broadstuff

This is a thought we have been mulling over ever since we attended the BBC Innovation Labs, and after reading Sam Sethi's post on Incubation in Vecosys we thought it was time to put some thoughts down.

Since we set up Broadsight we've worked with quite a few cutting edge startup companies, some more established technology companies, and people doing cutting edge work in larger companies. We've also chatted to many startups in the various UK events like FOWA 07, Open Coffee, Beers & Innovation etc.

The stories we hear have a number of very common threads:

- The propositions and their business models, albeit often in different sectors, are usually fairly similar, there are definitely comman "groups" of models.

- The platform requirements are also fairly similar (Web / CMS / Social net / Ad Server / Analytics)

- The attempts to get early stage funding are all depressingly similar - its very hard and time consuming - Angel Aggregation alone is hard, never mind getting the cash.

- By and large their requirements are fairly similar (even of the stuff they don't know that they need such as design for scaling) - space, support, senior management, service platforms etc

This would all suggest that an Incubation model has real benefits - centralised resources and support, an ability to aggregate those flighty Angels.

However, all (are there any left?) the UK Incubators in Web 1.0 imploded after the popping of Bubble 1.0, yet startups continued to start up - so what is wrong with the Incubator model? Now (and this marks us as fogeys I guess ) we were all around in Web 1.0, and knew of many of the Incubators in Web 1.0 in the UK, and some in the US.

Off the top of the head, the 4 things about UK incubators that (in our opinion anyway) doomed them were:

- In Too Late - most UK Incubators started far too late in the cycle, and this drove their behaviour - the other 3 failures I note below were largely driven by being in too late, and most were caught with their eggs largely unhatched. In fact the "in too late" seems to be a fairly standard occurrence in UK tech ventureland......it is impossible to get funding when the new markets are in early stage, and then there is "follow the pack" funding once markets are "validated" - ie everyone else is doing it already. There was a McKinsey study c 2002 that showed that even in the USA, the VCs / Incubators etc that entered after c 1998 all lost money (I can't lay hands on it right now, will link as soon as it is found).

- Excessive overheads - they were spending way too much - this is probably because too often the Incubation business models were predicated on taking companies off for an IPO pop too early (due to late entry). Endeth the Bubble, endeth the business model.

- Trying to pick winners. The big difference I noticed between the US and the UK was pithily put by Esther Dyson - in the US, they fund a lot of crazy ideas early. The role of the Incubator is to incubate and let the market pick. (Esther did note that in Europe, because funding is so hard, if you get it there is a more open road - a good reason to get in early in Incubation 2.0! )

- Poor risk / reward for the entrepreneur - in general the combination of valuation, ownership, interference by wishing to "add value" and justify the fees, foisting unsuitable senior execs on the companies too early (to get the IPO pop accelerated) etc etc made many entrepreneurs extremely wary eventually.

In the "post incubation" era we've taken a few startups to funding and also worked with a few companies left picking up the pieces from their "Web 1.0" startup hangovers, and the impression I am left with from Funding UK is (no doubt deeply unfairly) almost a dual mode behaviour:

Mode 1 (early days) - If its new tech, don't fund it - its too risky and hard. Would fail Flickr test (ie would these guys have funded Flickr). Result is that the Technology does not get out early enough

Mode 2 (bubble mode, when every other Funder is chasing the same stuff) - Fund anything that moves, including the nth Iteration of Flickr, and overfund it in the hope it will grow to be No 1.

To be fair, the funders we have worked with have in our view now taken these early risks, but it was sometime painful going - everyone wants a level of analytic certainty that just does not occur in the early days of products just (or in process of being) invented, for markets that do not exist.

These thoughts above were put down as a quick lunch starter , further thoughts/ comments were:

- On Incubator 1.0 from an old friend who was there - essentially his view was that it was inextricably linked with Bubble 1.0 - many of the people who were setting up Incubators were more interested in the bandwagon than actually creating great businesses.

- From Mike Butcher's tbites - noting the Channel 4 program on Bubble 2.0. Though it was over the top, the raw material was definitely there!

Two further comments by people who were there first time around:

- Many of the people running the Incubators had never set up a start-up in their lives, they were typically financiers of some description or another who were fairly recently into internet technology. When things got tough, the only solution they seemed to have to any problem was to fire the supposed (ir)responsible party - even the CEO, and put in a new one of their choosing - often at exorbitant cost.

