The Price is Right?

Has the phase of the lowest price being the best hit its nadir? The Financial Times' piece on a well known PC manufacturer today mirrors in the technology world the slowdown in consumer spending still in the UK high street even though many retail outlets continue an up to 70% off sale, but is it a question of belt-tightening and price elasticity or is it something deeper.

Companies that are remembering their strengths are beginning to do well again. Manufacturing 'innovations' in process and supply chain to drive down to the lowest cost is not delivering the customer benefits to the consumer - and the interest from BusinessWeek in Jeff Jarvis' story about quality of service and the product from the aforementioned company is a proof of that - because it means that whilst more product can be created more cheaply, the demand isn't sustainable.

Is this the beginning of the end for the throw-away and replace society or is this simply a case of the internet starting to develop a strength of feedback to a company that deals direct and knows no other way?

Broadcast News...

I'll be at IBC in Amsterdam from 8th to 11th September if anyone else is going and is interested in talking IT/AV convergence and what the possibilities are from a future perspective.

Talk is cheep...

Convergence is really starting to shake up the traditional boundaries between IT, communications devices and the rest of the connected world. Skype and GoogleTalk's developments over the past couple of days will provide a huge surge in the interest from a consumer perspective of talking for free over the internet. As they start to consider the devices that they are using, I think we'll see an extension of the way in which work is going to be conducted away from the office. As storage gets smaller and terrabytes of information can be carried around in a pocket, information will become ever more portable or referencable - dependent on whether you have the Microsoft or Sun view of the information world - and eventually connectivity will allow for all interaction to be recordable.

The next step is to deliver automation of this type of 'experience capturing' to understand how to do business with people better and how to understand interaction with customers which will deliver new business opportunities. It will no longer just be the case that people can be connected; these connections need to be translated into meaningful and actionable business development. This is where the development of connected visual information-capture devices, merged with analytical software platforms and delivered to specialised decision-makers will make IT meaningful to the business again.

So the new paradigm in blogs...

is this?

Again, I don't tend to blog about blogs much but my tectonic theory for the blogscape is starting to show some folds in the landscape here - plates are rubbing, the start of new landscapes are forming - features such as Scoble Mount are smoothing out and the landscape is re-forming...instead of natural features of the blogscape (e.g. original bloggers commenting on anything they want without necessarily compulsion - "Hello tree, Hello bird" - defining the dialect of the blogsphere) we are now seeing more 'man-made' constructions, still equally valid as entities within the landscape being built - business blogs, open source knowledge sharing, the equivalent of the public library - but probably talking more in idiolect.

Or something.

Things are moving apace...

...in the nanotechnology space - this story is starting to sound like the realisation of a dream held for a while about the ability to cure diseases...