutely no sense.

The final thing which it fails with is that for all the talk of Apple’s OS being a closed system at least it does Facebook and Twitter integration much better. I realise Google has its + service, which is great and its trying hard to push, but it still needs to accept what the MAJORITY of people are using.

So, as a verdict I would say its a very worthy competitor for the smartphone/tablet OS crown: what it lacks in some areas it excels at in others. However, I think that most people either fall into the ‘I like Apple devices’ category, the ‘I don’t like Apple devices category’ or the ‘I don’t care category’ – and while I applaud the apathetic crowd (its only a phone and a web browser, if it does those fine then what else really matters) until the haters crowd stop disliking something to like something else, and actually find a genuine original, then Android will always be a comparison.

Have a good week!

Should be released in the UK in the next few days.

Intentional Enemies

A small story that I spotted this morning was from The Next Web – it was about the launch of the 4S in Sydney (I promise this isn’t more about it) and more specifically Samsung’s interesting tactics to divert some attention. Samsung set up a pop-up shop just a few metres from the Apple store and started selling their Galaxy SII handset for on $2!! This marketing ploy was designed to undermine the Apple launch, and while queues were certainly longer for the Samsung offer, the stand will only be there for one week so I don’t think it will make much difference in the long run. Just a bit sneaky and underhanded and doesn’t really make me want to buy a Samsung. More harm than good?

Unintentional Friends

Although Samsung certainly intended to damage the launch of the iPhone 4S, Blackberry certainly didn’t intend to help it. But help it they did. We have already discussed on this blog the annoying effect of having a network fail, but in this instance it wasn’t the networks fault, it was RIM themselves that had an unexpected problem with their servers which meant that Blackberry users experienced problems with messaging and emails for 36 hours!! This has coincided perfectly with the iPhone fanfare, so it couldn’t have come at a worse time for RIM. They didn’t help themselves by being incredibly bad at communicating the  problem to users – they put out one tweet in the first 12hours and then one email 24 hours after that. Not good enough Blackberry.

Embarrassing Frenemies

Along with the Blackberry downtime happening soon after the Apple launch, it was also during the T3 awards, which lead to further embarrassment as the Blackberry Bold 9780 won the ‘Work Gadget of the Year’ award. Unfortunately you couldn’t use your award winning gadget during the ceremony because your service was down!

Another winner from the night was Samsung (they must have felt pleased) with the ‘Phone of the Year’ award! Well done to them with their Galaxy SII phone, launched less than 6 months ago, which beat the iPhone 4, launched 18 months ago. A great victory!

Honestly, I’m not an iFanboy, I just think Samsung have had some hollow victories this week. When Apple do something crap I am the first to shout about it!

Have a great week folks!

With the sad passing of Steve Jobs yesterday I don’t think there is a lot any of us here at Twenty3design can add personally to the conversation, other than that we all used his companies products more than any other, found him to be one of the greatest leading lights of the 21st century and that we all greatly respected his innovation.

Instead I will leave you with what I think are some of the bet blogs, videos and stories written and posted after his death.

Stephen Fry on his acquaintance. Especially love his definition of genius.

Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech.

Jonathan Mak’s wonderful Apple symbol tribute.

And finally the simple and stylish tribute on the Apple homepage. Just how Steve would have wanted it.

It has been a fantastic working with the team at Lattitude, designing and developing their new site, so it was with enormous pride that they have just been told that the website has been listed in thebestwebguide.co.uk as a ‘Best Site For Planning a Gap Year’.

A GREAT site... and not just because they listed one of ours!

So well done to everyone at Lattitude and I think all of us at T3d Towers might even celebrate with a glass of beer/wine/pina colada (T3d workers delete as applicable).

Now don’t get me wrong, this is nothing to do with the tweaks and changes they have done recently. Love them or hate them you will probably soon forget them within a few months. Thats the way FB has always been and I kind of applaud them for it. Its their website and they will change it however best serves the most “customers” (more on the quotation marks later) and whenever they make a change to the UI there is a few weeks of people complaining and then everyone deals with it.