- The UK incubators couldn't provide the quality of advice and access that US players like Idealab could, and never really solved the access to funding problem, and in fact many of the other benefits of incubation could be fairly easily self provisioned once it became clearer what an early startup needed to do.

Nonetheless, there are some definite benefits to incubation environments. Our experience at the BBC Innovation labs and at various Mashup type events is that if there is a level of camaraderie and collegiate behaviour, and good facilitation, then ideas and plans can be accelerated fairly rapidly and blind alleys avoided.

Following on from yesterday's thoughts on the v$15 mobile, there is an interesting article in The Economist this week on Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.

This is an area we've worked in - on and off - for years, from early pre-RFID systems and on. What is getting very interesting now is what has been getting interesting for Human 2 Human comms as well, namely the rapid reduction in costs of device, transport and infrastructure allied with a rapid rise in bandwidth and penetration.

Enter ubiquitous m2m comms....

This of course has been talked about for a long while, with tiny communicating sensors in every device, no matter how insignificant (I recall playing with smart clothing in BT labs 7 or so years ago)

However, what strikes me about this, and the the Economist article didn't really capture, is the impact on overall logistics and distribution systems. Not simple RFID systems, but on entire supply chains.

We did a piece of work about 2 years back on the potential of a new logistics and distribution software package that used some very serious maths to optimise the logistics - because you can - with all that incoming data.

To quote Brian Eno......

But if you study the logistics
And heuristics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line

...or in this case the mystics and heuristics of logistics....and indeed, they were using Geometric programming and various modern mathematical techniques - again, because they can with the cost of cycles these days.

But Eno went on to note that....

So its much more realistic
To abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped on a leaf in a vine.

At the time this was also semi true because integrating RFID, Internet, etc in international logistics nets was suboptimal and expensive...but even in these few years things have moved on apace, so I suspect these sort of apps are much closer now...and of course very Green, given (in theory) the wasted air-miles (miles spent transporting air in trucks) that can be saved....

Forget the iPhone.....at a talk last week at the London Technology Network, mention was made of the projections for a $15 mobile 'phone by c 2008.

Hit that with Moore's Law and its a c $5 'phone by 2011 or so...a total commodity.

So the question is, what happens when price points such as these are reached?

Firstly, there are already more 'phones than people in many OECD countries. Secondly, at these prices most of the rest of the world will be wired. There is also quite a lot going on in the developing world with low cost Internet phones, driven by their own needs to have mobile devices which are first and foremost internet devices.

Leads to 2 interesting thoughts:

(i) In the OECD, phones at this price will be attached to things, not people - ThingPhones. All manner of devices will be talking...assuming they can afford to make the calls....

(ii) In the developing world, will the need for real IP connectivity drive Mobile Web 2.0 adoption before the developed world's Telcos tear down their walled gardens? This is a topic in itself to be dealt with in another blog.

Taking ThingPhones, one of the other speakers (BP) noted that the uses for ThingPhones in industrial plants was potentially very high, but a combination of regulatory strictures and operators disinterest made it impossible to run such Manufacturers' Virtual Network Operation services.

In addition this makes it hard to integrate seamlessly with the world of RFID devices.

Clearly if the Operators can't agree to help in these areas then WiFi et al will go in by default, even though they are less reliable in such environments - yet another market (after email, music etc) the Mobile Operators leave open to penetration by inaction?

(This post was delayed in being posted up due to the SNAFU system in our backoffice infrastructure - I forgot to save it

Looks like the beta test of using voice on Second Life will be rolled out.

This is very interesting for expanding Second Life as more than a sex site with user generated environments and the ability to colour in your own trainers. (OK, OK there is more to it than that....though sometimes one wonders !! )

We have blogged before on the huge potential for 3D social network sites, both for consumer and business use, and the ability to add voice does make a huge difference to the overall experience - as anyone who has used voice to play World of Warcraft will confirm..

As Philip Linden (aka Rosendale) put it:

"There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can't tell who's talking if there's more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it," said Rosedale, noting that avatars with three-dimensional voice integration will likely accelerate using Second Life for holding virtual conference meetings.

Of course this will also increase its...utility?.....as a driver of Porn 2.0 too

I wonder how long it will take Habbo Hotel to add voice to its Habbits.....?

One to watch........

