I take a look ahead at who will rise and who will fall over the next 12 months.

The Biggest Winners & Losers In 2012

We take a look at the 10 biggest tech stories of 2011 and round-up the rest in what proved a year of shocks.

The Biggest Tech Stories of 2011 & Why

The festive season is a minefield of ageing and immature products. I tell you what you should avoid and what will prove a sound investment.

The Gadgets NOT to Buy This Christmas – Tablets

In an experiment for TrustedReviews I find out if music streaming services are ready for the big time… find an extract below.

Spotify Can Replace Your iPod.

The evolution of WiFi has been frustratingly slow, but a white knight is now on the horizon. My latest feature for TrustedReviews investigates ‘WiGig’, a stunning new standard which could stretch bandwidth to 7Gbit. A sample is below and – as ever – if you enjoy what you read… READ ON

After a wonderful holiday in Malta, I came home to find Bright Publishing  has sent me scans of my 3D HDTV Supertest for Verve along with permission to publish them on my blog. Usually you can only read Verve travelling business class and above on the Eurostar or the UK’s main airports, so this is a generous gesture and allows me to illustrate the style with which this new and exclusive magazine has been put together.

My scans are below, clicking on them will bring up full size images which makes the text readable. Feedback appreciated as always.

Opening paragraphs reprinted with permission by TrustedReviews. If you wish to read my full feature you’ll find it here.

Are Apple’s New iPods A Deliberate Botch Job?

On Tuesday Steve Jobs announced the next generation of iPods, a new shuffle, nano and iPod touch. Widespread predictions were largely spot on and brought the usual reaction of excitement fused with modest frustration and a general agreement that Apple’s infamous marketing hyperbole remains as strong as ever, despite the iPhone 4 antenna climb down. Since Tuesday, however, I’ve been hit with a nagging sense of irritation which you may or may not share: is everything Apple announced that day a botch job?

Certainly I don’t expect everyone to agree with this viewpoint and it would be a boring world if you all did. In fact our very own Andy Vandervell describes them as “pretty tantalising” and Hugo will mount a spirited defence of iTunes’ Ping on Monday so I’ve a fight on my hands. Then again, let’s see if you can follow my logic because Apple frequently receives a great deal of adulation and this time I’m not entirely convinced it’s deserved…

Read on

Even the word sounds boring: printing.

Yes our world may not be the paperless environment we were led to believe it would be by now, but certainly the printing industry is feeling the squeeze of Cloud computing and ever more mobile devices. Even wave after wave of company email signatures warn against environmental impacts of printing.

So how will printing survive? Should it survive? I spoke to Brother UK marketing and sales director Phil Jones who not only had an answer, but also a genuinely exciting vision for the printing industry as a whole. ‘Exciting’? Printers?! Just watch…

Originally published on the TalkTalkBlog. Reprinted with permission from TalkTalk.

Tablets are the talk of the technology sector, a seemingly exciting middle ground between smartphone and laptop. Apple, Dell, Toshiba, HP and Asus have all committed to the form factor and it is expected to challenge netbooks as the new must-have product of 2010. So with wave after wave of tablet marketing hype set to hit us between now and Christmas the big question is: should you buy one?

The Weight of History

I’d love to give you a one word answer, but the question is more complicated than that. Why? Because until recently the tablet was a largely abandoned idea, a product type which had clocked up failure after failure. Most famously Apple had tried with the Newton in 1998 and Microsoft was foiled in 2006 with the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC). In fact the closest any practical form of ‘tablet’ has come to success is as a laptop hybrid where their lids are modified to swivel 180 degrees and be folded back onto the keyboard screen size up. TheThinkPad X Series has long offered this, but its appeal is decidedly niche. The pure form of tablet was dismissed long ago as ‘cool but impractical’ and that was that.

The iPad

So what changed? Apple changed. After years of speculation the company finally announced itsNewton avenger in January, the ‘iPad’. For all intents and purposes it is little more than a 10in iPod touch with extra power and it was ridiculed by everyone from the technology press to mainstream comedians. The iPad even got its own Downfall parody. One group wasn’t laughing, however: PC makers.

What they realised was Apple had managed to capitalise on the ease of use intrinsic to the iPod touch and iPhone and bring it to a sector capable of competing with cheap laptops. Never before had basic entry level computing (email, web browsing, media consumption) been made so simple and accessible to the general public at truly affordable prices. Forget having to learn Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, the iPad can be used by a two year old. PC makers realised if consumers around the world bite then Apple will have made the Nintendo Wii of computers.

The Reponse

The response from Apple’s rivals has been fierce. They are making tablets which capitalise on what the iPad lacks: a web camera, industry standard connections like USB and HDMI, expandable storage and multi-tasking (a major omission which will be addressed by the much publicised iPhone OS 4.0 software update due later this year). Billions of dollars are being poured into a market which just a few months ago barely existed, but the bigger question is: Should it?

The Pros and Cons

For all intents and purposes, no. The primary reasons tablets failed so many times in the past are still painfully present. In fact they always will be. Most obvious is a tablet requires two hands to hold securely yet two hands to operate effectively and it cannot stand up on its own. Oh dear. Furthermore, while tablets are smaller than laptops and slightly lighter than netbooks, they can’t be carried in a pocket so require an additional bag anyway. As a form factor it actually appears to fall short of the convenience of smartphones and the practicality of netbooks. Argument over.

Or is it? You see the appeal of tablets goes beyond logic because they appeal to our inner child. They tie into that futuristic vision of a single sheet of glass delivering all the information and services we could ever need. As children we didn’t dream about bulky desktop computers or laptops with their physical keyboards, we dreamt about tablets. Captain James T Kirk would never be seen holding a imaginary laptop on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, he swiped at mocked up plastic tablets before passing them off dismissively to a subordinate nearby. Of course had to pass them off, tablets are unwieldy and impractical!

That said the failure of past tablets has just been their impractical form factor, but equally because they failed to live up to our futuristic visions for them. With modern technology and – most importantly – modern finger friendly interfaces, they now can.

The Bottom Line

I started out writing this post in order to tell you whether you should or shouldn’t buy a tablet, but I’ve come to realise this is an impossible task. I’m a professional technology journalist, a critic, an analyst who looks at things logically and weighs up the pros and cons. I’d argue tablets are pointless, ridiculous creations worthy of every parody thrown at them and you’d be better off sticking to a smartphone and a netbook or laptop. Yet the appeal of owning a tablet isn’t formed from such considered roots. For those feeling the innate urge to buy a tablet, whatever I say won’t stop you, it has been hardwired into your DNA for years now. For those who are flummoxed by them, I can understand why.

The bottom line is tablets are coming yet again and they will divide consumer opinion like never before. As for me, I’m sticking with my laptop until everything becomes holographic.

I should have posted this a lot earlier: an interview I conducted with RunMarketing in November last year.

Contacting journalists can be a daunting prospect if you’re new to approaching the media. However, building up strong relationships with the media is critical to overall marketing success and is a must for any business. To help understand how small businesses and start-ups can best approach the media, RunMarketing spoke to freelance journalist and blogger Gordon Kelly.

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For more on writing press releases and pitching to media, visit RunMarketing’s Resources page.