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The Weekly Round-Up: 13.07.07
Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 13 July 2007

Around this time of year, all over the country, fresh-faced graduates are emerging into the real world after three or more years of academia and looking at the road ahead.

No doubt they see many avenues of opportunity. Here's one now, signposted 'Technology'. A man dressed in smart vendor-wear promises a brave new world of innovation and business leadership, beckoning tomorrow's DBAs, CIOs and - whisper it - CEOs.

Can the nice IT man tempt today's graduates? No chance, they're all becoming bankers or working for consumer goods companies instead.

IT companies are receiving just 22 applicants for every graduate vacancy they advertise - below the national average of 29, according to a recent survey. IT is just not sexy enough.

However, the very same graduates flocking to finance and elsewhere may have been rather hasty in committing themselves to life outside IT for two reasons.

Firstly, it appears a new golden age for developers is here, thanks to the advent of web 2.0.

New wave developers are demanding big payouts as the world and his dog rushes to invest in the next generation of the internet, inflating marketing prices and raising expectations with wild abandon and scant regard to what happened last time this sort of thing happened.

The Round-Up was there when the bubble burst. It was a bit like Nam.

Demand for web 2.0 skills has resulted in developers' paycheques rocketing up by 26 per cent in the past 12 months, according to research.

Consumer goods? Pah! Banking and finance? Idiots. Technology is where the money is after all.

It's not just Facebook and MySpace driving the demand for developers. The report claims demand for online business apps and investment in ecommerce ventures is also helping to drive developers' salaries through the roof. Bidding wars have broken out to win programmers. Egos and heads are swelling.

Oh yes, it's a heady time - but there's also a second major selling point for a career in technology: inner peace.

Irrespective of the issues facing the modern techie such as skills crisis, security woes and uncommunicative underlings, nearly half of silicon.com readers characterised normal stress levels as merely 'occasional panic attacks'.

The server room may be a chaotic, tangle of wires and filled with frenetic, flashing lights but a further 22 per cent are even less stressed out - for them, a stiff drink is the only tonic required to eliminate the stress of the daily grind. Although, the Round-Up would hope, after the day is done.

A further 13 per cent of digital bodhisattvas enjoy a 'Zen-like serenity'.

Presumably that's our in-demand developer friends again, spending large swathes of the working day on Facebook, for research purposes of course, and watching the value of their stock options rise as the web 2.0 bubble grows.

Ohm...

Talk of bubbles leads one naturally to toil and trouble, not to mention owlet's wing and, of course, fillets of a fenny snake.

News broke this week that Romanian witches are taking to the web like newts' eyes to boiling cauldrons.

Romania's entry into the EU has led to the country's witches, from one-person sorceresses to international covens, to flock online in a bid to win more customers.

Apparently, witchcraft is a recognised profession in Romania, where witches offer spells, potions and read the future, according to a report on Ananova.

Traditional marketing channels are just too limiting for the modern-day witch. Today's witch needs to diversify.

Hanging around with toads and cats and cultivating facial warts is so last century. Why restrict yourself to flying around on broomsticks on Halloween and cackling when you could exploit ecommerce opportunities and blogging?

One of Romania's most famous witches, Witch Rodica, has done just that. Her website - complete with blog, of course - offers everything from a book on interpreting dreams to tarot card reading.

Rodica calls herself the "incontestable and undisputed leader of the Romanian witches" (ooh, get her) and claims she can cure impotence, epilepsy and alcoholism.

Hm, the Round-Up's thinking of dropping her an email - two out of three ain't bad, after all.

She added: "I still do spells and potions the traditional way but the blog keeps me closer to potential clients and can be used to convince the sceptical that witchcraft is real."

Failing that, she'll turn them into slugs and see how that pans out. It's a hell of a negotiation technique.

On 29 June Apple unleashed the iPhone onto the world - well the US anyway. You missed that?

The product launch prompted hundreds of Mac fans to camp outside Apple stores in the US for days in advance to ensure they got their hands on the device on Friday night.

Two days later, as some of them were waiting impatiently for mobile carrier AT&T to activate their iPhones, a few might have reflected they could have just strolled into the same store on Sunday afternoon, thereby spending less time sharing their personal space with a load of people wearing Apple T-shirts, open-toed sandals and knee-length combat trousers. No matter. At least you can tell your grandchildren you were there.

Less than two weeks after the iPhone went live, one analyst has predicted Apple will turn to a small form-factor to help sell the device and reassure jittery investors.

And quite right too. After all, the company only sold an estimated 700,000 in two days after its rapturous, epoch-shattering launch. It desperately needs a sales fillip.

Taiwan-based JP Morgan analyst Kevin Chang this week claimed the Cupertino company plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter of this year that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano music player.

The key word in that last sentence is 'could', by the way.

Chang cited unnamed people (uh-huh) in the supply channel and an application with the US Patent and Trademark office (hmm) for his report.

The patent application (dated a few days earlier) refers to a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch-pad control, similar to the Nano's scroll wheel. Similar, eh? What more proof could you need?

However, less than a day after Chang's prediction hit the wires it was thoroughly and unceremoniously rubbished. By colleagues from his own company.

JP Morgan's New York office issued a report authored by a trio of analysts warning the low-end, subsidised 'iPhone Nano' Chang predicted is extremely unlikely in the short term.

Analysts who follow Apple have increasingly made a habit of imitating the company's online fan base by speculating wildly about future products without any real evidence. After all, Apple is notoriously secretive and even within its Cupertino HQ nobody really has the slightest clue what Steve Jobs will announce at the next big event.

The JP Morgan response to the Chang clanger does predict a 3G model is likely, though. See? They just can't help themselves.

Am I boring you? So sorry.

If you are utterly and momentously sick of the iPhone then what could be more cathartic than watching one being dropped into a high-powered blender?

The Round-Up could barely watch but it can report the much-vaunted screen survives an impressively long time on the 'smoothie' function before it's returned to its component elements in spectacular fashion.

Note: Not for the faint hearted.

Until next week, the Round-Up will be dropping a number of defunct mobiles into a blender to test their resilience to the whirling blades of death…

In the meantime, don't forget to listen to the Weekly Round-Up podcast - for lively discussion on IM etiquette, the Mac vs PC debate and lots more - available here or subscribe in iTunes here.

And test your wit in this week's Caption Competition.

Congratulations to Kiernan Wagstaff who won last week's competition - see the winning entry here.