Before I went on holiday his summer I sent a message to Twitter and Facebook asking if anyone would recommend some good holiday reading. May of the people I am connected to me only know me through Twitter so I was interested to see what happened. I was surprised at how many incredibly good suggestions I got back, many from people who don’t know my reading habits.

19 people suggested 54 books of which I had read and enjoyed about half.

Of the remaining suggestions, I removed the odd business book – this was a vacation about family, wine, cheese and relaxing.

I bought about 10 of the reamining ones, fairly at random, from Amazon and ended up with some great reading that I would probably have never picked for myself.

Special thanks in no particular order to Andrew, Neil, Jane, Matt, Jo, Kathy for suggesting books I hadn’t read, did and really enjoyed.

I was surprised just how much I enjoyed recommendations and will definitely repeat the experiment next time. I recommend you do too.

Some of the highlights of my holiday reading:

<A HREF=”http://ws.amazon.co.uk/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=GB&ID=V20070822%2FGB%2Ftb0e-21%2F8001%2Ffb1c4b5e-171b-4ecb-8e4f-c5383e42cd05&Operation=NoScript” mce_HREF=”http://ws.amazon.co.uk/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=GB&ID=V20070822%2FGB%2Ftb0e-21%2F8001%2Ffb1c4b5e-171b-4ecb-8e4f-c5383e42cd05&Operation=NoScript”>Amazon.co.uk Widgets</A>

Print media has reached an historic but critical evolutionary point. Print businesses are severely pressured. Declining subscription and advertising revenues are becoming the norm across the industry. The growth of user-generated content, citizen-journalism, blogs, Twitter and the real-time web have all been responsible for forcing changes on the industry. While print media is under sustained attack from the web, some of the most popular web-based news sites only make a small fraction of their revenue from the web making any possible transition painful and complex.

• Can print media cross the Rubicon that it has now reached? How?
• Will Rupert Murdoch’s recent announcement that News International will charge for web content come to be viewed as a turning point or a Canutian gesture?
• How can the print media industry lever core strengths to build a sustainable and profitable future?

BLN discussion dinners draw key participants in business ecosystems – incumbents, investors and growing entrepreneurial enterprises – together to meet and discuss important and pressing issues about the future of their industry.

Confirmed attendees from the publishing world include CEO/MD/CxO level from Associated Newspapers, Bauer Publishing, Magicalia, Newsquest, Telegraph Media Group and UBM as well as some of the emerging entrepreneurial companies in the sector.

BLN events are framed by industry analysts but draw on the experiences and knowledge of participants to help understand the strategies they need to consider in planning for the future. They are designed to be thought-provoking, participatory, relevant and enjoyable.

If you believe that the print media has a secure and stable future in which no action is required to maintain sustainable and profitable businesses, there will be little of interest for you in this discussion. If you wish to understand some of the challenges and opportunities in a fast-evolving industry, and some of the strategies for future growth, we hope you may be able to participate.

We are delighted to be partnering with BDO Stoy Hayward, Merrill Lynch and Farrer & Co on this important discussion.

If you would like an invitation to participate, please contact us directly at: info@TheBLN.com

Interested that the Gartner hype cycle for Emerging Technologies, shows Speech Recognition is coming out of the slope of enlightenment and moving towards mainstream adoption, albeit in 5-10 years. Speech recognition seems to be a technology that is perpetually less than five years away from being adopted as mainstream and still has a long way to go.

Speech Recognition technologies are hard enough to work in call centre applications where callers are asked to provide very specific information – my experience calling credit card company lines is that they seem to have enormous difficulties even recognising the numbers 0-9 although this might just be that I have an inpenetrable accent or something. This seems to be where they can have the most immediate impact however.

Using technology to recognise and interpret more complex information however is another matter entirely as the recent Spinvox debacle demonstrates.

Possibly the technology industries worst kept secret – Spinvox uses people to transcribe lots of the messages that it transcribes from voice-to-text. No great surprise although the extent to which their investors have been led to believe that this was a technology vs people-powered solutions seems to be a case for speculation. Still, any investor putting money (and £120 million of cash registers on any VC radar), would surely have done some proper due diligence wouldn’t they…?

