If you want proof that mobile devices have become essential, consider how closely every single new phone from the major players is analyzed and critiqued. This harkens to the early days of the PC, when a new desktop from IBM or a new processor from Intel made front-page news.

A couple of weeks ago it was the Blackberry Storm, the first touch-screen device from Research in Motion, the Canadian company that dominates the business mobile space. This week it’s the Nokia N97, the flagship of the Finnish company’s high-end line.

Invariably, new phones are compared to Apple’s iPhone, the alpha dog of cellular telephony, and the phone that gets more ink than all the others combined. Most reviews of new phones consist of listing the shortcomings of the pretender and heaping praise on Apple’s product.

From an interface perspective, there is a real gap between the iPhone and the rest of the pack. But consumers have varied needs and the iPhone may not be the best device for everyone. Many users won’t consider the iPhone because it doesn’t have a real keyboard. On the other hand, none of the challengers have matched its ease of browsing the Web.

The prevailing consensus now is that RIM’s touchscreen Blackberry Storm is a nice try, but no groundbreaker. The biggest complaint is the inconsistency of the software and the problems with the touchscreen.  But it’s only version 1.0 and will get better.

The Nokia N97, which won’t be available in Europe until March at the earliest (no date for the U.S.), hasn’t been subjected to the vigorous hands-on testing that should go into any review. That hasn’t stopped Forbes from speculating that the N97 might nip the burgeoning netbook movement. The N97, which comes with a Qwerty keyboard, could make netbooks unnecessary, he speculates.

The netbooks, light laptops with limited software designed to access applications over the Web, range in price from $200 to $500, and have emerged as an inexpensive alternative to traditional notebook computers. But while I can see myself writing a column on a netbook, I doubt I would do more than send email on the N97’s tiny keyboard.

The real danger for mobile devices is increasing complexity; in some of these devices the phone function is nearly an afterthought. They take pictures and shoot video; they download and play music, they handle email and text messages; some have FM radios or TV tuners, and of course, they browse the web, which also means they will have access to thousands of Web 2.0 applications.  Stuffing so many functions in such small devices, is an engineering tour de force. And for users, managing all the bells and whistles can lead to a migraine.

The real mass market in mobiles is still centered on the basic functions: voice and texting, with the camera function becoming more or less standard. But phones that just do that aren’t sexy, and they won’t get much press coverage.

The site was launched on  November 20 to much fanfare as Europe's answer to Google's plan to digitize the major English-language research libraries in the U.S. and U.K.

But a rate of 10 million hits per hour promptly crashed the site as Europeans sought access to a trove of cultural artifacts, including famous paintings, the Magna Carta, and Dante's Divine Comedy.

A note on Europeana's development site acknowledged that it had been overwhelmed by traffic and would be rebuilt as a more robust destination. Apparently, engineers had planned for 5 million hits an hour and saw traffic peak at 20 million hits per hour. Initially lanched on three servers, the site was then distributed to six servers, but service was still so slow that administrators concluded they had to shut it down completely.

The site was launched with some 2 million books, maps, documents, photographs, sound recordings, films, and paintings from member countries. The goal is to digitize and make available some 10 million items from the European Union's 27 member countries by 2010.

The EU promised that all material digitized and uploaded to the site would respect the rights of authors and publishers. Google recently reached a $125 million settlement with publishers and authors over its digitization of the contents of major research libraries, including the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities.

Every experienced computer user has a handful of tools they use to keep their PC running and to make their tasks easier. I am often asked what I use on a regular basis, so here goes.

1.       PC Tune-Up. One of the problems with Windows PCs is that they accumulate junk. Whether you troll the web, do word processing or video editing, “stuff” collects and fills up your hard drive, especially if you install and remove software regularly. The problem is that each piece of software revises the registry files that control your PC, and can contribute to slowing it down.  PC Tune-Up from Large Software does most of its work under the hood; you just install it and on starting up the PC it hunts down broken registry links, defragments files that are scattered around your hard drive, and then reboots the system automatically. I think of it like a steam cleaning the engine before I move out onto the race track. Like a fuel additive, it has perked up several of my slower PCs. (Large Software, www.largesoftware.com. Trial version available, $29.95)

