Olympic Legacy and Future?

What do you do once the Olympics is over? For most of us it’s a period of adjustment from wall to wall sport back to normal life, but what about the technology that was used to support the event? Does it merely return to the sponsors, or get sold off cheap, or even donated to the needy?

Acer plans dispose of some 500 "Olympic" laptops to school children in North East London and the remaining 15,900 computers they used in London 2012 will be sent to schools around the UK. The London laptops will be given out in partnership with the e-Learning Foundation charity  to eight local primary schools in the "Olympic boroughs". A number will also go to Great Ormond Street Children's hospital, which we all remember featured in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony.

The PCs that were used for planning travel to supporting broadcaster will first be wiped and refurbed by Acer. Acer will then sell them to the schools at 17% of list with a years guarantee. Special "Used in the Olympics" stickers will remain on them for the kids to enjoy.

So the PCs will be one of the first legacy deals from the London Olympics. 

But what about Rio and 2020?

Olympic and Paralympic IT partner,  Atos have produced a report, ‘ Ascent at London 2012: A vision for sport and technology’ . This far reaching vision aims to prepare  the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) for the impact of technology at the 2020 Olympics and future.

It predicts that one of the greatest innovations will be the potential use of holograms at live events. This could even pitch previous Olympians against the best on the day.

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Technology is already starting to impact how we watch sport such as Formula 1 and holograms of dead musicians have even appeared at music concerts. Information is also key to understanding events and performance and feeding this to the individual in a customised form offers much to engage even further with the paying audience. The audience could benefit also from being able to access behind the scenes footage, different camera shots , all fed on demand and over a local network service in the stadium.

Sport like space, medicine and warfare is now starting to push technology into areas we could have only dreamt of previously. We wondered whether the 2020 games legacy will not be a computer but a hologram teacher in the local schools!

Acer Tablet Cometh

Tablets are to become the device of 2011 and the choice will be wide but they will all be chasing the iPad. Among the Android followers is Acer's 10” which is rumoured to be powered by Nvidia's dual-core Tegra 2 platform. A number of leaked videos start to show some of the things in store such as the tablet's gyroscope to allow touch-free page turns and for zooming in and out of photographs without using fingers allowing the user to flip through pages merely by tilting the tablet from side to side.

These may not be great videos but they show some of the many crude demos we are going to get from CES next month!

New iRex But Same Old Song

Sony one day now iRex has released details of a new and better ebook reader. The picture is a mock up release, but we know that it will have a 8.1” eink touchscreen and be released in the last quarter of this year.

The feature that grabs the attention is that has 3G wireless connectivity which means that it doesn’t need to be tethered to a PC. No carrier has been announced, nor are there details of the supporting ebook store or stores capable of the direct connection.

However, iRex is not without models and against their competitors are on the pricy side. This new model is probably not going to prove the exception. When Sony have just launched cheaper models to get mass adoption, iRex have now to either follow that lead or risk, even with wireless, being left on the shelf.

So is the ereader battles becoming clearer or just starting?

Acer , the world’s 3rd largest maker of PCs, has announced that it will expand into televisions and electronic books. It is reported to be waiting until the market develops before it releases an ebook. You may ask why and the answer is down to volume and we would expect similar Computer manufacturers to follow a similar path when the economics are right.

So as a consumer you have to make some hard decisions, in what are still hard times. Do you buy a device that today is clearly not the end product and could well be superseded within months of purchase, or wait? Do you buy into a device which may be tethered to a carrier or a specific service and book source, or do you wait for interoperability? Like any early technology, when do you buy and expect to write it off? When do you make that heavy investment and transfer your collection, or do you play safe and buy as you read?

We fear that the current ebook reader wars may be raising the consumer awareness but are also adding to their apprehension. The price of the books may be stabilising at $9.99 but the price of the devices isn’t, the service is not standard, the range is inconsistent and eink is still akin to black and white tv in today’s full colour HD world.

Finally, the eink players are banking heavily on news and magazines driving demand and that is understandable. However, where once digital may have been free News Corps words this week that this is not sustainable and has to change means that it could impact how ereaders develop and the service constraints that support them.

The Devices are a Changin

When the economy and consumer spending slows down then hard choices usually follow. We all may want the biggest and most expensive, but when given a reality check, common sense often prevails. PC PRO today reports that the shift to spending on netbooks is continuing apace and that they now account for three out of ten consumer laptop sales in Europe.3.6 million netbooks were sold in Europe in the last quarter of 2008 and Western Europe accounted for more than 80% of overall European sales. Acer with 30.3% and Asus with 28% dominate the market with the likes of HP. Dell and Samsung collectively only having some 17.9%. Clearly consumer are deterred by ‘cheaper’ and newer brands and the ‘old guard is slowly changin’.

What is interesting is that the demand todate has been predominantly consumer driven but as notebook specifications improve, 3G is integrated, the screen size increases to 10” and times gets tighter it is easy to envisage notebooks exploding onto the business sector.

Asus has already stated that it will have a Eee PC with touchscreen running on Windows 7 by the summer. As we have written many times it is now easy to predict that the consumer media battleground will be between the notebook and smartphone. The laptop will survive but will be the heavy duty engine and its portability become less appealing. Dedicated media players such as games will have to fight on the enriched experience ticket and ereaders will suffer as they become marginalised and become increasingly one dimensional, eink constrained and neither one think or the other. The other big threat to the ereaders is that you can do what they do on every other device but they can’t do what ever other device does.