Related articles by Zemanta

• James Whatley said to have quit SpinVox (inquisitr.com)
• It’s Media Day At SpinVox (paidcontent.org)
• Spinvox phone message translation service facing privacy questions (telegraph.co.uk)

Interesting to see the latest Gartner hype cycle chart for emerging technologies was published whilst I was on holiday. Sold as a sort of IT Manager’s Guide to emerging technology, it is an interesting read, although at $ 2,000 it should be. The link to buy the full publication is here.

Noteworthy to see that according to Gartner, Microblogging, Cloud Computing and Green IT are just about to drop into the ‘Trough of Dissolusionment’ on the chart. They are very different beasts.

Microblogging and Cloud Computing strike me as being very different issues for the typical IT department. Cloud computing has probably established itself as of general importance across an organisation, microblogging is probably viewed generally as a distraction amongst the majority of IT departments that I come into contact with. No great surprise that Twitter and the social media family will be put under increased scrutiny in corporate life in most organisations but cloud computing seems to cover a wide range of functions, many of which can be usefully considered as being non-core to an organisation’s cost base and competitiveness. While it has been overhyped by some, I expect Cloud Computing to cross the trough more easily than the social media technologies at first.

As well as the usual high quality mix of entrepreneurs and executives that you would expect to find at a BLN event, we have included some of the most interesting rising stars in the region, none of whom can be accused of thinking small… We hope you will find their views and ambition refreshing.

The BLN events bring entrepreneurs doing interesting things together to share thoughts, meet peers, investors and a few corporates in a relaxed, informal atmosphere. Events are run across the UK with further discussion dinners in London, Oxford, Edinburgh and Bristol over the coming months.

This event is being run with the kind support of BDO Stoy Hayward, Taylor Wessing and Gill Jennings & Every.

We expect approximately 12-16 companies to be present at the event, along with 5-6 active investors. Previous attendees at Cambridge events include CEOs, founders, recycling entrepreneurs or board members from ARM, IP.Access, Biowisdom, True Knowledge, Arakis, Serentis, RedGate, Ubisense, Plastic Logic, Abcam, Nujira, Bango, Alphamosaic, Pursuit Dynamics, alongside up and comers.

There are many opportunities to attend networking events but we like to think that The BLN events are both high quality and a little different.

Places are limited so a prompt response is necessary to be considered for a place.

While I am off on vacation –  a guest blogger.

Today’s view is on Open Source business models for Hardware comes from Jeremy Bennett.

Open source is well established as a business model in the software world. Red Hat is now approaching the old market capitalization of Sun Microsystems preacquisition, while IBM, the worlds largest patent holder, makes more money from open source than other software (source: BBC Radio 4 “In Business”). Major tools such as the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server and the Eclipse IDE are all open source.

But open source is more than just a business model. It is a change to the underlying approach to business. Open source software is “free” in the sense of “freedom”-as a customer you have the source code and you are “free” to do with that software as you wish, just so long as you pass on that freedom to others.

A consequence of that “freedom” is that open source software is usually also free in the sense of “not paying”. A supplier can, if they choose, charge for their open source software-but their customers are free to pass on that software for no charge. When Red Hat started to charge for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS Linux started to redistribute RHEL free of charge, recompiled with any Red Hat proprietary material removed.

Open source works as a business model, because the marginal cost of distributing software is effectively zero. While users will typically pay nothing for the product, they stimulate a market, within which revenue can be generated. For a web-based application the revenue may come from traffic based advertising. With a software tool, revenue comes from the 1% of customers who need services based around the tool. For any area where there is high volume, the business model is a winner.

As a consequence, open source software development is a service rather than a product business. Business is more consultative, and revenue grows incrementally as the software becomes more popular. Fewer dot.com millionaires, but a relatively stable income for the professional programmer.

Now here’s a novel idea. What about open source for hardware? At first sight this seems a non-starter. Open source relies on the nil marginal cost of software distribution, but hardware has to be manufactured.

But a modern silicon chip is typically built from silicon “intellectual property” (IP), written in a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL. Fabless design houses may never produce a chip themselves-one of the largest and best known is ARM in Cambridge, whose processor IP is built by other companies into one billion chips ever month. That IP costs the same amount to produce, whether it goes into one chip or one billion.

The marginal revenue from this silicon IP is tiny. It is an urban myth that the company supplying the cellophane film covering a mobile phone’s screen earns more than ARM from each phone, but the myth contains a grain of truth. ARM, as market leader, makes pennies from each phone. Smaller players make far less, or even receive just a one off payment. For them the marginal revenue really is nil.

