On the walk from Oxford Circus tube station to the Computing office in London’s Soho, there is a Carphone Warehouse shop. It is normally unremarkable – except today at 9am there was a queue of (mainly male) people outside, apparently eager to be the first to buy the new 3G iPhone, out today.

Well, you might have thought, there’s a popular product. The last times there were queues in Oxford Street were for the opening of a new Primark store and the latest Harry Potter book.

But in this case, there also happened to be a camera crew set up outside the phone shop to film the queue. And another camera crew inside, no doubt waiting to film the “rush” of punters to get their hands on an iPhone.

Hmm. In-demand, or very carefully stage managed? I think the latter.

Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have done a great PR job on the new phone – creating the illusion of massive demand regardless of how many units they will ship.

Newspaper stories this morning claimed that supply was limited to one iPhone per customer, or two per business. Given the big bucks Apple is chasing by establishing the product as an genuine corporate alternative to the BlackBerry, this is hardly likely to be the case.

Imagine the conversation: “Hi Apple, I’m the IT manager at [insert global multinational company]. I’d like to buy 10,000 iPhones please.”

“Sorry Mr Global Multinational. You can only have two.”

Yeah, right.

It’s become classic consumer electronics marketing – create a buzz around a product by making people think everyone is desperate to own one.

In the case of the new iPhone, it probably needs the buzz. After all, the great new features of the second-generation product include 3G connectivity for faster web surfing – already available in, erm, every other product on the market. And an online store of 900 ready-to-download consumer and business applications to help make your smartphone more functional.

Or you could buy a Symbian-based phone and download any of the 9,000-plus applications already developed for that platform.

Oh, and the iPhone costs a bomb.

Perhaps I’ve been in this game too long and the cynicism has set in after seeing too many product launches, but if anything is more likely to turn me off the iPhone – already the most over-hyped technology product in history – it’s the stage-managed artifice surrounding a me-too, catch-up phone.

Computing is attending SAP's Sapphire conference to meet and talk to the software giant's customers. We are, as always, far more interested in the real-life business experience of IT leaders - our readers - than the detail of the technology itself.

But for once, I found myself genuinely impressed by a product demonstration today.

SAP has worked with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to integrate its business applications with the BlackBerry user interface and have created a truly seamless connection between the two.

The demo featured the RIM executive who was presenting going into his BlackBerry calendar, finding a meeting with a customer, then at the click of a button bringing up that customer's history from RIM's corporate SAP software.

It is the first time I have seen a real business-focused innovation in the mobile technology world for some time, and an example of the way that business executives will be using their mobile computers - be they BlackBerrys, phones or smartphones - to really keep up with the organisation away from the office.

Email and calendars are the easy and obvious tools for flexible working, but there has been much less progress made by IT vendors in making the mobile properly a part of the core business applications that actually run the company.

SAP and BlackBerry are onto a winning combination - and an example of what will one day be the norm for business.

If you’re consumed by doubt over who killed President Kennedy, intrigued about whether or not the Pentagon was actually hit by a plane on 9/11, or if you’re still out to get Prince Philip for driving the white Fiat that took out Princess Diana, then the world of undersea cables is probably taking up a lot of your time at the moment.

Over the past week, four telecoms cables at the bottom of the sea connecting the Middle East and North Africa have “failed”, disrupting internet traffic and telecommunications – and hence electronic trade – in several countries across the region.

Broken undersea cables are, as you can imagine, not a frequent occurrence – but it does happen often enough to warrant a small fleet of repair ships ready to take action.

The unusual number and the particular geography of these problems have kept the internet conspiracists very happy.

First reports suggested that a trailing anchor had damaged a couple of co-located cables near Alexandria, until the Egyptian authorities denied the presence of any ships in that area.

Since then there have been suggestions of CIA dirty tricks, plans to spoil a new Iranian online oil exchange, or even botched attempts to install covert listening devices on the cables themselves.

Matt Walker, a senior analyst at Ovum RHK, gives a very good – and sensible - account of the likely circumstances:

“Of the four reported and confirmed failures, two are on cables in the Mediterranean, two in the Persian Gulf; at least one of these may be a power failure, not a cable cut, and hence the landing station is the likely culprit,’ he wrote.

