“
Weinschenk: You suggest that there will be enough demand to satisfy all these players.
Bajarin: If you think about it in context of pure number for the U.S., the U.S. represents 40 percent of global worldwide sales at the moment. If you take my numbers and say 60 percent will be smartphones by 2012, you are looking at somewhere between 200 and 300 million smartphones in the U.S. alone in 2012. We’re using that straight billion phones as a guide. That can go up.
Weinschenk: What about worldwide?
Bajarin: In 2015, 60 percent of the world will use smartphones. If we use the billion phone number, that’s 600 million. Let’s say Apple sells 50 million iPhones; they will be a huge winner and have a huge segment of that market. BlackBerry could do 50 million. If you have those kinds of huge numbers, there is room for a lot of companies to play. That’s why it’s unclear to me when you realize how large the market is that we’re actually driving to consolidation.
Weinschenk: Are these numbers and forecasts just for smartphones, or does it include things like MIDs and smartbooks?
Bajarin: What I just gave you is smartphone numbers. At the moment, the industry has not figured out quite where to put smartbooks. It’s a tricky issue because all of them will have cell phone chips in them. But they aren’t phones. They are portable data terminals, in a sense. At the moment, we can’t define then as phones or smartphones because they are fundamentally data-centric. The concept of netbooks and smartbooks still is in the form factor of a notebook.
Weinschenk: Could those definitions – whether smartbooks are phones or data devices – change?
Bajarin: Guys like me who research this at the moment are putting netbooks and smartbooks in the overall notebook numbers. Will that change? It could. When I talk to IDC, Gartner and others, we haven’t come up with a way to categorize them outside of small notebooks. Smartbooks is the term that at the moment carriers like to use to describe what they are doing. They would have to force enough numbers to change how we track to make it a separate category.
”
— Definitions Still Elusive in the Exploding Mobile Device Sector | Interviews | ITBusinessEdge.com
• 14 February 2010 • View comments
“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
— Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
• 12 January 2010 • View comments
New Krugman Paper on Currency Crises
I only get about half of this on my first read, but the half I get seems key. Bottom-line: The world system is more chaotic than one might suppose from studying US based trends 1930 -1980.
• 4 January 2010 • View comments
Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
International research council that sets standards and evaluates potential industrial toxins.
• 2 January 2010 • View comments
Plastic Bags = Plastic Lumber?
Em just came home from Safeway with another half dozen plastic bags. They have a little symbol on them that identifies their plastic resin as HDPE, High-Density Polyethylene. Apparently this material can be heated to about 400 degrees and melted into plastic lumber. Presumably that is what happens to the bags we put in our recycle box. I feel a need to check this out.
Attached find a detailed report on HDPE recycling from 2005. Looks pretty good.
I imagine noxious fumes emerge when you melt a stack of grocery bags, no?
• 2 January 2010 • View comments
Macroeconomic effects of Chinese mercantilism - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
Krugman cites this new paper regarding post-crisis global trade imbalances. Looks dense, but I want to read this and try to break it down, probably in the comments below. If you have news or insight to bring to this topic, please share.
• 2 January 2010 • View comments
5,000 Tons of Plastic Bags Per Year in Seattle
In 2001 and 2002, Seattle residents recycled 287 tons of plastic packaging, said Brett Stav of Seattle Public Utilities.
But not everyone bothers to recycle, and in 2002 nearly 5,000 tons of plastic bags went to Seattle’s landfill, he said.
King, Pierce and Snohomish counties do not offer plastic bag recycling to their unincorporated-area residents. Although Brooke Bascom of King County’s solid waste agency blamed the market, saying there’s not enough demand for recycled bags, Seattle’s Stav said, “China is a huge developing market. … There’s not a problem with demand.” The used bags are made into decking and building materials, he said.
• 1 January 2010 • View comments
