This week, I spent a day exhibiting at Insight 2006 as part of the ICG together with 10 fellow Indendent Consultants.
The day was a great personal success thanks to a steady stream of former colleagues and interesting new contacts stopping at our attractive and vibrant stand (thanks Janet!).
As well as the stands, there were some talks and it is refreshing to see some scepticism about the role of neuroscience in market research. What a relief that we’ll still be asking questions and analysing answers rather than inserting probes.
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Who would be an academic? Here is Jonathan Wolff head of philosophy at UCL writing in the Guardian:
Indeed, we academics live by repeating ourselves. I’ve often thought that the true sign of genuine academic vocation is to be equally delighted delivering the same ideas the hundredth time as the first, with the same twinkle in the eye and chuckle in the voice. We are also all too used to being bored: one scholar told me that sometimes he couldn’t read the medieval Spanish texts he was spending his days with because the tears of boredom distorted his vision.
Repetition and boredom, then, are our trademark. Excellent. I shall go out and tell everyone I know. Many times.
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I’ve already written about how mobile phone technology can help deliver education and economic opportunties to the world’s poor.
That admirable institution the MIT has a Program for research on mobiles that is focussing on Africa. Why? There are lots of practical examples here and:
Over the past five years the continent’s mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65 percent…in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million [in Kenya], despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity…Kenya’s small business sector, which employs the majority of workers in the nation, created approximately 437,900 new jobs last year. The boom of mobile phones in Kenya has been credited for much of this growth.
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Scientific publisher Wiley is to buy Blackwell Publishing in a deal that will enable the combined organisation to invest more in electronic services and capabilities.
Key competitor Elsevier meanwhile has announced that revenues and margins are strong.
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Microsoft’s challenger to the iPod has just gone on sale in the US and despite some favourable reviews like this (dull) one, it’s mostly taking a panning like here and here that betray a rush to market.
Top of the list of criticism for me is the continued restriction on use of media files. It only allows a shared file to be played for 3 days before it gets switched off and files can only be shared between Zune devices.
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Here is a comprehensive review of research that exists on the UK scholarly journals publishing market, including some of our own survey findings in the public domain. As well as providing information on the shape of the UK market, it also identifies large gaps in current understanding.
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Web-users often get frustrated with websites that take a long time to load. My personal bubear is poor Flash graphics before allowing to find what you are looking for.
For online shoppers, the cut-off is apparently just 4 seconds before they decide to abandon the site. And they are getting more impatient: that’s half the time that they were willing to wait a year ago.
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Here’s a nice looking search engine with nice filtering and lots of sources from Reed Business that is aimed at people searching for business information.
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