Its not even the issue of having your information and your “Likes” sold as an advertisers commodity. To be honest, its a free site with revenue coming from advertising – not irritating, pop-up, unavoidable advertising but ignorable button ads at the side of the page. If Farmville, Google or Aviva want to pay Facebook millions of dollars to find out I like playing games, surfing the internet and driving my car so that they can place an ad at the side of my FB page – which I completely ignore – then I am absolutely fine with it (I even had to check my FB page to see who the hell was advertising there!!).

He is our new King. Bow before him (via whistlernews.blogspot.com)

No, my issue, and many other people’s, is that too many companies are tying up with FB so that they are inextricably linked. There are already a multitude of apps, photo-sharing sites and games that require you to sign into them through your FB login but the latest – and some would argue the largest – of these has jut been announced at F8: Spotify. Now I am a huge Spotify fan and use it a quite a bit (not enough to get angered by their 10 hr/per month limit imposed a few weeks back) to listen to my own music collection as well as discovering new bands, songs and playlists. Unfortunately Daniel Eck, one of the founders of Spotify, announced this week that new customers would HAVE to have a Facebook account to join up. I appreciate that the ven diagram of FB users and Spotify users is probably a single circle, but its the idea that to use one service you have to be a member of a completely different service. AND that those services will not only share information but AUTOMATICALLY post your listening preferences. You listen to a bit of Shania Twain and all of a sudden all your friends will know. I’m not saying I listen to anything I am particularly ashamed of, this isn’t the equivalent of having your search history posted, its just not something I wanted, or apparently many FB/Spotify users wanted, especially without asking our express consent!

Going back to the “customer” comment before, its an old cliché but when it comes to web use that doesn’t stop it being true: if you’re not paying for it then you are the product not the customer. And that means when you agree to use a service, or services, then they can chop, change and generally share whatever they like.

So does that mean that the backlash has begun? Will we start to see the turning of the tide? Will next year show the first decline in facebook users? No. Of course not. We will get angry and we will stomp our feet and we will write articles and blogs about how much we dislike it. Some might even go as far as leaving FB altogether. But most wont. Most people will kind of forget about it and deal with it and get on with enjoying the services provided. I’m just starting, and starting is the optimum word there, just starting to get a little worried as to how far they can and will go. A future run by facebook where every company is tied into your profile, likes and interets. Will that be better than what we have? Will we benefit from it? I don’t know.

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The Big Apple

Property of Apple (via Nasa)

So it emerged that Apple has more money than the US government. To be honest, they are $14 TRILLION in debt, so most homeless people have more money than the US. But this was actually about liquid cash and in that case, having more than the US is a big deal. They are joining the likes of the worlds largest oil companies and Google and… well thats about it. That does indeed make them pretty large. The next story will lift their well-financed spirits even further:

No longer using an HP to write

Anyone wanna buy a failing American technology giant?

HP, in what they are calling a “radical change of direction“, and what everyone else is calling “a horrifying realisation”, have discontinued their ipad “rivalling” Touchpad and said they are moving out of personal computing and into software and services. This comes less than a year after they bought Palm to use its WebOS for their tablets and only 2 months after launching the Touchpad. With the news of its discontinuation many retails dropped its price from £399 to a little as £89!! This caused it to be, very briefly, the most popular gadget on sale in the UK. To try and bolster its new credential as a software and service supplier HP have bought the UK software giant Autonomy for £7bn. I can only pose the question: have HP gone mental? I mean, its great for Autonomy, but HP spent 15% of its value on a company that produces 1%. Maybe HP should have picked a bit more wisely:

Googlerola

And finally there was the news that Google have bought Motorola Mobility, the mobile phone and video arm of Motorola, for $12.5bn. This looks to be a pretty shrewd move as they are getting quite a lot for their money. Firstly they obviously get all the patents and technology associated with one of the worlds largest mobile phone producers, and secondly they now get a finger in the pie of “home devices and video solutions technology” (which sounds much dirtier than it is) – an area they were already make huge headways into through Chrome laptops and Gmail calls. And all this for a quarter of their liquid cash.

As I said at the start, big money news but will anyone really be able to tell the difference? Apart from those who grabbed themselves a cheap (and shortly to be obsolete) tablet, I suspect not.

Have a great week.