Anyway, how can it be a definitive list if it doesn't include Sir Clive Sinclair's electric vehicle of the 80s, the C5? The C5 had a range between charges as low as six miles, and you had to pedal to get it to go up hills. Little wonder Sinclair Vehicles ended up bankrupt.

Maybe an electric vehicle is not considered a gadget though? How are you defining gadget? Wikipedia says, "A gadget is a device that has a useful specific practical purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology. In some circles the distinction between a gadget and a gizmo is that a gizmo has moving parts, whereas a gadget need not have them." Ah, so the C5 is more a gizmo than a gadget.

Surprisingly, there weren't many products that are technology or IT-related. The highest ranking techno-gadget, indeed, is the Sony MiniDisc player, ranked as the fourteenth most useless gadget. I must say I was a bit thrown by that one, too.

First off, it's not a British product yet the survey says it sought to find "Britain's Most Useless Gadgets", and secondly, I can't quite see why it is such a useless product.

It may not be easy to buy the latest albums on MiniDisc, it's true, and you could argue the technology has been made obsolete by the iPod and its ilk. But the fourteenth most useless gadget? More useless, according to the survey, than egg slicers, electric tin openers and towel warmers?

I might have to start a MiniDisc supporters club in protest, although I would feel something of a fraud as I confess I have never been the proud owner of a MiniDisc (though if I had, I would have been very, very proud, and not kept thinking what a useless gadget it was, honest).

Besides, a MiniDisc player has moving parts, so doesn't that make it a gizmo, and not a gadget?

Anyway, what was the most useless gadget according to the survey?...

“Long term, de-dupe is likely to become a storage fundamental, for all areas of storage,” Biles told me. It may be sooner than that...

Now that he is the chief strategy officer of BPM firm Cordys, it looks like that vision is finally turning into a reality.

I just noticed that there’s a beta programme underway at www.theprocessfactory.com, powered by Cordys. I’ve not seen any press releases on this so yeagh, you read it here first.

“We have released the Beta of The Process Factory Solution to a private group of beta testers,” it says on the site. “All beta testers will get full access to Online Composer, with which they can easily build and run process centric applications, right inside their browsers.”

It lists a whole host of sample business processes that it says users will be able to build using the Online Composer, from asset management, to case handling and sales quote approval. It will be interesting to see whether, assuming the beta is a success and it gets something usable into production, The Process Factory powered by Cordys could start to get up a head of steam in on-demand BPM that salesforce.com did in on-demand CRM.

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So what’s the plan? Why does a company that has the upper echelons of the storage market so neatly sewn up want to pay $213m for a storage company that’s mostly a consumer/prosumer play?

SOA means a lot of different things, depending on who you ask. Let's talk for a moment about SOA's role in the application development arena, which most would now term the application lifecycle.

Before SOA was introduced as a concept, there were plenty of problems in application development. I'm going to lump these into three areas: demand, delivery, and management. SOA doesn't fix any of them, in fact it can make them far worse.

First we need to establish what Carr actually said. He said that what he calls "infrastructural technologies" would become ubiquitous in the not-too-distant future. As he puts it, "as their availability increases and their cost decreases - as they become ubiquitous - they become commodity inputs."

But is becoming a commodity the same as no longer mattering -- of no longer holding any importance? I believe that Oracle’s acquisition of BEA for $8.5bn is just one proof-point for the fact that infrastructural technologies are anything but commodity.

Not only do they still matter, they matter more and more to companies for whom integration – between data, systems and applications – is the biggest thing holding back many strategic projects.

Carr is right that there is constant evolution in all areas of technology, and that technologies that once held competitive advantage become a little less of a differentiator once they are readily and cheaply available to all.

But even with technologies that have become commoditised by virtue of being cheaply and readily available, there is still the question of exactly how those technologies are applied. Even the best tools, if not woven successfully into the fabric of a firm’s business processes, have the potential to do more harm than good.

For example, a survey a couple of years ago of 600 employees at blue chip companies in the UK by Priority Management, found that 11% of employees consider email to be the cause of most disruption to their working day. But for many other staff, email clearly has the ability to dramatically boost productivity.

The other thing that Carr underestimates is the pace of change in IT. IT is not static. There are constant inventions, improvements and combinations of existing technologies that once again create the potential to boost competitive advantage. For every technology that Carr would say has become commoditized, another is around the corner that only early adopters will benefit from.

