The usual round of email press releases dropped into the SandM mailbox this morning. One caught our attention, from the folk at PC World, which signals something we’re pretty sure is going to be one of the big IT trends for 2008.

In a tie up with 3, they’re going to be offering a free cheap laptop (or £350 off most) along with one of 3’s 3G dongle modems. You’ll need to sign up for a £35 a month data tariff for the cheap laptop, which gives you 3GB of data (with 10p/megabyte for anything over) at up to 2.8Mbps.

Ignore the free laptop (after all, PC World have a lot to get rid of, if you remember their recent results!) - it’s the 3G modem that really interests us.

It wasn’t long ago that 3G data was the province of the technophiles, using cards with complex drivers and expensive connections. Pricing models have changed dramatically in the last 6 months, as networks try to compete with WiFi - and as a new, lower cost, set of 3G chips arrived. Hardware is now cheap, and the latest USB designs self-install software as soon as they’re plugged in. Even the current tariffs are affordable - T-Mobile has just introduced a pay-as-you-go Web’n'Walk for just £4.50 a day.

That’s where things start to change.

Look at the cost of WiFi. Sit in a Starbucks and hook up to a T-Mobile WiFi connection and you’re already payig more than that (and let’s not go into the costs of BT OpenZone or The Cloud). HSDPA data is more convenient (if a little slower), and it’s now cheaper. You can use it anywhere, and with any PC. In fact, if you’ve got a recent laptop, there are reasonable odds that all you need is a SIM and you can use the built-in 3G WAN hardware.

3G data is here to stay. With higher speed HSUPA networks going online, things are going to get faster still.

My guess? The WiFi networks in places like Starbucks are going to become a loss leader. WiFi prices need to drop to compete with 3G - and we’re also going to see more deals like T-Mobile bundling WiFi with new contracts for it’s Web’n'Walk (why not for us existing subscribers?) and O2 providing free Cloud access to its iPhone users. O2’s also tweaked its data pricing to compete with the rest of the industry.

The endgame is going to be good for us users. WiFi will become free or very low cost, and 3G prices will continue to drop as operators finally start to digest the effects of data usage on the rest of their revenue in the light of voice becoming a commodity…

–Simon

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,321,783&OS=7,321,783&RS=7,321,783 and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

Minerva is part of a company called Gigatech, which claims to hold patents on “user-operated cell phones for audio/video and sensor event reporting” - and on air bags and seat belts. The company is also claiming patents for memory cards, connecting phones by USB and putting a mobile phone holder and charger on the dashboard of your car.

Minerva/Gigatech claims that CEO John Kim was 2003 Businessman of the Year - although the link that’s supposed to say who gave him the award reloads the same page and Google can’t find any reference to the honour. 2003 was, however, the year that Kim won a lawsuit against Shell to get royalty payments for those sun shades you stick to the inside of your car windows. Just what the inventor of the smartphone would be working on…

Click on the Products section of the Gigatech site and you’ll find a list of patents rather than phones; the News section is full of the lawsuits the company has filed. Last summer it sued 41 mobile phone companies, and this time the LA lawyers didn’t even wait until the patent came through to sue Nokia, RIM, Apple, HP, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Helio, Sprint, AT&T and a few others for good measure.

And even though Gigatech and its lawyers are based in LA the lawsuits are filed in Texas, in a court that’s notorious for enforcing dubious patents.

Minerva wasn’t even founded until 1996. That’s the year that Nokia shipped its first Communicator - and Philips sold a long-forgotten phone with an Internet connection then as well. By 1996 I’d been using an analogue Motorola StarTac to get online from the train for months (I plugged it in to an HP OmniBook and read my mail on CIX at 2400 baud and 125 miles an hour on the journey from Bath to London).

It’s a little more complicated with Trend Micro and Barracuda. Trend says its patent covers gateway virus scanning and wants Barracuda to take the open source ClamAV software out of its appliances. Barracuda says ’shan’t’ on the grounds that “scanning for viruses at the gateway is an obvious and common technique that is utilized by most businesses worldwide.” You’re not supposed to be able to get a patent for anything that could be classed as specialist subject - the bleeding obvious.  Between then Trend and Barracuda are wading through the US patent system, US federal court and - because some of the software was written outside the US - the import-overseeing International Trade Commission. And while patent lawsuits are two a penny these days, this one raises some interesting issues around open source and patents.

