The Netbook World Summit (NWS) is coming to town. That is, if you live in Paris, France. December 8th 2009 will mark the 2nd year of the annual Netbook Summit. It’s an international conference designed to chat, engage and examine the emerging netbook market. This year, it’ll be at the swanky Parisian “Cyclone – Le Studio.” But is there really a need for a big event about a tiny computer? We sure think so.
Various research firms predict 50 million netbooks will be sold in 2010. And this isn’t just a consumer trend. Watch for a series of business netbook announcements over the next few weeks.
At Netbook World Summit, the key players will outline their offers, strategies and results:
- the manufacturers of chips and mother boards,
- the ODMs, essentially Taiwanese, who design and produce Netbooks,
- the OEMs who distribute under their trade name,
- software publishers who supply the operating systems and applications for Netbooks,
- telecom operators who distribute these machines and furnish their connectivity functionality.
The conference promises some interesting people, including German blogger Sascha Pallenberg, who up and moved to Taiwan just to be at the center of the netbook world. And the partners? Big names like Lenovo and ASUS are coming, along with a few chip makers like Qualcomm.
The site itself is otherwise sparse with details. There’s a few pictures from last year’s summit, along with an itinerary for this year. Cocktails start at 1800 hours. But other than that, it leaves a reader pondering the actual point to all this. Is it simple just a “MacWorld” of netbooks, so to speak? It certainly has potential to become something great. To continue the analogy, the old and the wise will tell you once upon a time MacWorld was a bunch of developers swapping code.
But overall, I’m pleased netbooks are catching on. The devices prove that a niche item can move into the mainstream and business zones as a useful product. We’re already hearing from a few VARs and MSPs that are exploring Hardware as a Service (HaaS) options with netbooks. And keep your eyes open during CES 2010. Rumors ’round the net say numerous netbook moves will be announced at that event…
In the meantime, we’ll keep tabs on the netbook summit as it progresses.
Follow The VAR Guy via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter; and via his Newsletter;Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, check out more channel voices atwww.vartweet.com.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
Don't miss Charlene O'Hanlon's weekly columns...
Interesting partner and speaker list….no Canonical/Ubuntu rep…but Google and Mandriva. Mandriva? I know its France and all..but I find it fascinating that Mandriva is sending a speaker and Canonical is not.
-jef
Is Canonical sending a speaker? Is Mr. Spaleta onto something here? VAR Guy? Dave? Anyone?
Mandriva has done the OS for the very cheap Hercules eCafe netbooks[1] from Guillemot Corporation. These netbooks are based on an AMD Geode SoC and quite a bit slower than Atom/Celeron/Via-based netbooks, especially the graphics, but they are also significantly cheaper (130-200 euro (all taxes included) depending on the model IIRC).
They are sold in the Carrefour[2] hypermarkets, at least in France & Belgium, probably also in other countries. Maybe other places sell them too.
So, it’s not all that strange that Mandriva will be there.
Now, when looking a bit closer, the netbookworldsummit.org domain is registered by Romain d’Alverny[3], who is “Web department manager at Mandriva”[4].
I would say it’s obvious why Mandriva will be there, and maybe The VAR Guy can ask Canonical why they are not there?
[1] See http://www.hercules.com/uk/ecafe/bdd/p/84 for example
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrefour
[3] http://www.who.is/whois/netbookworldsummit.org/
[4] http://www.linkedin.com/in/rdalverny