I’ll be brief. I didn’t see the England versus Germany match because I was watching Lolli’s gymnastics competition (where she picked up a silver medal). I did see the post-match analysis and the obvious talking point was the ‘goal that never was’. I hope that the match officials feel suitably ashamed this morning, and I hope that stubborn old git Sepp “we don’t need video replays” Blatter had a sleepless night. In a game in which the outcome is essentially based on the number of goals scored, making a correct decision of whether a goal has been scored would seem to me to be fairly crucial.

The what-if scenario… if that goal had been given (as it should have been) then England might have gone into half-time at 2-2. That could have changed the second half – when you’re behind and chasing a game it can leave the defence exposed, and the risk is conceding more goals… which is exactly what happened.

However… let’s be honest. We can sulk about that goal and the what-if scenario, but it doesn’t change the fact that England were massively disappointing during the World Cup. Robert Green was the scapegoat after the first match, but show me a goalkeeper who hasn’t made that sort of blunder during his career – poor old Greeny just chose to do it at the most inopportune moment. England’s real problem wasn’t their goalkeeper, it was the fact that they then couldn’t go on and score a couple more against a USA side ranked below England.

After the poor performance against Algeria (ranked twenty-two places below England), it was relief rather than admiration when England beat Slovenia (ranked seventeen places below) by one measly goal. And there you have it… four matches, four goals (if you count the one that wasn’t but should have been). Matthew Upson out-scored Wayne Rooney and Peter Crouch. After the same number of matches Argentina had scored ten goals. That’s how to progress in the World Cup.

This article from TechRepublic is nearly two months old, but remains an interesting read. I’ve observed that, in the past year, interest in iPhones and Android has grown significantly but I’ve yet to meet a customer with a serious strategy around those devices. The trend, as pointed out in the article, is for end users to enthusiastically bring their shiny new devices into work and then ask (expect?) the IT team to get it working with the company’s solutions – mainly e-mail of course.

Right now for me it’s a case of deja-vu (which I’ve experienced before, ho ho)… in the early days of the iPhone, and sporadically ever since, I received numerous e-mails from excited IBMers asking how they can get their iPhone connected to the Domino e-mail infrastructure (I’ve checked my job description, there’s no mention of this responsibility). Now I’m seeing the same with iPad owners. Our official mobile e-mail solution in IBM UK is the BlackBerry but Traveler is starting to gain a foothold, mainly due to the Apple devices.

The article does a good job of pointing out the major advantages of the BlackBerry solution… and solution is the right word. I’ve heard people say that Blackberries are expensive to own, but the infrastructure does provide what an enterprise needs with little or no requirements to add extras in order to make it enterprise-grade and extremely secure.

Since the article was written the iPhone 4 has been announced and I’m sure this will put more pressure on RIM and the other device providers. Consumers will lap it up, and IT departments may groan as expectant iPad / iPhone owners crave to get connected. Whether that trend gets traction in the enterprise space is yet to be seen, but one thing is for sure – consumerisation and end-user-power grows stronger every year.

To start with, I think this article has an amusing opening line…

Once the neglected stepchild of IBM’s colossal services business and systems unit…

Presented in the style of a slide-show, this article describes why software is now big business in IBM (which I’m rather relieved to hear). The Lotus brand gets three slides right at the end, describing Project Vulcan, LotusLive Labs and the expanding support for mobile devices. So, head straight to slide 25.

While a large percentage of the world has been staging a love-in with the iPad, I’ve been falling in love with another of Apple’s devices. A couple of weeks ago I received an iPod nano as a gift, and as I already had an iPod touch I wondered what use it would be to me. I had, previously, pondered Apple’s strategy for this device (albeit the 4th generation device, not the 5th) but now I find myself eating my words… absolutely feasting on them in fact.