Open source projects that infringe on patents can be hard to shut down, if they’re widely distributed. But it’s easier to take legal action against a company with money and business to lose than against individual programmers. Adopt an open source project that’s not covered by a patent promise and you’re getting a responsibility as well as a resource.

SourceFire acquired ClamAV last summer and its open source background with SNORT means the company will understand that open source isn’t a free ride. Less experienced companies - whether they’re developing or just using open source software - might not realise that one reason you pay more for commercial software is that the software company you buy it from is funding a legal department who can take the time to go to court and building up a patent portfolio of its own. Mutually assured patent claims keep a lot of cases out of court. 

Interestingly, Barracuda is going down the open source route in compiling its case against Trend and asking the community for examples of software that had network virus scanning features before September 1995. Maybe the best thing for patent reform would be a comment page for every patent application where we could point out all the academic papers and shipping products that predate the ‘invention’.

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform . Rubbish, Mary said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

What he means, I said, is that it’s a new level of openness on the part of the AT&T network in accepting a device like the iPhone in the first place. Look at the ill-fated ROKR; it had a paltry capacity for music, a terrible interface and was generally a pitiful excuse for a music phone, because Motorola did everything the networks wanted. Verizon put pressure on Palm to lock down the Bluetooth profile on Treo smartphones so you couldn’t transfer files directly to force subscribers to send the photos they took with a Treo through Verizon’s pay-for picture messaging service. Things haven’t been as open as we’d like them in the UK either, as Orange used to require applications running on its phones to be signed with its certificate before you could install them (though there was a relatively easy official unlock process).

For the iPhone to look like a beacon of openness in this scenario you have to ignore the fact that US operators like T-Mobile have been carrying much the same range of Windows Mobile devices we have in the UK and while they may be locked down a little more, big-name apps like Google Maps still run on them just fine. One thing to note: GSM-derived technologies and networks are still the minority in the US, and  CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint have the largest market share – but CDMA’s influence is weakening. The plan to switch away from the tightly-controlled CDMA technology in favour of LTE – the successor to 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA – may be as much of a reason for Verizon promising to open up its network as the success of the ‘open’ iPhone.

But Apple tends to punch above its weight. In the last three months of 2007 Apple sold 2.3 million iPhones (and about the same number of Macs). Sony Ericsson shipped almost 31 million phones in the same time; Samsung sold 46.3 million. Motorola – a company that’s doing so badly at phone sales that CEO Ed Zander had to step down – sold 40.9 million phones. And Nokia shipped as many phones as everyone else put together - 133.5 million handsets.

The vast majority of those are feature phones rather than smartphones. Last time I checked RIM only had around 10 million BlackBerry users. But if Microsoft hits its predictions of selling 20 million Windows Mobile phones in the year ending this July (up from 11 million the previous year), that will be around 5 million in 3 months. Selling half that many for a smartphone you can’t even install applications on means Apple is having an impact – and if the networks do see sense in the US, open smartphones from Windows Mobile to Linux will get a lot more useful too.

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

Luckily there was a solution. I had my trusty old HTC TYTN with me, and Vegas is on of the few places in the US with decent 3G connectivity (I’m writing this in the heart of the tech world, in a coffee shop in less than a mile from eBay’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where 3G is a rare and precious thing). Microsoft has added support for Internet Connection Sharing to Windows Mobile 6 (it’s in 5 too, but well hidden) - which means you can use a Windows Mobile 6 phone as a Bluetooth internet gateway.

Getting it working is pretty easy. You’ll first need to pair the phone with your laptop. The rest is simple. Click the Internet Sharing icon on the phone to start using it as a gateway. You’ll need to choose whether it uses USB or Bluetooth (we’d recommend plugging it in to the mains and using Bluetooth, as that way you won’t flatten the phone’s battery running two radios).