“The Persian Gulf is shallow but the Mediterranean reaches depths of several kilometres not too far from the coast. Without knowing the exact depth of the Mediterranean outages, accidental damage from fishing/anchors/dredging is certainly possible there, and highly likely in the shallow Gulf. Four breaks in two separate locations in a single week are rare but hardly impossible, or proof of a conspiracy.

"To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, though, even the paranoid have enemies; there may indeed be something sinister lurking. Even if all the outages occurred in shallow water, that doesn't prove that accidental damage from, e.g., a fishing trawler, was the cause, but merely suggests it was physically possible. Intentional sabotage is, after all, probably more feasibly done in shallow waters than deep, and cable security in shallow waters is only modestly more practical. Clearly, undersea cables are a ripe target for those with an interest in wreaking havoc on international communications, whatever their motivation. Another consideration is that undersea cables have been used for submarine/surface surveillance purposes as far back as World War II, with the cooperation of private industry,” he said.

Walker concluded: “In my view, the most likely outcome of this is that a credible explanation for the coincidence will be presented soon, and a few weeks from now, all will be forgotten.”

Believe what you will. The most significant aspect of this incident is to highlight the critical importance that the internet plays in global trade, even in developing nations such as Egypt.

The fact that a temporary and relatively minor disruption to that service in a pressure-cooker region of the world has produced such an outburst of conspiratorial hand-wringing shows that the internet is well and truly as much a part of international relations and political diplomacy as it is central to the corporate IT strategy.

I’ve just been compiling Computing’s news reviews of 2007 for our web site, looking back at the big stories that made the headlines during the year. With such an overload of articles, how can the past 12 months be best summarised?

Well, to be honest, it’s been something of a case of same old, same old. What have we learned this year? 

The government continues to embarrass itself where technology is concerned, sadly negating all the good work that is increasingly taking place in public sector technology. 

Green issues have leaped to the top of IT managers’ agenda, and rightly so. But really, most of the current advice available is simply common sense, good practice IT operational management. We are still painfully short of genuine vendor-free best practice green computing – although there are a few leading companies that are starting to write the rulebooks. 

IT security is just as much of a pain as it has been, but the law enforcement community seems to be drifting further away from being able to address the concerns of business leaders. The great fear is that e-crime will only be tackled once something really bad takes place to make the authorities act. 

What else? 

There are still skills gaps; the profile of the IT leader continues to change; more work is being outsourced; and offshoring is expanding faster than ever. 

Web 2.0 has become the new internet and e-commerce buzzword; stock market valuations for online companies are becoming very silly again; and broadband is an increasingly important economic driver (so let’s hope we get moving on the next-generation infrastructure). 

All in all, it sounds very much like how you would summarise any other mature, business-critical sector of the

UK

economy. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French would say if they translated into English. 

In that light, perhaps the most important story of the year came just this month, with news that the UK IT sector is now the second biggest industry in the country, after financial services, contributing 6.4 per cent of the economy – some £66.5bn. 

Maybe in years to come, we will look back at 2007 as a pivotal time, one when IT continued to grow up and establish itself as central to the UK's international success. Technology is increasingly just a part of business, it flows with and influences our lives every day, and perhaps it is a good thing that as the year ends, we are not looking back on any one trend as a defining influence. 

Just another year for a vital part of the way we live, work and play. 

Merry Christmas from everyone at Computing, and best wishes for a prosperous and incident-free technology new year.

 

Who would have thought that McDonald’s would emerge as a leader of the free world?

The fast-food chain plans to offer free WiFi networking at all its 1,200 outlets from December, making it the largest provider of free wireless connections in the UK.

It was only a matter of time before WiFi services would no longer be chargeable. Many paid-for municipal wireless networks are struggling for customers. The UK may be at the top of the hotspot league tables, but it’s mainly the province of business people using corporate services ­ the number of paying consumers is limited.

Whatever you think of McDonald’s ­or having to sit surrounded by screaming kids with their party meals just to get free internet access ­ the principle is exactly what mobile computing in the UK needs.