Autonomy is spinning out the consumer arm of its search technology and will float on AIM (aka get a tranche of money in a heating up Tech market). This technology allows audio and video search.

In essence they will demerge their "consumer" technology, roll it into Blinkx, a consumer search company they have invested some $12m in over the years which they will also take over, and then float the new entity on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM).

Simple then....no matter what Wired says (see previous article)

The FT comments on it here. They note that:

The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.

The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.

Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.

So - take an existing brand and customers in the USA, add sexy new technology area, promise losses, but dangle Ad funded business model for a great future - a made-for-float company !

Last time round the NASDAQ was where it mainly all happened....but is that now too regulated for these sort of plays? Will AIM be the NASDAQ for Bubble 2.0?

(Postscript - GigaOm says it more bluntly here and here)

April Edition of Wired Mag talks about 6 trends impacting the Tech sphere today:

1. Desktop Rest In Peace

This charts the move from email to webmail, noting that a McKinsey study says 61% of co’s plan to use Software OAS in 2007, up from 37%, and there is a rapid increase in different Net connected devices (the Digital Mess). It also notes the huge amount of user analytics possible in webservices.

Our take - yes, it is on the up and is the "outsourcing endgame" - but in our view infrastructure is still not at a point where a CIO should hand over business critical functions to SOAS without an ability to operate stand alone, and controllable backup

2. Two Way Talk

This is essentially that shocking idea of listening to customer all the way throughout the process, mostly used today by online co’s Benefits incude "network lockin" driving higher loyalty, and lower sensitivity to price - but has a much larger flipside if you piss off highly networked customers. In addition this is driving "feedback engines", typically as recommendations, and increasing the need for storefront interactivity.

Our take - In the 80's this was known as capturing the "moments of truth" of the customer experience, so nothing new - its just that its a lot easier to do with broadband internet - which is also making it easier to find alternatives and churn
.
3. Merge with care

The assertion- Formal marriage (aka JV’s etc) is passé – temporary hookups are the thing now between big players, with early acquisition rather than risky internal "diy" of new stuff.

Our take - its timing....everyone is experimentig right now as the whole area is new - when things become clearer then mergers etc will be back on the menu. Also teh article doesn't talk about the amazing prices that have been payed for a few buys, well in excess of the cost of build.

4. Fat pipes (Bandwidth is Destiny)

Apparently traffic on Level 3's broadband network was up 75% in 2006, video and audio sites (Youtube et al) are causing growth. 90% of Korean 20 somethings have a Cyworld avatar

This is really the main driver of the New Media....many things that are now occurring were conceptualised in Web 1.0, if not before - but fell down on low and expensive bandwidth with low penetration.

5. Green power

The US is starting to understand the endgame of no oil security, and is now seriously seeking alternatives - leading to volume production and thus economies of scale in alternative energy sources kicking in (e.g. solar energy). There is also an interesting trend that Nuclear popularity is rising - among politicians anyway.

Our take - undoubtedly a trend, and the 'Net can help here - but it is worrying that big business, green fundamentalists and the governments are all on one side here - beware the little people!

6. Getting Naked with The "See through CEO"

This is essentially a long piece about the rise of openness in businesses as a way of increasing customer trust (a New PR play in essence)....the ClueTrain manifesto in Case Studies.

Though they also claim hiring bloggers is Tired and firing ‘em is Wired......

Two trends in techspace we think they missed:

One is the rise of the opportunities and issues around User Identity - the risks from fraud, the emerging distrust that people are feeling towards the amount of analytics the large players are using (Ie the loss of privacy) and yet the high potential benefit to the user.

Second is the evolution of the way business can organise itself - globalisation of knowledge work (aka cheap knowledge workers), the rise of webworking, project based models, the start of lean / agile thinking using new tools - all promises to be an "interesting" time in the way we work.

So it looks like us Londoners may finally be able to get full Wifi coverage across the City at least (see coverage at GigaOm, the BBC and Vecosys)

This one is being set up by The Cloud.

However, unlike some examples of municipal wi-fi, this network will not be free. It is available to a variety of providers who will charge customers a range of fees to log on. Prices such as £12 / month are being bandied around - though Nokia is offering a free first month, though its unclear if strings are attached.

