Recently in Technology Category

Against the shiny, glowing iPad, the latest iteration of the Amazon Kindle is not much to look at. But the price, look at the price. $140 for the basic model. The device is now within spitting distance of where it needs to become a near-disposable piece of electronics hardware, much like a digital watch or a pocket calculator.

Criticisms of the Kindle tend to revolve around the idea that it’s no iPad. But Amazon doesn’t need it to be an iPad. The Kindle app runs happily enough on iOS, so why compete head-on. The Kindle is all about increasing the number of people who can buy ebooks from Amazon’s store. At $140 or so, the Kindle is still a bit on the high side.

But the Kindle is now only a couple of years away from the price point where people can view it as an impulse purchase. Almost five years ago, I reckoned $50 was the point ebook readers need to reach for them to displace conventional books – at least those that people don’t really want to show off on shelves. But anything south of $100 is getting close to good enough.

It’s at that point you can stick them in airport shops. You can offer three preloaded bonkbusters and expect holidaymakers to pick one up, knowing that it will last all holiday and be a lot lighter than packing a bunch of thick paperbacks.

Once below a shop price of $100, the opportunities grow for personalising Kindles or lookalikes – for that kind of price, the bill of materials is so low and the volume economics large enough for manufacturers to consider doing special, branded editions. And Amazon can consider licensing the design to other manufacturers to do designer versions that will sell for more than the base device but which don’t carry much extra manufacturing cost.

I honestly can’t see publishers getting into that, other than an operation such as Penguin, which can use its old orange and white styling to good effect on the case of a Kindlealike. But, as with netbooks, it’s not a big leap of imagination to see some design houses deciding to take the core unit and wrap their own styled case around it.

Two ex-Nokia executives have given their verdict on what ails the Finnish phone maker in its failure to make any headway not only in the US market but against the onslaught from Apple and the clones the iPhone has spawned.

Juhani Risku’s analysis has only been published in full in Finnish so far but The Register’s Andrew Orlowski has boiled down three hours of interviews on the contents of Uusi Nokia to get a flavour of what’s wrong in Helsinki. Risku’s analysis concentrates firmly on the problems within - and you get a strong sense that if you changed the names, you’d get a good insight of the sorry mess that Microsoft and other companies have worked themselves into. The stories are not all that different from those you find published by Mini-Microsoft.

Tomi Ahonen’s analysis is probably easier on you if you work at Nokia. Because, basically, it’s all Apple’s fault. And Apple’s band of tame analysts who have turned the financial community against poor old Nokia.

However, anyone who describes the N93 as a ‘superphone’ has to be a bit deluded. I used to use one. It was a perfectly good phone. But, frankly, saddled with Symbian with S60 layered on top, it was a usability nightmare. Yes, you could surf the web with it, send emails and download applications. But it was all so much trouble. The iPhone environment may be more restrictive and lack the proper multitasking of Symbian - but that didn’t matter when I found the iPhone to have simply better utility.

What Ahonen does do well is at least point out that while Nokia may have lost its image as a top phone maker, it’s still making a shedload of them and should outsell Apple by a large margin for some time to come even if it doesn’t get its house in order. But, like Microsoft, the indicators are currently pointing down. Turning that juggernaught around is going to be just as difficult. Maybe it’s time for the recipe that Sony used for the Playstation - create an internal startup to think the unthinkable. Or at least do that until the corporate bureaucracy does its best to kill it off.

Earlier in the decade, the Royal Society led a nanotechnology programme that was meant to settle nerves about Prince Charles’s fear of a grey-goo planet. People held the programme up as an example of how to deal with public fears of technology gone bad and is largely responsible for the path that various bodies are taking with fields such as synthetic biology.

You basically can’t get a project funding without some ethical component in synthetic biology on the basis that the Royal Society demonstrated that obvious public engagement, and lots of it, can’t go wrong.

Apparently, nobody told the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) that the Royal Society had successfully despatched concerns over the safety of nanotechnology in general. (However, I confess that I’ve been muttering darkly that the nanotechnology scare didn’t get killed off, it just went quiet for a while.) The strategy launched today by BIS should come sheathed in a high-vis jacket and plastered with signs about being careful not to slip up on its shiny surface.

It took a couple of hours for the report to appear. The BIS website took a sudden dislike to the content and decided to deliver a Fatal Error instead instead of a web page and download link. Maybe the document didn’t pass the web-safety test until it received another final going-over with the danger detector.

Open up the strategy — which could be the shortest-lived technology strategy ever if the polls are correct — and you find it uses pretty much the same approach as previous technological initiatives from BIS and its predecessors. Namely, set up a leadership council, encourage some communication between academia and industry — which the various Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) are already doing — and report back in a couple of years to see how it’s going.

However, ladled on top of that is 'elf and safety and lots of it. The strategy document calls on the Nanotechnology Research Strategy Group to set up no less than three task forces to focus on safety, with a fourth to concentrate on “social and economic dimensions” — you guessed it, more public engagement. A fifth will work out how to spot stray nanomaterials in the wild.

Part of the problem is the way that nanotechnology as it exists today has become a catch-all phrase for modern chemicals. Although so-called nanomaterials take advantage of advances in chemistry and, in some cases, biotech, they are simply chemicals and materials — just with a greater focus on the intermolecular structure as that has a key influence on their chemical properties. If the government expects to be able to get to the end of this programme (assuming the electorate allows it to begin) with a declaration of “nanotech safety in our time”, then the ministers and civil servants involved are fooling themselves. Each one is different; just like your regular chemicals.