With most of the big announcements taking place over the first two days, today was mostly a chance for hands on tests of the many funky new handsets which have been launched.

Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile phone conference kicked off yesterday in Barcelona where over 1,300 exhibitors were showcasing the latest in mobile technology.

Major announcements included:

So apparently, today has been dubbed National Sickie Day, unofficially of course. It seems that the first Monday in February is when most people phone the office with their best ‘ill’ voice.

This worth a read, news piece on The Times blog talking about the fact that PC manufacturers are trying to get a piece of the smartphone market as they are worried its eventually going to cause a shift away from people buying PC’s as they get better and better…Click Here…

Those of you who’ve been around in the Mac, consumer tech, tech industry for a while now, will of come across a chap called Mark Sparrow. Based at Future Publishing for a long time, you might be surprised to learn that Mark is no longer working as he is in hospital near Oxford, as he is in traction and has been for quite some time.

As most of you know, if you’re in the tech industry, last night was T3’s Gadget Awards…there’s been quite alot of coverage pre and post event, especially as the winner of the top prize was the HTC Hero and not the iPhone if you can imagine such a thing…! :-0

For almost half a century, TV has been the leading advertising medium in the UK. According to a report announced today on the Guardian however, this has all changed. The UK is now the first major economy to spend more on internet advertising than on TV.

Following on from a previous blog about our ailing newspaper industry, I was interested to see Google’s announcement about Fast Flip – a news website offering content from different publishers, which is presented in a similar format to a traditional magazine or newspaper, enabling readers to flip through the online pages.

Like the rest of the media and PR world we are really getting into our social networking applications and devices that enable these applications… and of course we are also starting to offer unique social media services that the PR industry is demanding…

Over the work year a number of magazines have awards, we usually attend most of them for ‘work’ reasons, nothing to do with the champagne receptions, gourmet dinners or comedy acts…

In a previous life I use to work for a really smart guy called Andrew Forbes.

Andrew has now moved to Spain for a change of scenery, but is an exceptional provider of copy writing, photography and creative direction. If you are in need of such services and you are based in the UK or indeed anywhere in mainland Europe then get in touch via his website – www.andrewforbes.com

For those that have not heard or seen Apollo surveys in the past, they provide vendors, analysts and PR representatives with a measurement of the volume of articles within the technology media.

In case you’ve missed all the news, Google Wave looks like its going to be the next topic of discussion for the rest of this year and next. Although not launched yet, it promises to be really exciting, especially if your really into your real-time collaborative communication…

It is with great sadness that we learnt this week, our friends at Personal Computer World (PCW) are no longer in employment with Incisive Media (PCW’s publisher). After 31 years, the magazine has been forced to close citing the poor state of the advertising market as the reason behind the decision to declare the title as “no longer economically viable”.

Bluetooth is set to undergo something of a renaissance this year thanks to the new faster and more reliable 3.0 standard. A conference in Tokyo in April launched the new Global Wireless Standard with the aim of providing considerably faster connection and file transfer speeds, making it ideal for wireless home entertainment. However, will people be sceptical about this apparent new dawn?

The two biggest stories from the CES show earlier this year were the LG watch phone and the Palm Pre smartphone. Whereas it appears to be all quiet on the LG front, excitement is building again for the impending launch of the latest pretender to the iPhone throne. But can it possibly live up to the expectations that proceed it?

In between the worryingly enthusiastic posts about Eurovision, Twitter was all a flurry this weekend over the launch of the Wolfram|Alpha ‘computational knowledge engine’. So what does this mean? A search engine for nerds?  Google for geeks? Well…sort of!

Its that exciting time of year again when vendors, PR’s and distributors all get drunk in one place and fall out with each other, yes you guessed it, the Macworld awards!

Louise at Macworld has sent me a list of the nominations, which you can find on their website, but I have highlighted our clients nominations:

One of our favourite sites here at Ranieri is to open up an office in the US. Makes perfect sense to me as alot of the tech news originates from the US…

If your interested in the story, check out – http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news.phtml/23593/pocket-lint-launching-in-usa.phtml

Pietro

To embargo or not to embargo…?

Funnily enough this question has been coming up alot recently, a while ago we had a press launch for a bunch of consumer tech products and our clients PR manager organised a couple of embargo’s with some tech blogs/news sites. However, before the launch actually happened the PR manager in question had left the Company, without revealing was sites that had been told what…

When ASUS first launched the EeePC in October 2007, other manufacturers laughed off the miniature laptop, believing it would never catch on.  However, one year on and the pioneering mini-notebook has been selling like the proverbial hotcakes, spawned countless competitors and has won just about every award going. The EeePC has created a whole new genre of computing, the ‘Netbook’.