But anything that drops the price of commercial WiFi in London is good news (£30-40 per month, c £4 -6 per hour at a PAYG rate), as at present it doesn't really compete with 3G cards (c £20 - £25pm but far more flexible location wise) and compared with c £1 - 2 / hour in an Internet cafe (and double that at free wifi coffee houses, but the coffee is much better!).

Some people also doubt the usefulness of all this, as its mainly for outside use - it remains to be seen whether it is usable in coffee shops, train stations etc. The BBC article notes that:

...is there really that much demand for open-air surfing? After all, staring at a laptop screen in the sunshine is not a great experience - especially in an area where so many cafes have wi-fi access.

.......

It's hard to see why well-paid City workers would bother with the extra effort needed to make a wi-fi call - but the City of London Corporation believes it will prove attractive to migrant workers on construction sites.

Not to mention Twitterbugs who can then get a real time river of drivel on the go......

However, there are countertrends..in a BBC report they note that
the Pew Internet and American Life Project survey asked 798 US internet users about their wireless habits and sampled almost 2,300 people overall and found that:

While 54% of internet users check e-mail "on the typical day," 72% of wireless users check daily.

Just under half of wireless users get news online every day, compared to 31% of internet users at large.

So...Wireless 'net users clearly are more Wired than wired 'net users.

Now what really does interest us about this is the opportunity for location based services - the trouble with Planet Mobile is anything to do with Data on 'Phones is extortionate, including location services (ergo there aren't any). But this changes the dynamic, perhaps?

And of course who needs Mobile TV when there is WiFi Web TV....that should be an interesting tradeoff!

This post is about talent in a user generated content world. It's sort of influenced by the Digitise or Die talk earlier in this week, a piece in the Washington Post I read about on Guy Kawasaki's blog, and a TV program the kids are fascinated by, the search for a Joseph (as in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat).

Take the Washington Post story first. Guy summarises it:

Basically, the Washington Post convinced a world-class violinist named Joshua Bell to act like a street musician to see how many people would stop to listen to him play and how many would donate money.

He would play his $3.5 million violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713. It must be a helluva of violin because it has a name: “Gibson ex Huberman.” The Violin Maker is filled with stories of how violins come to be named, by the way. (Should I give my MacBook Pro, made by Steve Jobs circa 2006, a name?)

Bell played pieces like “Partita in D minor for solo violin,” the Johann Sebastian Bach composition. To summarize: this experiment involved a world-class musician playing Bach on a Stradivari in a Washington D.C. Metro station at 7:51 for forty-five minutes one Friday morning while approximately 1,097 commuters walked past.

What do you think happened?

The answer is that he went unrecognized and unrewarded. What does this mean? Maybe that people make assessments about quality based on context and the rest of the herd. (The Violin Maker mentions a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how another world-class musician played a concert with a cheap violin, and the audience had no idea that he did so.) Or, maybe it illustrates what happens to people who are around politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers all the time…

And then there was the Digitise or Die discussion at the London Book Fair.....one of the issues noted was the increasing production of "beans books" - basically crap written by slebs to sell on the shelves of supermarket booksellers like tins of beans, to be consumed like tins of beans. This is apparently threatening to drive out the more delicate and beautiful literary flowers - the Literary Long Tail.

There was another point made by the CEO of Faber that essentially blogging was great because it relieved them of having to wade through the huge amount of manuscripts of earnest attempts by wannabe writers, as all these people were now writing it in the blogosphere.

....and making movies and podcasts and music, and distributing it over the New Digital media.

So are these wannabes untalented? Not necessarily. Firstly, as Guy points out, talent is about context. There are enough similar stories about wine cognoscenti fooled by plonk, art panels by kids and chimps etc etc - fame is very context driven, but talent is different, its about ability.

But its also about opportunity.

The "Joseph" search essentially allowed many people - from enthusiastic amateurs to trained singers and thespians - to take part in a national search for a person to play the role of Joseph in the musical. After screening auditions they whittled it down to about 40 and in various (televised) rounds it's being whittled down further, its now at about 11.

Sure there is a lot of drama in the whittling process, but the thing that hit me last week in the last 12 run-off was pretty much all those people were pretty damn good, and their backgrounds were pretty random - clerks, brickies and supermarket attendants as well as trained people among the finalists.