WiFi will become a commodity service because the value to individuals of wireless web connectivity is too low. Can you really not wait an hour or two until you get home to check your Facebook page?

The major mobile phone networks have tried to crack the data market for years without achieving much. Mobile web downloads are on the increase, but as more phones have WiFi connectivity built in, so teenagers will be tempted to pop into their local burger bar for free internet access instead of using 3G ­ or so McDonald’s hopes.

The most enterprising response from a mobile network operator would be to offer free data connectivity ­ regardless of the networking technology used.

Straightaway, the mobile would become the roaming web access device of choice for everyone. All the operator needs to do is make sure its mobile portal is the default home page and then watch the money roll in from selling services such as downloads.

Are there any such enterprising mobile operators in the UK? I’m not so sure.
But free is the future for a growing range of technologies. Google, Yahoo, Adobe and IBM are all taking on Microsoft Office by offering free online word processing and spreadsheets. The most mature free market is webmail, where providers compete on the basis of how much stuff they give away free.

The future of computing is mobile and increasingly web-based. The winners will be the companies that solve the conundrum of making money from being free.

It's not often that you can say that being involved with technology makes you proud, but the peaceful protests against the military regime in Burma - and the violent government response - really shows that technology is changing the world at its most fundamental level.

In such a closed country, where the government is making every effort to cut internet links and shut down mobile phone networks to prevent the world seeing the result of its repression, and where foreign journalists are mostly banned from visiting, the truth is being brought to us by mobile phone cameras and enterprising bloggers who know how to circumvent the technical barriers.

When the Burmese military junta killed 3,000 people in a previous uprising in 1998, we could not see the results and world opinion soon faded. Now, technology is bringing the full horror to the eyes of the world and even Burma's allies are forced to respond.

It's a good day for IT - if not, sadly, for the protesters in Burma.

At the start of Computing's week in China, we discussed the country's aim to be the centre of the technology world. After five busy days, how realistic does that objective seem?

You do not need to be here long to get a sense of the huge potential. Shenzhen has been developed to show the West what China is capable of - a busy and growing metropolis designed to prove that the success of Hong Kong was not entirely down to British patronage.

This is a country that prides itself on its ability to innovate - despite the Western view that China is all about cheap knock-offs and fake products. 

And the emergence of technology suppliers such as Huawei, our hosts this week, demonstrates that Chinese firms can take on their US and European rivals.

And yet...

While we have been here, a story broke in the UK about alleged Chinese hacking attempts on the Foreign Office. Although the Chinese government denied any knowledge or involvement, the innuendo in the news reports was that this would not have happened without at least tacit approval. The story shows the distrust that still exists between West and East. Sixty years of China closing itself off from the rest of the world and 40 years of Cold War are not forgotten easily.

But cold wars are fought between governments and politicians. When you meet the locals, and talk to the Chinese - especially the younger generation - they are not so different from us. Their hopes, dreams and fears are much the same. Of course there are cultural differences, as there are with India, with the Middle East, even with the US, but those differences can be turned into strengths, as India has proved.

The technological capability certainly exists - perhaps the most amazing statistic of the week was the 48 per cent of Huawei's staff working on research and development. Try to find a US or European rival to match that.

And my favourite quote of the week came from Huawei's marketing chief Xu Zhijun ('Eric') that the company aims to 'combines Western professional management practices with the wisdom of Eastern culture.'

Hong Kong is the thriving embodiment of that mixture of Western business and Chinese heritage. But HK has the one thing China lacks - experience.

There is a certain sense of naivety about the Chinese business approach - it is not something you can put a finger on, it is a feeling not a series of facts and hence perhaps entirely subjective - but it is a view I have heard from others that have visited the country.

You simply cannot quickly learn the ways of the world if you have turned your back on that world for so many years.

Huawei, for example, has invested heavily in bringing in Western advisers, such as IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers,  to help bridge that gap. But you sense that currently much of that learning is by process rather than instinct. It is all very well to follow best practice as a flowchart - do this, then do this, if this happens do this - but that gets you only so far. It takes time for those practices to become second nature. It is a bit like going on a training course - you come away with all these new ideas and techniques but you are not truly effective until you can put the manual aside, take the best of what you were taught, combine it with your own abilities and personality, and make it an instinctive part of what you do.

