My blackberry is not working

For anyone that missed it, here’s the Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield sketch from the Christmas special about problems with technology. If you’ve already seen it, it bears repeating – especially for the final gag. It’s fork handles for the iGeneration.

The future of mobile phones

We’ve just uploaded a Special Report (note grandiose use of Title Case, it’s that good) on the future of mobile phones, featuring fantastic forecasts from famed futurologist Jonathan Mitchener. Plus this cool period photo of Captain James T Kirk looking snappy in mustard polyester. Check it out!

"When will I finally be allowed to make another record?"

Jobs’ ‘Star Trek’ videocall gaffe

‘iPhone brings Star Trek to the modern world’ claims the Times story headline:

Apple has placed video calling at the centre of its new iPhone, [a feature that] that got the 5,000 crowd at the Worldwide Developers Conference most excited. Steve Jobs, founder and chief executive of Apple, introduced the new service to whoops of delight when he called to Jony Ive, the company’s British-born designer. “I grew up with The Jetsons and Star Trek, just dreaming about video calling. Now it’s real,” Mr Jobs said.

However, as any Trekkie know, the handheld devices features in the cult sci-fic series were not actually videocall-capable, as better-informed people at Trekmovie.com make clear, but it did show a kind of desktop videocalling system. And the same applies to The Jetsons:

Tweeting: ‘blogging for morons’?

So, farewell then Social Media World Forum Europe The World The Universe 2010, and roll-on next year’s event. Conference programme presentations in 2011 that we’d like to see include:

• Keynote address 1: “Will someone please capitalise me £500k?”
  Is investing thousands in a ‘vaguely interesting idea for a website that has the potential to be quite successful’ throwing good money after bad? Not at all, argues serial entrepreneur Con O’Course.
• Keynote address 2: Tweeting: is it really just blogging for morons?
  Controversial über analyst Gunther Lünch of market-watcher DataGeist Group shares his view of the ‘bifurcation of the Socmed generation’ into so-called ‘Tweet twats and blog-telectuals’.
• Social Media Trends: the rise of ‘identity sharing’
  Many socmed adherents are finding that an entire personality is surplus to their requirements. University lecturer Professor Grant Guzzler suggests that there is no moral or ethical reason why two (or more) individuals should not share the same single personality in virtual cyber-domains.
• Monetization: the ‘Holy Grail’ of Social Media business models
  Leading commercial consultant Daniel Day-Rate revisits a subject heading that rarely fails to pack ‘em in. His conclusion: we still have some way to go toward achieving this.
• Case study: 10 steps to deriving value from the obvious
  Shirley Knott, managing director of the UK’s largest small-to-medium sized enterprise Mega Industries International, explains how her company did some fairly obvious things to making Internet technology perform some basic business processes, such as setting-up a website, and accepting online payments.

Supine tigers, gaping maws

Thomas ‘Ecademy’ Power is back, bringing a welcome voice of experience and caution to the gung-ho geekery permeating the Social Media World Forum. As enterprises gush and rush to embrace Twitter to drive core sales, Facebook to build critical customer communities, and LinkedIn to consolidate valued B2B relationships (and find key staff to recruit) how many CIOs consider the fact that all that irreplaceable data that they are basing so much sales and marketing activitiy on does not actually belong to them? It belongs to yer Twitters, Facebooks, YouTubes, LinkedIns, etc.  And as they -the socnet platforms – introduce new ways to monetize their own propositions, how long before the social network providers start to charge for the privilidge of using their services?
“What happen when FaceBook and co start talking directly to your customers, to your clients?” asks Power. “And what happens when FaceBook becomes a bank, a credit card, an online retailer – becomes a predator?” [JH]