The countdown continues of the top ten things you can’t buy this Christmas:

5. If I Did It ….O.J. Simpson’s book , which gives a hypothetical description of how his ex-wife and male friend were brutally murdered, has thankfully been pulped in time for Christmas and Judith Regan, the publisher behind it was fired by HarperCollins on Friday.
But the title should still be up for grabs and we would assume any number of Silicon Valley executives caught up in the stock options scandal could use it to tell their side of the story in the New Year.
Come to think of it, a few people related to Hewlett-Packard could offer free serialisation rights for a book like that as a pretext for improving their relations with the media.

10. An Enzo Ferrari   9. Halo 3  8. The $100 Laptop 7. The iPod wannabes 6. Pleo the dinosaur

Continuing our countdown on the Top Ten Tech Trinkets you can’t buy this Christmas…

6. Pleo the dinosaur: It seems a geological age since Ugobe announced their revolutionary robot. In fact, it was February and it was supposed to go on sale in the autumn at around $200. Now it looks like shipping in March 2007 at $250.

“We don’t think like a toy company, we are more of a robot company,” says Bob Christopher, Ugobe chief executive, explaining the grinch-like attitude of ironing out the kinks and denying kids at Christmas.

Ugobe is a neighbour of Pixar in Emeryville in the Bay Area and has Apple connections that boost its aura of cool. Pleo may be prehistoric but Ugobe is expected to use and license the Artificial Intelligence it has created to allow futuristic figures to act out video games on your coffee table at Christmases to come.

10. An Enzo Ferrari

9. Halo 3

8. The $100 Laptop

7. The iPod wannabes

So you unwrap you’re LCD HDTV on Christmas Day, plug in the children’s Nintendo Wii present and then shatter your nice new screen playing a forehand smash in the tennis game included with the motion-sensing controller.

Nintendo’s replacement of 3.2m retaining straps on the Wii-mote is intended to avoid that nightmare at Christmas and any Wii sold after December 11 should include the new thicker cord.

I’m not convinced this is a complete solution. While Nintendo says it is almost doubling the size of the strap, this CPSC advisory shows the thin plastic wire is only being expanded from 0.6mm in diameter to 1mm.

Aware of safety concerns, I asked my son if he had hit our TV, which mysteriously died at the weekend, with the Wii remote. He vehemently denied this, only admitting to hitting the ceiling a couple of times while perfecting his top-spin lob.

So until a better DIY solution appears at Engadget, I am looking at either adapting my Kensington computer lock, my Kryptonite bike cable or buying a pair of handcuffs.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

Sometimes, even a blogging queen has to escape the blogosphere. Mena Trott, co-founder of the blogging company Six Apart, visited the FT’s London headquarters today – fortuitous timing for us, as it was hot on the heels of a storm about the Six Apart-sponsored conference held in Paris earlier this week, Le Web 3.

It’s the kind of saga that takes a dedicated blogosphere watcher to get excited about, but in a nutshell:

Some bloggers were unhappy with Le Web 3. The organisers disappointed a lot of attendees by making changes to the programme at the last minute to accommodate speeches from politicians: French presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, fellow French politician François Bayrou of the UDF, and former Israeli PM Shimon Peres. The collective finger of bloggers pointed firmly at Loic Lemeur, MD of Six Apart Europe. Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK & Ireland was one of those to criticise the conference; you can read the full account here on GU but the upshot is that Sethi is no longer writing for TechCrunch, and indeed as of today, TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington has put the UK/Ireland website on hold.

Mena Trott herself was of course at the centre of a similar furore at last year’s conference (called Les Blogs), when she called an attendee, Ben Metcalf, an ‘asshole’ after he used the conference’ IRC ‘backchannel’ to label her speech "bullshit".

She hadn’t heard about Sethi being sacked and I was braced for a slightly uncomfortable exchange, but Trott seemed genuinely sanguine about the episode – and even a little amused that Loic had used the same word she had used last year.

She admitted, however, that while she would’ve liked to have spoken at Le Web 3, last year’s episode had given her “more stage fright than I would normally have”. And she is no longer an avid reader of tech blogs. “I’m so out of the loop, thankfully, about all this stuff.”

Unsurprisingly, Trott is sceptical about what the future holds for the A-list bloggers (perhaps not such a controversial view these days), noting acidly that most of the usual suspects are only too keen to get exposure in the mainstream media whenever they get a chance.

"Rumours of iTunes’ death have been greatly exaggerated," according to ComScore, which says iTunes revenues rose 84 per cent in the first three quarters of 2006, compared with the year-ago period.

That fits with a separate analysis by Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray:

Contrary to recent reports suggesting sales on iTunes are declining rapidly, our analysis of Apple company data regarding iTunes sales shows strong growth [year-on-year].