2.       Exalead. This desktop search engine comes from France but it’s really been raising it profile in the U.S.  While there are several decent desktop search applications, including Google Desktop, X1.com and Copernic, I like Exalead because it is unobtrusive and it indexes Lotus Notes, which we are saddled with at Red Herring.  Exalead indexes the contents of your hard drive and then shows you results in a web browser. I can view search results from Microsoft Outlook mail as well as Notes mail and files on the computer. Exalead shows thumbnails of images, but not text until you click on a small box next to the result, but the item loads quickly. You can then click on a button that  will take you to the message itself. The company also offers far more elaborate enterprise versions of its software that can be shared across a company. (Free, www.exalead.com

3.       EverNote.  Like everyone else, I juggle several different desktops, laptops and phones. Remembering where I left notes from an interview, images or documents data can be daunting. I've tried every sync product out there, including several that have gone away. EverNote is my latest attempt to find an application that will keep everything in sync on different devices. The software promises to sync your information across several PCs, Macs, and mobile phones (iPod or Windows Mobile) so you always have access to it – as long as your store it in EverNote. The nice thing about Evernote is you can simply drag and drop text, photos and even pdf files into it and they’ll get saved and synchronized. The application recognizes text in images and can let you find something from a key word in a picture. It also keeps the URL of Web pages you store so you can go back to the original item.
There is a button you can install in your web browser that lets you save an entire web page (including the URL) or just a part of a page, great for rapid research. And there’s a time band you can use to track back to a certain day or time period when you only vaguely remember when you saved something. EverNote has iPhone and Windows Mobile versions although you can also look at your stuff via a mobile web browser, if you're a glutton for punishment. (www.evernote.com, free version, premium version provides more storage: $5 a month; $45/yr.)

The news that PC Magazine is ending its print edition came as no surprise, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sad about another sign of the obsolescence of a medium. For three years, I was responsible for getting the magazine out on time, and what a monster it was to produce. When Bill Ziff hired me as the Editor of PC Mag in 1991, “Mag”, as it was simply known at Ziff-Davis, was at the top of the publishing heap. Circulation was 800,000 and would grow to 1.2 million; the magazine came out 23 times a year and the average issue was over 400 pages thick.  The magazine brought in more than $200 million in revenue and an annual profit north of $40 million.

The biweekly copy really did hit your desk with a “thump” and I suspected it contributed to more than a few hernias among postal carriers. We were in the midst of the PC boom. The PC makers fueled PC Mag’s prosperity: we ran multiple-page ads in every issue from Northgate, Swan, and a dozen other companies that exist now only in memory.  Companies like Dell and Gateway were experimenting with an innovative approach to sales, bypassing dealers and selling directly to consumers. Of course, in an age before the Web, “direct” meant making a phone call to an 800 number.

Windows was still evolving and Microsoft was not yet dominant. A lot of people used DOS because Windows was so slow or their software didn’t run on Windows. When we did a review of word-processing programs, there were 17 products to test. When we reviewed modems, 100 manufacturers submitted products. Testing all 100 and making sure each modem could connect to every other modem in the review cost us $200,000. Our desktop PC reviews routinely included 50 or more products.The annual printer issue included at least 100 models (see photo).

PC Mag’s enormous clout was built on transparency. The editors had created a testing process that was completely clear and objective. Our reviews often ran 40 to 50 pages, and included endless tables and charts of test results that readers could (and did) peruse. We explained the criteria that led to our coveted Editor’s Choice designation, a logo that could turn a company into an overnight success. We were blunt about products that failed to meet our expectations.

A bad review could scuttle a company, and occasionally resulted in a lawsuit.  One maker of memory management software (necessary when the amount of RAM in a PC was 64K or 128K) filed suit, accusing our reviewer of failing to understand the technology. That turned out to be bad strategy: the reviewer was a rocket scientist: a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Labs who kept meticulous notes. A judge soon threw out the suit, but the company eventually went out of business.

Our editorial policy was to review every product that fit our criteria. I saw signs that this strategy was losing its justification. After reviewing the exorbitant cost of the modem review, I sent a note to the publisher pointing out that just a half-dozen of the units had 90 percent of the market. Yet we spent 90 percent of our money on products that almost nobody bought. I suggested focusing on the products with the biggest market share. There was a quick reprimand from the publisher: we will review EVERY product.

Mag could afford such a grand mission. One colleague, who, like me, had come to Ziff from mainstream publishing, marveled at the steady flood of ads. “They don’t sell ads here,” he said. “They take orders.” No one believed the gush would end. After a particularly good year, we took the entire editorial staff of 110, plus significant others and children, to Saint Lucia for an all-expenses-paid four-day retreat.