The other factor is that the cost of any modern hardware is dominated not by the cost of the chip, but by the cost of the software that will run on that chip. In a modern product, there is far more value in the software than the hardware, and that software will need regular updating to keep the product viable.

This gives the recipe for open source hardware to work, at least for silicon IP. A marginal cost of nil and an associated product (the software services) whose value is pulled through by volume.

• Give away your silicon IP and software and make your money from servicing the software.

There is already a considerable amount of open source silicon IP, and hardware design companies such as ORSoC AB in Sweden and Beyond Semi in Romania who work with such IP. However a first glimmer of the complete approach can be seen with Google’s Android open source operating system for mobile phones. Google aren’t giving away the hardware (yet), but put Android together with the OpenMoko open source phone and you have the complete story.

There is a fly in the ointment-the legal position. Open source software relies on licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) to enforce the “freedom” rules. These in turn are based on copyright law, which has for a long time been held to apply to software and its publication. Most open source hardware projects to date have used the GPL or similar contracts, even though it is explicitly not suitable for hardware use.

Although silicon IP is written in a description language, its results are typically disseminated through manufacture, not publication. This is governed legally by patent law, and unlike copyright, patents cost time and money to obtain. There have been some efforts to write an open source license that would work for hardware, most notably the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) Open Hardware License, but this is still a long way from the maturity of the GPL.

I have recently started discussions with the National Microelectronics Institute (NMI), the trade body for the UK electronics industry, exploring the possibility of a definitive open hardware license that is robust in English law. We have a candidate first project, developed in the Cambridge University Computer Lab by Marcelo Pias. The initial goal is to establish the UK as a location where open source hardware businesses can proceed on a reliable legal footing, and then in a wider context internationally. If you would like to help, please get in touch. In particular we’d like an academic lawyer versed in this area of the law to get involved.

I believe open source hardware will have an important role in the computer industry in the future, just as open source software has an important role today. I hope my efforts will contribute to that success.

Dr Jeremy Bennett is Chief Executive of Embecosm Limited.

http://www.embecosm.com Embecosm provides open source services, tools and models to facilitate embedded software development with complex systems-on-chip. He is an active contributor to the OpenCores project.

Contact him at jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com

Apple reports second quarter 2009 earnings tomorrow and results are likely to show just how much of a racket the investment research industry still is despite all of the much trumpeted changes in the way that Wall Street and London’s littler version, ‘The City‘ mean very little in reality.

Reminds me of something…

June guidance for analysts was $0.98 EPS on $7.8 billion of sales. Consensus from analysts stands at $1.16 EPS on $8.18 billlion sales which I think just seems to show that very little has changed in the world of financial analysis. Not because the consensus is so much higher than the guidance, but that both of these numbers seem to represent yet another in a series of carefully understated sets of numbers that a stock market darling can use to WOW the market and thus stimulate trading activity in a stock favoured by institutional and retail investors alike.

It used to be that analysts always rated companies as ‘Buys’. (In March 2001, according to Thomson Financial/First Call, Buy notes outnumbered Sell notes by 92-1 Ref). It seems that whilst that particularly incredible and blunt instrument has gone away, there are other ways of using analysts to get people to trade is in shares.

So what is so bad about analyst expectations being a bit higher than Apple’s guidance in this case? Are analysts trying to talk the comany up? Actually there seems to be a little bit of reverse psychology going on here. Very few people ‘in the know’ expect Apple to hit their guidelines. Very few expect them to meet the anaylst forecasts. Far from missing the numbers by going too low though, Apple has to beat both sets of numbers to continue to spread good news and keep people excited about the stock.

This chart from Silicon Alley Insider shows the reality of an overperforming stock on Wall Street.

Either these BRILLIANT analysts, who get paid reasonably well to to do one thing – analyse stocks – are still playing games to support trading in popular shares, or they are really crap at their jobs?

As this chart shows, since December 2006, Apple’s EPS has topped guidance by an average of 39%. Revenue has been topped by 7% on average. Makes you wonder why although a stock that consistently outperforms the market expectations cannot be bad for trading volume in today’s world.

This highly scientific analysis suggests that EPS will be$1.36 with $8.35 billion revenue.

Please sir, can I have a nice bonus if this is right?  Can I be sacked with a pay off if I am wrong?

IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: I have an iPhone and apart from the tragic battery life, I really love it – especially now I have the new software that allows me to cut and paste and other basic functions.