The question for China is how much it really wants to fully engage with the West. Yes, it wants to learn and understand Western ways to be able to do business. Yes, it recognises it needs to meet us halfway rather than expect us to adapt to Chinese culture. But does this country want to be a part of the world, or just to do business with it?

It has a model in Hong Kong of that fusing of the best of West and East into a business giant. But there is all that distrust to overcome, and the cultural hurdles to get over.

You cannot ignore the amount of change taking place in China though, and perhaps sooner than we think, these concerns and that naivety will pass. Few could have predicted where China would be today 20 years ago.

My personal view is that China does not yet quite 'get' the rest of the world - and that the rest of the world certainly does not 'get' China. But I leave this fascinating country with a sense of enormous potential, of rapid change that its rulers are trying to control and keep at their own pace, but with an emerging generation whose expectations and ambitions will be very different from those of their parents.

The Chinese technology sector has yet to show that it can transform the industry in the way that India has, but don't rule it out.

One way or another, China is going to be a major part of our future.

There is a great contradiction that lies at the heart of Hong Kong. For a place where change is constant, it prides itself on the fact that it has not changed.

Computing asked our guide here this week what has changed most about the former British territory since it was handed back to China in 1997.

'Nothing has changed,' she said. 'We just sent your Governor back.'

Despite all the trepidation and uncertainty felt by the business community back in 1998, modern Hong Kong prides itself on keeping business as usual since the mainland took political control. But all over the territory, everything changes. Building work is constant, whole areas of Victoria Harbour - the waterway dividing Hong Kong Island and Kowloon - have been reclaimed from the sea to make space for new developments. Yet so much is the same - the noonday gun is fired every day near Causeway Bay as it has been since colonial days; horses still race around Happy Valley racetrack in the only legal form of gambling in Hong Kong; and most of the inhabitants keep on making money.

China has protected the 'one country - two systems' principle in Hong Kong, and it exists still as an adjunct to the rest of the nation. Hong Kong has its own border controls - on landing at HK airport, foreign visitors fill out a Hong Kong arrivals card, then hand over their departure card at the border when crossing into neighbouring Shenzhen on the mainlaind where they hand in a Chinese arrivals card, just as if passing from one country to another. Mainlanders need to do the same unless they have a Hong Kong ID card - but that doesn't stop them arriving in their thousands every week for the tax-free shopping in HK.

You almost sense that Hong Kong is the face that China wants the rest of the world to see - and Shenzhen certainly strives to be like its neighbour. But Hong Kong will be unique for a long time to come.

As for the technology world, HK is a big bonus for Chinese IT firms. With seven million residents in an area not much larger than London - but with only 10 per cent of the land space inhabitable - it is a microsm of business IT elsewhere. With multinational financial services instutions, major retailers, one of the world's largest airports, five different mobile phone networks, and an incredibly technology-literate population, Hong Kong is a great proving and testing ground.

Here the world's first major 3G networks were installed and tested, and in May last year, local mobile operator PCCW launched the world's first live, real-time broadcast mobile TV service, which now has more than 100,000 subscribers.

These are technologies that will soon be rolled out to the rest of the world. For Chinese supplier Huawei, working with PCCW on these projects brings invaluable experience that it can offer to international customers. The networking specialist is now rolling out its multimedia broadcast technology to 60 countries.

The unique nature of Hong Kong also means that mobile networks need to cope with closely-packed high-rise buildings, underground tunnels, steep and hilly terrain dividing the island, and one of the world's highest population densities. Proving the technology in such a testing environment gives local suppliers a potential edge over rivals.

Hong Kong is high-tech, modern and fast-growing, and China's technology industry is reaping the benefits of its unique ability to change and to not change at the same time. 

The BBC News web site is banned in China. I can look at any other part of the BBC site - I can keep up with the latest developments in EastEnders if I really want to. But if I want to use the UK's most popular news site - no chance.

