Wildfire Tech PR Blog – Business and Consumer Technology Public Relations

The woes for of the trade publishing world continue today with Data Strategy the latest publication to bite the dust. The marketing title, edited by David Reed, which covered everything you’d possibly need to know about data, has been ditched by Centaur media (as its rivals Haymarket were happy to report today!)

The monthly title will be absorbed into sister title Marketing Week from September. This follows a similar move that occurred back in 2009 for another of Centaur’s marketing titles – Precision Marketing.

Centaur, the publisher of magazines and websites such as Marketing Week, NMA, Precision Marketing (RIP), Design Week and Mad.co.uk, has been in trouble for some time, so the demise of Data Strategy is hardly surprising. I have no doubt that much of the useful content from this title will shift online (although whether Marketing Week will be able to adapt itself to cover more data related news is yet to be seen), but it is still sad to see the back of a title that, although niche, was always worth a read.

Anyone want to place a bet on which title will be next?

Google’s latest endeavor, the Android mobile platform, was revealed to the world today. The first phone to use Android is HTC’s Dream on the T-Mobile network, available later this year and nicknamed G1 (horrid microsite!).

The features are certainly impressive – drag and drop functionality in particular looks great. Gizmodo has comprehensive coverage.

Because of the touch interface, the media has been quick to tag this as the iPhone killer. However, I think the real target probably lies elsewhere: Microsoft (and everything it traditionally stands for). [Not to mention the fact that the phone looks very ugly compared to the iPhone's curves!]

G1 is clearly geared towards the consumer rather than the business user and there is no way (currently) so sync to Microsoft Exchange, for example. If all your information and data is in the ‘cloud’ then this will be the phone/platform for you – GMail syncing for example with ‘Push‘ technology inbuilt. However, if you still rely on a (Microsoft) server then you may have some difficulties finding the range of features you require.

My suspicion is that the phone will have less impact on iPhone sales which have been very impressive since the 3G launch. This is however another very significant move towards cloud computing and if anyone is primed to capture this space, it’s Google.