Paris, 8th December 2008 - With 160 participants from 20 countries drawing an
international attendance of 1,200, the Open World Forum welcomed the
inaugural Netbook World Summit dedicated entirely to netbooks, last monday.
Some of the principal players in the field, notably Walter Bender, the founder
of Sugar Labs and former president of the One Laptop Per Child project,
helped make the Summit a more than useful indicator of where the market is.
According to the latest IDC survey, 10 million netbooks should be shipped
this year.
The wide-ranging supply (screen size and capacity), the involvement of mobile
operators and the arrival of new players lead IDC to advance netbook sales
figures of 30 million units in 2012, representing a turnover of 10 billion
dollars.
In 2012, two-thirds of these sales should be concentrated in the EMEA (Europe,
Middle-East, Africa) zone and 70% of deliveries will be in western Europe.
« The netbook is primarily seeen in Europe as an extra machine for surfing the
web, for e-mails, social networking or stocking photos, » comments Eszter
Morray, Senior Analyst for IDC.
The Netbook World Summit was chaired by Thierry Noisette, journalist and
co-author of « La bataille du libre »The Opensource Battle) and « Vote
électronique: les boites noires de la démocratie » (Electronic voting,
democracy’s black boxes).
An audience of some 150 from five continents participated in round-table
dialogues with some of the industry’s key players, including :
* Hervé Yahi (Mandriva),
* Water Bender (Suger Labs),
* Surendra Arora (Phoenix Technologies),
* Olivier Blin (Mandriva),
* Patrick Sinz (Mandriva),
* Patrick Ferran (Dexxon),
* Bastien Guérry (OLPC France),
* Jean Varaldi, (Qualcomm),
* Jae-Woo Seo (Samsung),
* Janet Crooper (Lenovo),
* Frederic Oster (MSI Computer),
* Jean-Marc Fougerolle (MSI Computer),
* Ellis Wang (Asus),
* Larry Kettler (Xandros),
* David Liu (gOS),
* Tristan Nitot (Mozilla),
* Jean-Baptiste de Longeaux (SFR),
* Emmanuel Forgues (Bull),
* and Augustin de Waily (Comwax).
The entire Netbook World Summit Council is dedicated to organising a second
session in 2009.