When Carr wrote his paper about infrastructural technologies becoming commoditised, for instance, the Enterprise Service Bus and the SOA Registry/Repository were just emerging. Today they are far more mature and perhaps even to some extent commoditised, yet they still matter to those who have built their SOA infrastructures around them.

As for technology as a whole, I believe it matters more, to more people, than ever. Here's why...

It’s not yet known just how much of a premium Microsoft is willing to pay for that exclamation mark at the end of Yahoo’s name, but analysts are already saying the exclamation mark was a “deal-maker” for Microsoft.

A senior Gartner analyst has been quoted as saying, “Look, Microsoft could have gone for Google since Micosoft’s market cap is over $287bn and Google is a miserly $121.3bn. But Google doesn’t have an exclamation mark in its trademark, and sources say that Gates and Ballmer particularly liked the impact and energy that the exclamation mark brings to Yahoo!’s brand.”

So for all the procedures in place about securing laptops to desks when in the office; not leaving them in cars or in the back of cabs while out of the office; or even about the levels of sensitivity of information that should be stored on laptops in the first place; none of these can ultimately prevent laptops getting lost or stolen.

The only answer now, indeed the only answer has always been, that any laptops containing sensitive information should be securely encrypted.

Finally, even the government and its various departments are starting to accept this. But this realization has come at a very heavy price: you only have to look at how HMRC lost two discs with 25 million people’s records on them, or the even more recent loss by the Ministry of Defence...

Classmate PC is Intel's low-cost mini-laptop, geared for school children. Intel confirmed that the OLPC board asked it to stop supporting non-OLPC platforms.

The chipmaker initially resisted joining OLPC, which currently distributes a $200 mini-laptop called XO that is powered by a microprocessor from Intel's chief rival Advanced Micro Devices...

What will 2008 have in store for enterprise IT?

I am glad that London Underground is improving its signals. I am even glad that they utilize otherwise-lucrative billboard space in order to tell us so: after all, you have to be seen to be improving, rather than just improving.

But I am less heartened by the fact that the massive message contained not one, but two glaring grammatical errors. Firstly, it should have been “improved signals mean”, not “improved signals means”.

Also, it should have read, “mean fewer delays”, not “mean less delays”.

In fact, for any cynics who travel regularly on the tube – and let’s face it, travelling on the tube can turn the most glad-of-heart optimist into a cynic after a short while -- the corrected sentence should read: “Improved signals likely to make little difference. Only fewer people or greater capacity could result in less overcrowding.”

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Firstly, why does the Guardian see the need to publish content by the TV critic of the Mirror? Don’t get me wrong, I like his ShelleyVision columns a lot. I just find it a little odd that they are published in the Guardian. Wouldn’t that be like my own esteemed organ, CBR, publishing a column by the columnists of rival magazines? Why would I, or indeed the Guardian, want to do that?

In case you missed it, we’ve posted the stories into our Business Intelligence Analysis Center, which you can find on the left of our home page.

But to make it even simpler for you to find all of the articles, I’ve created a mini contents page for you down below: now isn’t that what you call organised!

How to put your data to work

What’s in your basket? A look at BI in retail.

Brave new world: a look at enterprise search

Making the business case for BI investment

Q&A with business intelligence experts

Technology focus: the different approaches to BI

Café Nero case study: why they implemented Cognos, and what they achieved by doing so.

Power to perform: from BI to performance management

Safe & secure: lessons learned from the HM Revenue and Customs data debacle

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The report is on business intelligence, and you probably don’t need me to tell you what a hot topic that is right now. Little wonder that over $15bn worth of acquisitions have been consummated in just four deals this year: Oracle buying Hyperion, SAP buying Business Objects, Cognos buying Applix and then IBM buying Cognos.

The report looks at the latest trends in BI: the move towards performance management; the rise of enterprise search from the likes of Autonomy, FAST and Google Enterprise; the sophisticated use of BI in the retail sector and even how to justify investment in business intelligence technologies.

There’s a roundup of the latest news, and some thought-provoking factoids – for example that the term business intelligence was first used in the context in which we now use it, in an article in 1958 written by H.P.Luhn in the IBM Journal.

CBR co-produced it with those nice people at Special Report Publishing. It features comment from many of the experts in the BI field, and even takes a look at how companies can avoid a major data loss such as that experienced by Nationwide with the loss of a laptop early this year, or HMRC and its two missing computer discs.

Anyway, check it out tomorrow, and be sure to let me know what you think.

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