Click connect, and go back to your PC. Right click the taskbar Bluetooth icon (if it’s not there, enable it first). You can then select the option of joining a Bluetooth PAN. This is a Personal Area Network, an IP network running over a bluetooth connection. In the dialogue box that pops up, click to choose the device you’re planning on connecting with.

Hey Presto! You’re online.

It’ll be slower than WiFi, but at least it’s a connection. Of course you don’t need to be in a Vegas motel room to use this - it’ll work in Starbucks (no need to pay T-mobile, unless you’ve got one of the new Web’n'Walk contracts that let you use WiFi as part of your standard mobile contract) or in the park, or on the train, or in even in the back of a taxi.

The Mac Air is cute, shiny, lightweight – and a true reflection of the Mac market in many ways.

Walking around the show floor at MacWorld shows the difference between the Mac and PC markets. There was the new Mac version of Office of course, Office 2008, which combines the logically arranged big icons of 2007 Office with the menus of every other version, adding the SmartArt and XML file formats without making a fuss about them. There was Bento, the build-your-own-catalogue tool for people who find FileMaker too complicated. There was Parallels, making an excellent business of putting Windows onto the Mac.

And then there were the colours. You can thank the Mac market for the different colour cases for iomega’s portable eGo hard drives, because Mac users are used to colours. We saw whale-print neoprene laptop sleeves, embroidered neoprene laptop sleeves, oversize purple leather handbags designed to take notebooks and more rubber, leather, plastic and metal iPod and iPhone cases than you could shake an unlocked iPhone at. Whatever your tastes in technology as personal jewellry, there’s a case to suit.

It’s great to see so much style; when I bought my Portégé 2000 back in 2001, I hunted high and low for a stylish, small case that didn’t make me feel like a corporate drone. I had to go to a Japanese stationery store in San Jose to find a protective sleeve and even then it was black. Now, whether your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air – the first Apple notebook in a very long time that you can truly call ultraportable – or a 17” MacBook Pro that needs its own wheeled suitcase, you can snap on a red cover or stick on a Van Gogh skin.

If your heart’s desire is a touchscreen Mac, that’s not quite as easy. You have to take your Mac to Axiotron and have it undergo major surgery to add a Wacom layer and remove the keyboard. (And if you want to use it in portrait mode, run BootCamp and Vista on it, as Apple hasn’t built screen rotation into the Leopard graphics drivers). If your heart’s desire is a MacBook Air and a second battery, you either need to be very skilled with a screwdriver (and we wouldn’t advise doing it on a transatlantic flight) or you have to go to BatteryGeek and buy an external battery that plugs into the MagSafe power port. You’ll have to wait until they make a new tip for the new MagSafe connector for the Air; Apple hasn’t licensed them the details of the MagSafe connector so they’re reverse engineering it, along with Nokia and dozens of other connectors.

If your heart’s desire is a 7” ultramobile, or a computer built right into a TV screen rather than an extra box (no matter how stylish the box), or any other niche form factor, there isn’t a Mac for you. That’s not a criticism of Apple; Apple is making computers for the largest audience it can get. It can’t afford to be HP, Dell, OQO, Motion Computing and Asus rolled into one. Apple isn’t going to license the Mac OS (or lets VMWare and Parallels virtualise it on non-Mac hardware) because that means supporting a lot of different hardware and writing a lot of different drivers. The choice isn’t what style of machine, it’s which Mac and what colour accessories.

The PC market is about choice in a different way. The Toshiba Portégé R500 is lighter than the Air even with an optical drive in the case and as thin as the thickest slice of the Air; it doesn’t look nearly as sleek but it was available last summer, and it wasn’t the first ultraportable PC, just the lightest one so far. Hardly any of them have looked as good as a Mac and while you can get stick-on skins for every HP laptop – and the new Artist’s Edition has gorgeous colours and designs printed right into the case – you can’t get a purple brushed metal clip-on case custom built to fit. By definition, Mac users don’t need the range of hardware choice you get with the PC (or they’d have bought a PC instead) and PC users will continue to envy Mac users their stylish design and colourful accessories

At least the lime-green neoprene sleeves will look good on my shiny white Toshiba R400 tablet…

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley. It’s also been a busy few days in boardrooms in the towns around San Jose. While Apple has been burning the midnight oil at One Infinite Loop while plotting this year’s MacWorld strategy, the lawyers’ Lexus convertibles have been powering up and down 101 with the documents that detailed this morning’s announcements.