I remained a subscriber long after I moved on. I was a techie before I went to Mag, and I remained an avid reader, especially when shopping for a new product. But as the tech industry consolidated, so did the ads. In its bankruptcy filing earlier this year, Ziff indicated revenues had dropped from $210 million in 2001 (for all its publications) to $40 million in 2007.  There were other reasons. Much as we complained about Windows, it standardized computing and turned much hardware into commodities. You no longer needed a magazine to tell you how to make something work. More than other sectors, technology ads have shifted quickly to the Web, with its instant metrics and measureable effectiveness.

The editors at PC Mag tried valiantly to adjust to the shifting realities; they wrote about auto tech, about cameras, and even home theater systems. Like other magazines, the company soon saw that print and distribution costs exceeded revenue. So even with a circulation of 600,000, PC Mag will soon stop cutting down trees and exist only on the Web that destroyed its original business.

"Digitization projects like Europeana send a strong signal that authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies can work together to democratize access to the world's collective knowledge," Santiago de la Mora, head of Google's book partnerships in Europe, told reporters.

The first question I have for Yahoo’s board of directors is “what took you so long?” Was it founder’s syndrome that kept Jerry Yang from stepping down or a board too timid to do the obvious?

 The stock price alone provides compelling evidence that change was overdue. Yahoo’s stock has fallen by two-thirds since Microsoft offered to buy the company for $33 a share back in the spring and Jerry said “No!” It has rebounded 12 percent since Monday’s announcement of Mr. Yang’s intent to step down.

Maybe now Yahoo will finally figure out what Yahoo is. While archrival Google always maintained its focus on being a search company and making money through search advertising, Yahoo was all over the map. It has lurched from one identity to the next. For six years Yahoo was led by Terry Semel, a Hollywood executive who seemed bent on turning the company into a media conglomerate. He brought in former ABC TV chief Lloyd Braun, who developed Lost and Desperate Housewives, and they made plans for original TV shows for the Internet. Then suddenly, in 2006, just as video became a force on the Internet, the company denied having any media ambitions. Mr. Semel left in 2007, and Mr. Yang came back as CEO.

Google has become so dominant that it is easy to forget that Yahoo was the search pioneer, going public even before Google was founded. Yahoo! started as personal project by two Stanford University graduate engineering students, Mr. Yang and David Filo, who set up a search engine in a campus trailer in 1994 to track their favorite web sites. By the time the site registered 1 million hits in a single day, the two men realized they had a business. They raised $2 million in venture funding from Sequoia in 1995. In April of 1996 Yahoo!, with just 49 employees, went public at $13 a share; the stock soared to $43 before settling $33. At the height of the dot-com boom, Yahoo shares reached $118. At that point, Yahoo was the No.1 Internet brand. The day after Mr. Yang resigned, the shares traded at just under $12 and a market cap of $16 billion, down 20 billion since Mr. Yang turned down Microsoft’s offer.

Then two years after Yahoo’s IPO, two other Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google. It took six years to go public, a spectacular public offering that raised $1.67 billion in 2004 and gave the company a market cap of $23 billion. Today, Google is worth $94 billion. Yahoo has lost $16 billion of its value. Google has steadily gained in revenue and in reputation. The company became one of the most desirable places to work. It came out with cool products: Google Mail, Google Earth, and a suite of desktop applications that work over the Internet (“cloud computing”) that seemed aimed at breaking Microsoft’s hold on consumers.

Yahoo lost its cachet. It no longer seemed on the cutting edge. The name didn’t come up in Silicon Valley the best and brightest no longer beat a path to its door. Yahoo remained one of the most popular destinations on the Web, but its search engine fell to No. 2.

Ultimately, Google may have indirectly caused Mr. Yang’s exit. As Yahoo struggled to hold off Microsoft, Mr. Yang discussed a deal to let Google run ads on Yahoo’s site. Microsoft abandoned its quest.  But the planned alliance with Google, which controls 60 percent of Internet searches, raised antitrust issues, and last week, Google called the whole thing off.  Mr. Yang was left holding an empty bag and a bunch of devalued shares. That’s finally when the board bit the bullet.

The possibility that President Obama, an admitted BlackBerry addict, might appoint a cabinet-level chief technology officer has created a lot of excitement in the world of technology. Such an appointment would finally be an acknowledgement of the importance of technology in the day-to-day lives of Americans.

The Chief Technology Officer of the United States would presumably be responsible for coordinating the use of technology throughout the government – something which has long been wanting – but also in promoting its application to the lives of Americans.