Point being that there are a lot of people out there who, for various reasons don't have access / know how / etc and in the past would never have got heard. In other words, "talent" is far more common than we think, the issue is giving it access. Traditional Media, with its (artificially?) high access costs, has tended to create an artificially high value for talent, and has tended to reward those who could pay the price to access that media, rather than talent per se.

What is happening with the New Media is cost of access is falling, and thus more of the talent pool will out - the closed shop is being prised open.

That this is potentially disrupting the traditional Meedja system is a given, much e-ink has been spilled on that...what is more interesting is what it means going forward.

Does it mean that the value of talent will fall, or does it mean that value is constant but everyone will only get their 15 minutes of fame before the next one comes in?.

Or will this just mean that the New Media will follow form and eventually be "stitched up" by people who can pay the New Prices - who have made early reputations, have access to Big Media, to marketing funding etc etc.

So...step one is to incentivise all the talent. If today's rights systems are unworkable, or lead to unwanted outcomes, how to make it work for them?. But how can all those 12 Josephs be incentivised to let their talent shine?

In my view today's Rights systems are more about keeping current aggregators' value artificially high - the actual amount of money in the chain that goes to the talent is quite small in most cases - so large swathes of cost can theoretically be removed without actually disincentivising the talent....and in theory some of that surplus could go to fund more talent

ie if for eg music was 1/2 the price would one spend less or buy twice as much (I would buy twice as much) and if the artist still got roughly the same amount thats twice the number of artists supported per $ or £ spent

For this to work, it is key to be able to find that talent at a lower search cost than today...(I will take it as read that cost of music production is massively lower, by definition)

Traditionally, artistic media have tended to follow power laws (eg Zipf's Law), driven (sometimes manipulated) by the way our social networks tend to select according to what other people are doing - ie for mass popularity - the tyranny of democracy.

Great for governing, less great for discovering great talent. Can search engines or social media help?

Sheer volume makes it harder to find those fascinating niches through all the noise - there is some evidence of this even now in emergent mediums such as the blogosphere, where early-in players continue to grow simply by being easy to find, but do not necessarily have the highest quality content anymore.

Sadly, the "big" search and social media sites seem to be increasingly "gamed", so are becoming less efficient - the signal to noise ratio is going down.

But all the while a lot of us are continuously out there discovering this new talent over the web - new writings, new music, new videos - but how do those who like what we like find us, and how do we find those who are finding the stuff we like in an increasingly congested and gamed space? If we can't the risk is we increasingly get channelled down the massed paths of the dominant social networks.

So if today's (fairly crude) social media technology is now part of the problem, how do we tweak it to be part of the solution?

How to harness our own Inner A&R Men in this search?

It seems to me, at any rate, that there will need to be an emergence of trusted "taste aggregators", people (or social subnetworks) who can be relied on to find great talent that I will like. This is not the same as "Friends of Friends" networks, nor "Peopel who bought this also boiught that" systems - it needs to be more discerning and thus needs some form of "ungameable" critical input.

This is not an argument for going back completely to the Old Media's "editing" function, but it does seem that the optimum is some sort of approach that actively prevents the re-emergence of strong power laws in talent recognition and navigation, as clearly the level of talent in the Long Tail is far far higher than the "traditional" models would have us believe.

To make it work, seems to me that it needs:

- more sophisticated knowledge about me
- a capability for serendipity that is (imho) missing in most of todays social networks
- a certain ability to be "discerning" - anyone patented "discerningness" yet?
- higher levels of proof against "gaming" by vested interests or payola plays

Thoughts?

One of the (many) things you may not know about us is that over the last few months we have been helping develop the content delivery systems for a brand new eBook proposition, so it was interesting to go along to this talk during this London Book Fair week.

Authors Margaret Atwood and Andrew O'Hagan, Faber CEO Stephen Page and Times literary editor Erica Wagner talked about the future of the book in the digital age.

To summarise.....overall it felt to like a paean for the return of the Old Media, a remembrance of things past. Although I never attended the Guardian Future of Media summit it had the same ring about it judging from the blog posts. For example there were no digital mediarati (like us, or maybe even Amazon at a push in on the panel), so there was not really the input from that side until Question Time.

Nonetheless, there were a number of points that came up that were quite interesting. Its probably useful to split the discussions into three areas, viz:

- The future of the book as a technology for reading text
- The future of the book as a thing flogged by booksellers
- The future of the book as a way of authors making money (aka copyright)

The future of the book as a technology for reading text was in my view best expressed by Margaret Atwood in her talk "the death of the scroll" - she noted that if history is anything to go by, new tech (eBooks etc) will be adopted if they solve a problem, and will then coexist with Old Tech for quite a while, and the Old Guard will tut about the New Stuff all that while - it was ever thus.