Oracle buying BEA wasn’t a surprise, the two companies have been engaged in a takeover struggle for some time, and BEA’s capitulation, if not quite a foregone conclusion, was certainly on the cards. Sun’s purchase of MySQL came out of the blue. It’s actually quite logical though, as Sun has been moving away from its proprietary roots since Jonathan Schwartz took control of the corporate rudder.

Still, there are going to be some worried customers out there. Both Sun and Oracle have a history of buying companies and slowly killing innovative products in favour of their own solutions. MySQL is probably too entrenched to be replaced (though SQLite is getting a lot of usage), and it also fills in a gap in Sun’s product portfolio. BEA’s web services-driven middleware strategy is certainly at risk, as Oracle already has its own application server and web services platform. BEA may have an edge in performance - especially now that its JVM and application server are able to run in a VM without an operating system, something that Oracle has been looking for for a long time.

Consolidation in the enterprise IT world has been going on for some time, and now it’s the application server stack’s turn. This is just the first $10 billion dollars of what looks like it’s going to be an expensive year for the big vendors - so let’s hope the costs don’t get passed on to the rest of us…

–Simon 

Every now and then I want to throw my laptop out of the window in sheer frustration. I’ve certainly flung USB sticks across the room from time to time, by accident. I’ve also done a Bill Gates and left my travel mug on the car roof when we drove off (although unlike the spoof video in Gates’ CES keynote speech the mug wasn’t there when we arrived). Most flash drives can survive a certain amount of damage - or at least the flash memory can. A USB stick would probably survive the fall from a car roof but I have a rather fetching 1Gb earring made from a flash stick that was sticking out of Simon’s PC when he turned his chair a little too far and snapped off the USB connector.  

If you expect to treat your data roughly, Corsair has the rugged, rubber-coated Voyager and the Survivor which screws into an aircraft-grade aluminium canister. The Survivor we saw looked a touch battered; Corsair had driven a tractor over it to test it out. Voyager drives were sitting in ice, water and sand but they still worked when we fished them out.

Both now come in 32GB,  and at that size you start to wonder if it’s worth carrying a portable hard drive. Except portable hard drives now have a lot more storage for the size; Seagate had a new version of the FreeAgent Go at the show that fits 250GB into something about the size of a CD case (remember those?). Verbatim’s new SmartDisk goes up to 320GB.

And if you want to take 4TB around with you, Intel has conveniently put it into a suitcase. Well, it’s actually a NAS box designed for the home but it looks like a suitcase - because that’s what you put things in and take things out of. Ideal for backup of course, but you can also put your media in it and stream it out to almost any device: on the stand Intel was streaming different video files to an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, an Xbox, a PC and a TV screen, all at the same time.

It wouldn’t quite fit in our cases for the trip to MacWorld, alas. As I write this we’re driving off down I-15, watching the moon set like a thin orange smile. And as I don’t yet have a 32GB SD card for my camera, the next task is to unload the photos from our driving trip through Arizona, ready to snap whatever we see next.

Just because it’s the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of products that matter for business here in Vegas.

Connecting to multiple monitors wirelessly is as useful at work as it is at home; manufacturers like IOGEAR and Samsung are doing that with DisplayLink’s chips and a future product will put the screen from your mobile phone onto a TV or monitor. A SlingCatcher lets you send video from one TV to another (so you don’t have to pay a second Sky subscription to watch the occasional show on a TV in the bedroom), but you can also use it to see photos, presentations, Web pages - and anything else that’s on your PC screen - on TV, which is handy for an informal meeting. Panasonic’s 150″ screen is sized for a large meeting room rather than  the average living room.

And then there’s Windows Home Server. It’s designed for the home - obviously. Microsoft has come up with an amusing ad campaign about Stay At Home Servers, complete with fake TV debates and a hugely funny children’s picture book entitled Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House?