Piper says its analysis showed iTunes sales up 78 per cent year-on-year between January and September.

Both analyses followed a report earlier this week by Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, which said iTunes sales dropped 65 per cent sequentially between January and June. Piper Jaffray’s figures lend credence to the view that the sequential decline was due to seasonality in iPod sales:

It is clear…that iTunes sales spike upward in January…We attribute this  post-holiday growth to new iPod owners and iTunes gift card users. We expect another uptick in early ‘07.

The Forrester figures still pose vexing questions. In 2005, they show revenues per thousand online households falling sharply from their spike in January, then recovering in May and June. Forrester’s estimates showed that the spike in January this year wasn’t as high. And with the exception of a brief recovery in April, iTunes revenues per household fell steadily between January and July.

With just two years’ worth of iTunes data, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions. But if last year’s second-half recovery in iTunes sales fails to materialise, Apple may have reason to worry.

Forrester’s latest report on iTunes sales is causing a stir. "iTunes sales ‘Collapsing’," says The Register. "Digital flatline looks ominous for music labels." Bloomberg and The Street.com have also picked up the story.

Josh Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, says that iTunes revenues did indeed fall 65 per cent over five months from a high in January this year . But he told me on the phone that was a sequential decline that "reflected seasonality" in iPod sales, rather than a sign of a collapsing market for iTunes.

For its part, Apple says that "the conclusion that iTunes sales are slowing is simply incorrect."

The real lesson of the Forrester report, says Mr Bernoff, is that the iPod and iTunes are no panacea for the music industry’s slumping sales. Here’s a link to an executive summary of the report. Read more on what iTunes customer buying habits mean for big record labels after the jump.

(more…)

More on the on-again, off-again acquisition talks between Yahoo and Facebook. According to TechCrunch this morning, Yahoo offered $1bn for the social networking site earlier this year and was prepared to pay up to $1.62bn before talks lapsed.

Most intriguingly, TechCrunch appears to have got hold of internal Yahoo documents estimating FaceBook revenues this year will be $50m and projecting that the site will achieve earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $1bn by 2015.

Mind you, 2015 is a long way off and all sorts of things could happen before then in the febrile world of social networking. There is probably a social network for five-year-olds starting up soon that could be a power in the land by then . . .

Guessing about Apple’s next invention is one of the tech world’s favourite parlour games, but Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter Research is starting to rue the onset of December iPhone madness.

While I know that December is the best month for Apple rumors, this is starting to get out of hand as mainstream press and analysts comment about a product that may or may not even be announced at Macworld. […] No doubt we’ll see lots more in terms of rumors before Macworld and probably another note or two from analysts with the “Scoop”. As in the past, almost all of these will be wrong.

He goes on to offer some advice to the journos who keep calling him asking for details on Apple’s rumoured mobile handset:

You must presume one of two things, I either don’t know any details so why ask or if I did know details, I probably couldn’t tell them to you for publication (or tell them to you period) so again, why ask? Please, let’s skip this question for the next few weeks, OK?

Better turn off that ringer on your phone, Michael, because I think we’re all in for a long few weeks until Macworld starts on January 9.

The semiconductor revolution looks like rolling on as scientists find new materials to combat the fact that the laws of physics are closing in on silicon and threatening to put an end to relentless miniaturisation.

In the latest development, MIT engineers have developed chips using a material called indium gallium arsenide, a semiconductor which allows electrons to travel many times faster than in silicon. The prototypes will be shown at an international electronics meeting today and tomorrow.

The InGaAs chips carry 2.5 times more current than today’s state of the art silicon while each InGaAs transistor is only 60 billionth of a metre in size, equivalent to the best of today’s silicon technology.In the future, these chips will replace silicon, the experts think. So let’s hear it  for Indium Gallium Arsenide Valley… No? perhaps it loses something in the translation.

Alan Cane, London.

(The Grinch List continues: all the gadgets, gizmos and games you won’t find in the stores this year.)

So do you want the Nano, the Shuffle or the plain old regular version?

In July, HP scrapped the "HPod". (Call this one Fiorina’s Folly: for a while she dreamed of juicing up stodgy old HP with digital media. It didn’t take Mark Hurd long to change the playlist.)

A month later, Dell turned off the final model of its "DellPod". (Perhaps DJ Ditty wasn’t such a great name for a music player after all.)

This was also the year the Rio ran its course (hard to believe that in pre-iPod days this dinky gadget provoked a legal storm from the music industry - mine only held about eight songs.)

You can still buy a Zune, though. Apparently there are plenty of those available.

10. An Enzo Ferrari

9. Halo 3

8. The $100 Laptop