Versatile Amphibian

I’m of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week: social media ads are bunkum, most efficient computer makes (deliberate) mistakes, Thai schools get 400,000 tablets & how our fear of death affects our decision making Digital media An amazing 18% of smart phone users say they use a geo-social service to login to a location. Women use them more than men, and people on low incomes are more likely to use them than those earning over $75,000 a year. Sadly, the survey doesn’t seem to talk about frequency of use, which is a shame. http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2012/PIP_Location_based_services_2012_Report.pdf US social media advertising to increase at 21% CAGR to 2016, meaning it’ll be $9.6Bn in that year. That’ll be why Facebook’s IPO was such a bust. http://www.biakelsey.com/Co...

Following the recent announcements that Huawei, ZTE, Fujitsu and Panasonic would (re)enter the European mobile handset markets, I spent Day 1 of the Mobile World Congress focussing on high end smartphones. My objective was to decide whether these newcomers could genuinely challenge today’s hegemony of Apple, Samsung and HTC. The answer was a clear “yes”, but the most obvious challenger was more of a surprise. I’ll give you a hint – they weren’t Japanese... Symbian is not dead, just stunned Before I could get started on this, however, there was the small matter of an 830am Nokia keynote to get out of the way. You may recall that this time last year, Stephen Elop announced his firm’s “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft. This year, despite being promised “significant industry news”, Nokia delivered more of the same. At the high end there were two new devices, the anticipated Lumia 900 and a new camera phone – the N808, featuring a 41 megapixel camera... no, that’s not a typo, it really...