This derailed our press briefing for several minutes while we giggled our way through the book. You c an read the whole thing at http://www.stayathomeserver.com/book.aspx but to give you a flavour, here’s what you find in an office.

When we saw this page, we turned to each other and Mary said ‘but you gave me an Exchange server!”.

And while we don’t have a puppy, I’ve lost two laptops to red wine and a watering can so far…

 But just as around a third of the copies of Small Business Server are sold to home users who need a mail server and file store at home, plenty of Windows Home Server boxes are going into offices. The spring PowerPack update will add some features that will be useful in business including finer-grain user control, so you can share files without the tab that lets visitors explore your PC. Microsoft’s Joel Sider thinks Windows Home Server is ideal as “executive backup for the CEO or the CFO who has all the financials on his PC”. If you can’t get executives to plug in at a certain time to do backups, or you find they interrupt backups to speed up something they’re doing, the invisible backup of any PC you connect to Windows Home Server could come in useful. Chris Grey of the Home Server team calls losing the only copy of the digital photos of your wedding “a divorceable event”; losing the only copy of the accounts the CFO just finished working on doesn’t have to be your fault to be a sackable event.

Between the queues and the crowds and the firehouse of information, CES quickly turns into a blur. Yesterday things kicked off gently with Logitech announcing new products over a leisurely lunch – a Squeezebox with an iPod-style remote control, a tiny keyboard with built-in scroll wheel for running a media center or driving a presentation, a Bluetooth version of the MX Revolution mouse that gets you through a multi-page PDF more ergonomically and time to chat about trends. The CES Unveiled preview was less a queue and more a moving herd of journalists, grazing on the buffet and crowding past the stands. SSD capacity is going up but prices are still at the level where you have to care a lot about TCO and data safety to find them good value.

One of the points that came up again and again while we were researching future IT trends at the end of last year is that video is coming to business – presentations, training and chat as well as video conferencing. This brings up lots of issues around storage and search and regulatory compliance, but there’s also the question of how good this video is going to look. You can drive a spreadsheet, you can knock together a presentation – but could you edit a video? Video editing is going to get as accessible as image editing soon and Pinnacle is hoping to get market share by giving away a simple video editing package, but technologies like auto-summarising, search and index, facial recognition and embedded metadata are going to take some of the work out of watching video.

HD camcorders are going to get small and cheap this year, but Casio is putting video into a camera in a way that could completely change the way you take pictures. A good digital camera will have a burst mode that’s gets 10 shots in a second; the new 6 megapixel $999 Exilim Pro EX-F1 will take 60. It’s a lightweight EVF model rather than a DSLR, it takes around 300 shots on a single battery charge – and it’s much more likely that those will be the shots you want. You can either shoot away and pick later or preview the shot and choose the frame you want –put the preview in slow motion so you can find it more easily. The flash can’t quite keep up but you can still get 30 frames per second with flash.

Burst mode is great when you’re prepared and pointing the right way but you still have to get your finger on the shutter button. The EX-F1 can pre-record images so that when you press the shutter button it saves a preset number of frames before and after, which does away with shutter lag pretty comprehensively. There’s a five second version on the pocket-sized Exilim s10, which also has an ‘autoshutter’ feature that presses the button for you when the subject isn’t moving, the camera isn’t shaking, the subject is front and centre, the person you’re photographing – or when you make it into the frame after you set the timer.

Casio is using video to get better still images but the EX-F1 can also shoot 1080i HD video at 60fps – or a lower resolution at 300, 600 or 1200fps. That catches motion you couldn’t see with the naked eye and give you the kind of amazing shots you used to only see on TV. When you burst a balloon full of water what you see is the water falling; when you video it at 1200fps you see the water holding the shape of the balloon before it succumbs to gravity. HD video is easier to look at because the detail makes it look more real; high speed video shows you something you couldn’t see otherwise.

We try out a lot of technology - so much different technology that sometimes we don’t take the time to sort out the technology we really need ourselves. Instead of resolving to work out more and work less, we decided to work out our own technology in 2008. It’s time for some upgrades, some changes and some less is more.