For something so packed with features it’s incredibly thin and light – I worried about snapping it when removing it from the box. The first issue I hit was the only negative – it’s the 8 gb model, so realistically has about 7.3 gb of storage. My music collection weighs in at 11.2 gb, so I had to de-select a number of bands and artists. Goodbye Coldplay (mind you, I should remove them anyway).

Now the positive points. As I said, it’s thin and light – incredibly so. It barely registers any weight in your hand. A gnat’s lunch weighs more. So in the last week I’ve tucked it into a suit and shirt pocket, and used it when I wouldn’t normally consider using one of the bigger devices.

Now, I keep going on about how thin and light it is, because it’s not just a music player. It’s amazing enough that they can fit 8 gb of storage, a battery, and the gubbins for a 2.2 inch (240 x 376 pixels) screen into it. But that’s not all – it has an external speaker, a radio and a video camera (complete with microphone). Okay, it’s not high definition video, but considering what it’s squeezed into I consider that an amazing feat of micro-engineering. And the quality is pretty good.

This now means I’m a three-iPod guy. My original 20 gb white 4th generation classic (complete with a monochrome LCD screen) provides music in the car, the iPod touch caters for games, e-mail, videos, Twitter and many other applications… but the nano looks set to be my primary device for music outside of the car.

I don’t have a ship date yet for IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5.1, but (no surprise) I’m already using it. A couple of weeks ago I installed the Sametime Connect 8.5.1 client on Ubuntu 10.04, and this week (while enjoying some conference calls) I installed the ‘embedded’ version of Sametime 8.5.1 into Lotus Notes 8.5.1.

As always with a point release there’s a few enhancements and a few bug fixes. But the really important thing about Sametime 8.5.1 in my humble opinion is that it supports all of  Sametime’s extra trimmings – so now in one client you can enjoy the Advanced features (chat rooms, the broadcast suite), Sametime 8.5 meeting rooms, and Sametime Unified Telephony.

Click on the small image to see the entire Sametime family installed into the Notes side-bar.

It’s a busy week for announcements in Lotus-land, but that tends to happen around the time of DNUG (which is this week, so there you go). Already this week Stuart McIntyre blogged about the new version of Lotus Quickr 8.5, which we have available internally with IBM and is a major upgrade (and a great product). More about that another time.

The other big announcement this week is the support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler on the iPad. This momentarily had me scratching my head, because I set up Traveler on an iPad a couple of weeks ago – it’s a great e-mail, calendar and contacts experience, and simple to get running. So what’s the announcement? It’s official support for Traveler on the iPad, and also for the Traveler Companion which manages encrypted e-mail.

In time other applications will be supported… LotusLive Meetings and SnappFiles for Quickr. Both of these work fine on an iPad today, they’re just not supported yet. And I’m sure there’ll be more iPad applications to come.

Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus  webcasts during June…

• A deep-dive on building Lotus Domino applications with XPages (17th)
• Drive growth and deliver outstanding business results through exceptional web experiences (22nd)
• Harness a changing workforce and drive growth with social software (23rd)
• Collaboration in the cloud: grow your business and reduce costs (24th)

To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.

Ooops, IBM Lotus Symphony 3, to give it its correct branding. Anyway, you all know the story with Symphony… spreadsheets, word processing and presentations, compatible with Microsoft Office and the Open Document Formats, it comes with IBM Lotus Notes 8.x (free support for maintained users) and Symphony can be downloaded separately and used free-of-charge.

I’ve been using Symphony 3 on Windows and Mac since the release of beta 2 back in February. It’s a huge improvement over version 1.x – but beta 3 is another leap forward. The Symphony web site lists a few things new to beta 3… ability to customise the toolbars, instant export to PDF, and a new plug-in to make your LotusLive files directly available.

But there’s something else that I love about Symphony, and it’s improved in beta 3. In all aspects Symphony shows a panel on the right-hand side which gives quick and easy context-sensitive access to properties for whatever you’ve selected. It’s an approach that’s so much better than endlessly going in and out of dialog boxes, and makes Symphony very easy to use.