Americans clearly see a policy role for the White House CTO. A site called www.ObamaCTO.org asked readers to identify the top priorities for the job. Voters listed as number one network neutrality, guaranteeing equal access to the Internet to companies and individuals. Some companies have suggested they would like to charge higher fees for access to heavy bandwidth users such as video sites.

The no. 2 issue in the poll was privacy, including repeal of the Patriot Act, which allows the federal government broad rights to conduct surveillance without direct supervision by the courts. Third was repeal of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the controversial law which attempted to set rules for copying, fair use and payment to artists.

But the job is not likely to appeal to a visionary like an Eric Schmidt of Google, No.1 in Red Herring’s poll of candidates for the job, or Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, if it is focused just on revising legislation. (See: http://redherring.com/blogs/)

The Secretary of Technology should be providing a vision for our technology future. What are the technologies that will dominate 5, 10, 20 years down the road. How will a switch to “cloud computing” affect our current digital infrastructure?  How do we turn around a dramatic decline in Americans willing to study science and technology to assure we have the personnel we need. How can the government nurture innovation, as the legendary DARPA once did, without getting in the way of the free market’s decision process?

There is plenty of fundamental work to do. The U.S. was ranked 15th among industrial nations in broadband penetration, with a mere 57 percent of Americans having access to broadband service at home, according to a 2008 Scarborough report, compared to 80 percent or higher in some European countries and Korea. President-elect Obama has indicated that he sees the potential for job creation and innovation by expanding broadband’s reach.

The tech czar’s role would not be limited to information technology issues. He or she would probably oversee the federally-backed $50 billion venture capital fund that Mr. Obama has proposed to nurture more green technology. The CTO could end up as a sort of neutral arbiter on disputes over the best technologies and the best organic products to convert to fuel.

It is likely that the Obama Administration will pass some form of universal health care in the next four years. A key element of that initiative requires digitizing medical records for all Americans and providing the right access to doctors and insurance companies while protecting the privacy of the individual. The CTO would probably play a key role in assuring that technologies chosen are compatible and that protections are in place to control access to medical records.

Finally, the CTO would have to coordinate with the chairman of the FCC, which has traditionally made decisions affecting technology use in communications. There has been a sense in recent years that the FCC was trailing tech advances and not really equipped to deal with issues like social networks, peer-to-peer networks and cloud computing. Whoever lands the job of national CTO will have a very full agenda.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile-phone company, paid $13.1 billion in May 2007 for a 67 percent stake in Vodafone Essar, formerly known as Hutchison.

As of Sept. 30, the number of subscribers in India was up 51 percent in a year to 315.3 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

By comparison, Japan added 0.4 percent customers to 104.8 million, based on figures from the nation's telecom trade association.  The country gained 5.59 million mobile users in 2007, or about 60 percent of India's monthly additions.

The company has ample cash and plans to buy up to $258 million of its own shares, which have lost more than three-fifths of their value since they were listed last November.

"We believe a buyback program is appropriate at this time, and it demonstrates the directors' confidence in the fundamentals of our business," Chief Executive Officer David Wei said in a statement.

While the global financial crisis is weighing on Alibaba, Beijing's $586 billion stimulus package announced last weekend could benefit the company since part of the package was aimed at increasing lending to China's small and medium manufacturers.

The chairman of a French technology company has called on France to learn from the election of Barack Obama and take concrete steps to end discrimination against France's minorities. Yazid Sabeg, the only ethnic Arab to head a French public company, published a “manifesto” in the influential French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche, calling for both private and public sectors to achieve “real equality” in France.

The election of Obama, he wrote, “highlighted the shortcomings of the French Republic and the gap that separates us from a country whose citizens have gone beyond the racial question to elect as president a man who happens to be black.”

Mr. Sabeg is the chairman of CS (Communications et Systèmes) Group, a technology company based in Paris. Born in Algeria and brought to France at age two by his dockworker father, Mr. Sabeg earned a PhD at the University of Paris before going into business. He has been an outspoken proponent of “positive discrimination” as affirmative action is often called in Europe.

While the election of Mr. Obama has been celebrated in France and elsewhere in Europe, it has also set off a debate about the lack of opportunity for people of color. Libération, a liberal daily, ran several sobering articles last week lamenting the failure of left or right to take action to end discrimination. There is just one black member of the French Assembly who does not represent an overseas territory and just four of Arab origin in the Senate. By most estimates just a dozen of France’s 2,000 mayors are nonwhite.