1.    Exchange Server 2007
I want HTML email on my smartphone. I can already file messages but I want to be able to flag emails on my phone so I don’t have to leave half of them to deal with when I get back to the office. That means we need to upgrade the Exchange server - and that means we need a 64-bit server, which is why we haven’t upgraded already. Any new server will have Intel AMT support so we can remote in to fix any problems when we’re traveling.

2.    And Windows Server 2008
While we’re at it, we’ll make sure the box can run Windows Server 2008 when it comes out at the end of February. This means we’re switching away from SBS at last; not because SBS isn’t a good idea, but because it’s just too long a wait to get the new versions. We’re not expecting Server 2008 features until SBS 2009 and that’s too long to wait for PowerShell and the better Vista support. After all, nearly all our PCs run Vista now.

3.    SP1 everywhere
We didn’t install Vista SP1 in beta on our production machines because while it was mostly a good update there were problems with it - that’s fair enough for a beta. RC1 is stable and worth having, so we’ll upgrade all the Vista machines.

4.    More memory everywhere
Vista needs memory. Memory is cheap these days and it doesn’t make sense to have less than 1GB in a machine - 2GB for Vista - so we’ll do a little shopping. I’ll get a faster hard drive for my Toshiba R400 too; the 4200rpm drive just doesn’t cut it.

5.    Sort out the media centre
The late, lamented Elonex produced a completely integrated Media Center PC, in an LCD screen. It works really well, but we want to add more memory so we can take it to Vista, and add an HD-DVD drive. What we really want is to take the Dremel to the case to cut out the SCART socket and wire up the SCART connector on the motherboard so we can use our Sky+ box with the same screen, but we haven’t found a firmware upgrade that allows that. If we can’t do all the upgrades we want, we’ll probably get a flat screen and a separate Media Center in a Shuttle case or similar. We’ll just have to make sure it gets enough ventilation sitting inside the TV bench.

6.    Save some money, save some power
The fan on the switch has been going beserk recently; lifting it off the carpet on a metal rack helped with that. Most summers the office gets uncomfortably warm, so we’ll be looking for a new server that runs cool and for switches and routers that reduce the power they use when there’s no Ethernet traffic. Rigging the surge protectors that the various phone and media player and camera chargers are plugged in to so we can turn them off when we’re not actually charging could be a money saver; some estimates say 75% of the electricity used in the US is driving devices that aren’t actually plugged in. In an ideal world the charger would detect when there’s no current draw and stop taking power itself, of course. Greening the data centre is going to go from a warm cuddly feeling and advertising slogan to a hard look at the bottom line; in business, IT is going to have to pay its development, installation and running costs - including power - and generate profit besides. Smaller businesses need to do the sums as well.

7.    Personal navigation
When we have a GPS phone like the O2 XDA Stellar on test, we get to meetings on time and without going to the wrong tube stop. When we drive around the US, CoPilot gets us to the oddest places, down the most obscure back roads. This year I’m going to add navigation to my own phone, the HTC Excalibur. Either I’ll run CoPilot and use a Bluetooth GPS, or I’ll use Google Maps with the cellular location feature to do it without GPS, which will save on battery.

8.    Better BES
We both use Windows Mobile, but we both use a BlackBerry quite often too. You need a separate server to run BlackBerry Enterprise Server on, so we usually just get email over the air and connect by USB to sync addresses and calendars. It’s not worth running another server for so few users but a hosted BES service would make sense.

9.    Make our VPN less virtual
Most home DSL routers don’t do VPNs properly, so we end up using Remote Desktop or Hamachi to retrieve files when we’re on the road. Getting a Soho or business router will give us real VPN, which is faster and one less step to deal with when we want to get a file in a hurry.

10.    Into the cloud
Of course it would be easier not to have to get the file over DSL at all. As laptop hard drives haven’t yet got large enough to take every file we have on the server (and offline files remains delightful in theory and impossible to use on our network in practice), the best solution is to be backing those files up into the cloud somewhere we can retrieve them from as well; encrypted and password protected of course.  We’ll always have servers and hardware locally, for speed and control; software as a service doesn’t really fit our business. But to steal a phrase from Microsoft, software plus services makes what you already have better.

If we can get all that done by the end of the year, the IT department will reward itself with a really good Christmas do…