The BBC's news services is considered by some in China to be the propaganda mouthpiece of the British government and the West. As the best-known Western news agency in this part of the world, the BBC is fighting a legacy of misconception.

You can read the web sites of The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph - every one with much more of a political agenda than the BBC. But our national broadcaster is, somewhat ironically, considered the dangerous government mouthpiece. Someone should have told Alastair Campbell.

This media censorship creates one of the biggest negative perceptions of China in the West. Add to that software piracy, copyright theft, accusations of human rights abuse, and the spectre of the Communist bogeyman, and you have many of the worst views of the country that its companies have to overcome to trade as equals in the West.

Huawei chief marketing officer Xu Zhijun admits the company has to make 'one hundred times the efforts and face one hundred times the challenges' compared to US or European rivals before it can win international business as a result of these preconceptions.

But how realistic a picture do these controversial topics really paint of modern China?

When Computing first visited India about five years ago as the offshore outsourcing boom took off, you quickly learned that India cannot be judged by our Western values - it is just too different.

China is just the same.

Take, for example, the explanation of the role of democracy in modern China given to me by one young person here. Democracy is seen by the younger generation as a goal to be achieved - but one that cannot truly be reached until the country has tackled the challenges caused by the huge disparity between rich and poor, rural and urban society in a country of 1.2 billion people. Other aspects of life are considered more important goals to achieve, on the route to democracy.

In the West of course, democracy is seen as the fundamental tenet of our belief system and society, the foundation upon which everything else is built.

Does that mean China is wrong, or just different? India is again the best comparison - a country of one billion and the world's largest democracy. But how different is the life of a rural Indian farmer 1,000 miles from Delhi with a vote, and a rural Chinese farmer 1,000 miles from Beijing without a vote? Probably not much. China has never been a democracy, even before Chairman Mao it was ruled by an Emporer and further back split by feuding warlords. Democracy has only become a consideration as the country engages with Western democracies.

Surely if we reject China for some of its values, we are rejecting the opportunity to engage in cultural and social debate about those differences, and to encourage the country to embrace democracy as we have in the West? After all, 25 years ago we would scarcely have considered China to be the economic powerhouse it has become. It has shown a willingness to change - that is a good starting point.

Chinese schoolchildren are taught little about the Cultural Revolution - it is seen as a passing part of history, not a factor in today's society. The Tiananmen Square massacre though is still a taboo subject in official circles - everyone knows it happened, but they would rather forget it as a regrettable stain on recent history.

Few of the younger generation, I am told, consider themselves to be Communists. It is just a label used by politicians.

Like India, that new generation has enormous enthusiasm and pride in taking their country out into the world.  Unlike India, they live with the unique situation of being the first brought up under the government's one-child policy, limiting most families to a single child.

This is a policy that has had terrible consequences and as-yet unforeseen implications. In rural China, millions of families have aborted female babies because they want their one child to be a boy who can work in the fields. As a result, by 2010 China will have 60 million single men - the equivalent of the entire population of the UK, many of whom will never marry and may never even have a relationship.

What also are the effects of a whole generation that has never known what it is like to have a brother or sister? And the burden those children will have to take in caring alone for their elderly parents in years to come?

But, like much of what we perceive about China, even this policy has had benefits - aside from the obvious one of population control.

Many children have been able to study, go to university, and even travel abroad to universities in the US, UK and Australia purely because as an only child their parents can afford to send them for the first time. This has been a particular boon for girls who once may have been passed over for further education in favour of their brothers. It is this educated, English-speaking generation that is the future of China. Go to one of the bars here in Shenzhen and see the energy and anticipation and pride that these young people have in their country and their future.

China is by no means perfect - it has huge flaws and problems, many exacerbated to the West by some fundamental differences in values and beliefs. But what country is perfect? Certainly none in the West.

China is trying to open itself up to the world, and the least we can do is open our eyes to China. The opportunity for the West is to engage with China, encourage it to understand and value the aspects of our lives that mean the most to us. By rejecting China for its obvious flaws, we risk rejecting the opportunity to be part of the global community that a new generation of Chinese are enthusiastically embracing.