As August draws to an end and the balmy summer days
draw to a close (and the kids go back to school), many businesses will look
towards getting back into full swing of things, the whole team back and rested,
chomping at the bit to push forward with the last quarter of the year.
Previously, I have mentioned ‘The Silly Season’, the part of the summer when
the media are often scratching around for good news stories, which can be a
great opportunity to grab a few column inches. Whilst that may be drawing to a
close, it also means that the audience for media coverage is also rising and
the benefits of placing a good story increase with it. Traditionally, the last
quarter is another popular part of the year for trade shows and product or
service launches (Apple is rumoured to be launching the new iPhone 5 this
autumn), so expectation is high from the press for exciting news stories. It’s
an ideal time to launch or re-launch a key PR push and at MCC we encourage our
clients to consider this as part of the wider PR campaign.
The sparring of smartphone heavyweights Samsung and
Apple came to head this week with a landmark US court decision on intellectual
property infringement, as reported by the BBC News website.
Samsung now faces having to make a $1billion (£665m) damages payment to Apple
and technology commentators are buzzing about the implications for consumers of
such legal rulings. Both companies have locked horns in courts around the
world, both claiming that the other has copied its technology. It’s perhaps an
inevitable repercussion of the level of rivalry between them, especially when
you consider their combined sales account for more than half of the worldwide
smartphone and tablet sales. The mobile sector has gone from a marginal one to
perhaps the key consumer IT market in only a few years and these kind of
judgements will inevitably help to shape the way we communicate in the future.
Whilst the technology giants squabble over market share, Australian
scientists have been promoting technology for far more altruistic reasons –
creating a bionic eye that is helping blind people to regain a degree of their
sight. As reported on the Telegraph
website, patient Dianne Ashworth is trialling the technology which promises to
restore at least some level of vision and could be a first step toward the
dream of restoring lost sight and giving blind people a greater degree of
independence.