Since the racial riots in France in 2005, the government has promised to take steps to correct inequalities. Earlier this year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has appointed several women of immigrant backgrounds to the most diverse cabinet in France’s history, announced a plan to reduce the isolation of poor mostly-minority suburbs around France’s major cities by improving schools, job training, and public transportation. Mr. Sabeg has described these steps as "an empty shell."

Mr. Sabeg’s manifesto has drawn the support of a number of French political leaders and intellectuals. President Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, even wrote a front-page article in the same newspaper supporting his proprosal. In his article, Mr. Sabeg argues that affirmative action policies in the U.S. led to the creation of a black middle class. “With the arrival of Obama,” he wrote, “we can no longer argue that diversity is the enemy of merit or tolerate injustice as the consequence of the principle of equality.” French law forbids collecting data on the race and ethnic origin of citizens, which makes it difficult to track racial progress – or identify discrimination.

Mr. Sabeg called for pressure on all French political parties to subscribe to a commitment to diversity, on the French government to improve schools in deprived areas, and on private companies and the government to commit to hiring policies that will deliver results.

Periodic tests by the French media show that job candidates with identifiable ethnic names or addresses in poor areas are much less likely to be called for interviews than whites with identical credentials. Mr. Sabeg has said in the past that for several years his company was denied security clearance to do defense work for the French government because of malicious rumors that he had ties to Muslim militants.

In a survey for the Journal du Dimanche, 80 percent of respondents said they would vote for a black candidate for President of France, but just 58 percent would back an Arab.

If the economic news is generally bad, one bright spot is the state of online advertising. While the rate of growth of online ads is slowing, the sector is still expected to increase revenue by double digits in the coming year, according to the experts. 

The larger problem is that, despite all the hype, Internet ads are still barely 5 percent of all ad spending and this has huge consequences for popular Internet services like video and social networking.

The crowds were large and enthusiastic this week at ad:tech New York, a digital marketing conference. One measure of the optimism at a tech industry event is the amount of tchotckes being handed out; at ad:tech, the freebees were plentiful, if cheap.

Evan Neufeld, a vice president at comScore Brand Metrix, said that “media spending is going down,” but his research firm still estimates that online ads will grow 14.5 percent in 2009. That should be good news for a lot of companies that have invested in selling ads or providing ad networks on the Web.

The problem is that the total spending on the Web is still tiny. Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker slapped the audience with some harsh reality at San Francisco’s Web 2.0 Summit. Ms. Meeker, whose presentations are always full of hard facts and numbers, reviewed the sharp decline in market caps of the major industry sectors and predicted that technology spending and ad spending would also fall. But she noted that online advertising was the only ad sector whose growth is expected to remain positive for the rest of this year and into 2009.

When it comes to spending money to sell stuff, big advertisers still place most of their bets on television and magazines. Yes, certain parts of print still get a huge share of ad dollars despite the repeated obituaries. Online ads drew $21.6 billion in 2007 out of the total U.S. spending on advertising of $469 billion. Newspapers won $46 billion and broadcast TV $44 billion. Ms. Meeker pointed out that advertisers are spending $818 dollars per household in newspapers vs. $288 on the Web, a disparity that leaves a lot of room for growth.

Ms. Meeker noted that online social and search sites are, in her words, under-monetized, despite their explosive growth. YouTube, with 329 million users, has been growing its audience at a 52 percent annual rate. Facebook, with 161 million users, has more than doubled its audience in the last year.

With the global economy in recession, the next couple of years promise to be difficult for startups and even the well-established tech companies like Google. Many of the biggest names are “under-monetized”, not making anywhere near the revenue they should expect for the number of eyeballs they provide.

But as Ms. Meeker points out, CPM, the cost per thousand of viewers, is declining even as the number of viewers goes up. Ms. Meeker suggests that Skype, the Internet phone service provider owned by eBay, could be considered the world’s second biggest “carrier” after China Mobile. But Skype only collects $1.55 per registered user annually.

Ms. Meeker is optimistic here too. She says that historically, “eyes follow eyeballs, it just takes time.” Many companies will have to walk a fine line in the next year or two–and hope she is right.

The divorce heads off a possible conflict with Siemens, which provides IT services to industry. Recently FSC won an IT services contract with German car company Daimler and Fujitsu has indicated its intention to become a full-service provider of IT services as well as hardware and to compete better against companies like Hewlett-Packard and IBM.