Her view was that an e-Reader will only really replace a book when you can drop it in the bath and it still works (must pass that tip on to the product design team....)

She also asserted that book reading is a more neurologically effective way of taking in and assimilating data....I haven't been able to corroborate this yet though.

There was also quite a passionate discussion about the physical joys of actually owning and interacting with a physical book - riffling, smelling, scribbling - clearly some fetishes going on there - and quite a subtle point was made (by Andrew O'Hagan I think), in that physical book ownership tends to push you to exploring the canon of works by an author, whereas Amazon etc pushes you to explore "books like this that others have bought" - which can be useful but can also link books you buy for yourself plus the one you bought for retired Uncle Bob.

The future of the book as a thing flogged by booksellers really (in my view) resolves itself into the discussion about how the "long tail" is to be found and sold, ie how best to serve the many literary niche audiences - via digital media or books.

(Note - at no point was the term Long Tail ever used in any of the presenters' talks....thats how little "digerati" input there was, until I asked about it specifically in the Q&A)

Stephen Page's view was that the Long Tail is best handled right now by the ability to print on demand, but over time the more the niches are pulled out of teh book supermarkets, the harder it will get to find physical niche books.

It would seem that partly in response to Amazon etc, large commercial booksellers are stacking "books like beans" and it is harder and harder to get niche (aka quality) literature. One of the corollaries of this has been the increased manufacture of "beans" - large amounts of "crap books", typically by slebs - to the point that to be a successful author the last talent you probably need is good writing skills - fame is the thing.

There was also quite a long discussion on the death of niche forms like the essay, and literary criticism (which they differentiated from literary review)...but no comments about the blogosphere, where criticism - literary and otherwise - certainly abounds, as do essays and many other media forms. (There was some disagreement on the state of poetry.....interesting to know why it has become resurgent if true - has the 'Net had an impact?)

The last - and most emotive - area was about Copyright and DRM, and is clearly what literature is really all about - Andrew O'Hagan quoted an Edith Wharton character:

"A keen sense of copyright is the nearest thing she has to emotion"

Needless to say the Internet is (mainly) a Bad, Bad thing for Literature - you've heard it all before....but the reference to Ghougle - a ghoul that reduces all literature to searches of lumps of text - was an interesting allusion

I thought two interesting points were made here though:

Firstly, copyright as a quality assurance tool - editing is a craft, and its supposed replacement, social media - the tyranny of the most popular - does not really replace it.

Secondly, many people see publishers as the Evil Aggregator - but the truth is that they arose because writers wanted people to "monetise" their talents. ( Margaret Atwood noted that publishers were a 20th century phenomenon, and that the 'Net may have removed the need for their role)

Overall though, the sense I was left with was that Olde Literature, like Olde Audio and Olde Video, are still not really grasping, grappling with and grabbing the opportunities from the emergence of the Digital Media.

Other writeups are a detailed one here, and others here, here and here

Never mind having to turn your phones off in-flight to stop them damaging aircraft navigation systems, there is a major kerfuffle emerging over new research that seems to show that mobile phone transmissions damages bees' navigation too.

This piece in The Independent is a fairly typical summary.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Its an awesome plot for a Sci-Fact novel, I assume Michael Crichton is writing as we speak

Admittedly the research is in the early days, a number of other causes have been proposed (GM crops, increased sunspot activity, Global Warming, new parasites - you name it, its there) and as you may imagine, the Mobile Phone industry has been quick off the mark to scotch all this.

Also its not clear why TV and radio signals have not had this impact over the last 50 years or so, though it has been known that bee behaviour is significantly altered near powerlines.

But, as bees pollinate a fairly large proportion of our food (not to mention the wild flora) this is a potentially very serious outcome. And in the tradeoff between food and 'fone, its clear which takes precedence.

Will we thus see "Mobile Free" zones in agricultural areas ?

(hmmm...could do with that in enclosed public places too, like we are seeing for smoking......)

Is this time for the Great Cell Phone sell-off? Not yet time to short mobile phone stocks perhaps, but one to watch carefully.......