HP sets sail with Plastiki
Everyone is invited to follow a unique adventure which inspires people to rethink waste as a resource. In September, a crew of experts, scientists and creatives will sail across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made out of plastic bottles and recycled waste products. This voyage is named “The Plastiki” taking inspiration from Thor Heyerdal’s 1947 expedition “The Kontiki.”
The Plastiki is a one-of-a-kind 60-foot catamaran created out of reclaimed plastic bottles, self-reinforced PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and recycled materials. Its voyage will be a one-way trip. When it reaches Sydney, the entire boat will be recycled.
During the voyage, the Plastiki vessel will pass through a number of environmentally sensitive regions, including the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, where plastic pollution twice the size of Texas has accumulated. HP is providing the Plastiki vessel with technology products that will be used to document and capture data from these regions to better understand the impact of pollution on the environment.
Keeping the nature of the project in mind, the Plastiki Expedition has been equipped with HP EliteBook 6930p notebooks. More than 90 percent of each HP EliteBook 6930p PC, by weight, is recoverable or recyclable. Follow the journey and interact with the Plastiki crew through www.adventureecology.com/theplastiki/.
Mobile accessories generate profits
According to a study from ABI Research, 66 percent of revenues earned from mobile handset accessories are generated in the aftermarket. This percentage is only expected to grow with time, following a market trend to move more and more accessories “out of the box” and onto retailers’ shelves.
“Mobile operators and mobile phone vendors see that the only return from including a subsidized accessory in the handset box is customer satisfaction,” commented industry analyst Michael Morgan. “While that isn’t without some intangible value, on the retail shelf an accessory is a high-margin product that will generate actual income.”
Because of this, aftermarket accessories will also show faster growth rates than those included “in-box.”
Currently, the most popular aftermarket accessories are memory cards and protective silicone carrying-cases or sleeves. Both result from the popularity of smartphones: their multimedia capabilities often demand extra memory capacity, and their high value encourages owners to take better care of them. This latter trend has clearly been initiated and driven by Apple’s iPhone.
Protection takes on even greater importance in some emerging markets, where most owners intend to resell their phones when they upgrade. Other regional factors in the accessories market are culturally determined, remarked Morgan: “While the belt-clip style of handset ‘holster,’ for example, is popular in North American and Western European markets, Asian consumers tend to prefer wrist- and neck-straps which provide greater visibility for the phones of the fashion-conscious, at lower cost.”
Fast-growing accessory groups include Bluetooth headsets and wired headsets for music listening, while others such as add-on GPS receivers are in decline as their functions are progressively moved into the handset itself.
Server market spending still down
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Forecast, customer spending in the worldwide server market is expected to decline 29.6 percent to $10.6 billion in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09). This represents the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year spending decline for servers and a further acceleration in the pace of worldwide market deterioration.
In total, IDC forecasts that the market will see eight quarters of year-over-year revenue declines and expects annualized 4-quarter rolling server spending will drop by 30.3 percent or $19.1 billion during the 2Q08 to 2Q10 period. Additionally, IDC believes 2Q09 represents the largest year-over-year server sending decline the market will experience in this negative business cycle as the rate of market decline improves significantly in the second half of 2009 and early 2010.
“IDC has lowered its 2Q09 forecast by 8.5 percent or nearly $1 billion from our previous forecast as the depth of the worldwide recession increased in the first half of 2009,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. “Although we are now forecasting a 22.1 percent year-over-year decline in server spending for 2009, the worst of the market contraction is behind us. In fact, by the end of the third quarter this year, nearly 90 percent of the cumulative market contraction will have been realized as the market begins exhibiting significant signs of stabilization.”
USB market to surge ahead
n Although the global recession will prompt a slight decline in USB-enabled device shipments this year, next-generation “SuperSpeed” technology will fuel the market over the next several years, reports In-Stat. SuperSpeed, USB’s new incarnation, will deliver 5Gbps, a tenfold improvement over high-speed USB.
“All PCs, and most PC peripherals have transitioned from full-speed to high-speed. Most of these devices will eventually transition to SuperSpeed, the only issue is the speed of the transition,” said Brian O’Rourke, In-Stat analyst. “For PC peripheral devices, the key will be how quickly SuperSpeed is integrated into the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and microcontrollers that are the brains of these devices.”
According to In-Stat, with over three billion devices shipped in 2008 alone, USB is the most successful interface ever. It has been broadly adopted across PCs, PC peripherals, consumer electronics (CE), communications and automotive devices. Consumer electronics devices with USB will rise at a 6.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2008 and 2013. Although mini-USB ports have not made significant progress as a connector on mobile phones, micro-USB ports are expected to become the dominant standard for connectors in mobile phones by 2013. USB in computer mice will remain the single highest volume PC peripheral category. SuperSpeed USB will represent over 25 percent of the USB market by 2013.
Australia future-proofs its network
According to a new report from Strategy Analytics, the National Broadband Network (NBN) recently announced by the Australian government, slated to deliver 100 Mbps Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service to 90 percent of Australian homes, will set the bar for other nations mulling publicly-backed networks.
The Australian government’s decision to proceed with an FTTP-based architecture, rather than with the less-costly Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) solution, is not without controversy — particularly in light of the current economic environment. Strategy Analytics estimates that, depending on the exact flavor of FTTP chosen, the cost differential between FTTP and FTTN customer acquisition costs ranges anywhere between 20 percent and 40 percent.
“While more costly, from a pure technology standpoint the FTTP solution is certainly more scalable and ‘future-proof,’” said Ben Piper, director of the Strategy Analytics Multiplay Market Dynamics service. “It leaves open the possibility of future hardware upgrades capable of delivering 1Gbps and beyond.”
Key to success of the initiative will be consumer uptake and willingness to pay a premium for a faster broadband service. The report estimates a 63 percent FTTP consumer take-up rate by 2020, translating into 5.2 million fiber subscribers in Australia. High definition and two-way video applications will be a primary driver for higher bandwidth requirements.
“While it may be difficult to create a demand profile necessitating a residential 100 Mbps service today,” said Piper, “looking five or ten years down the road, and at technologies already on road maps, it is clear that the functional limitations of DSL will be reached in short order.”
