Adobe tips ebooks at World Business Forum
"It's a lot of fun to go round the world and see how technology is changing behaviour, but it is still hard to get a cellphone connection in the heart of Silicon Valley," according to Bruce Chizen, head of US software company Adobe, who was speaking at the World Business Forum in Frankfurt on November 3.

He is tipping ebooks as a technology to watch for the future and says he's seen mobile devices in Japan that store many books but are quite book-like. He reckons a price point of about $199 is about right and says the company has embarked on a new ebook experiment.

The WBF, a conference geared towards senior business leaders, also featured many other luminaries including Jack Welch, former boss of GE, and William Ury, a Harvard law professor who had a lot of useful tips for those involved in negotiations.

Ury said: "Even though we think of negotiating as talking, it is more about listening. You appoint a spokesman for the team, but how often do you appoint a listener?

"Often the other side offers a concession, or appears to, but you don't hear it because you are focusing on what you are trying to say."

He also quoted Henry Kissinger - another of the event's speakers - who once said: "The most important rule of diplomacy is to have talks when you don't need to have talks - so you're better prepared when you do."

But Professor Ury's biggest tip was to see the negotiation process as a co-operative search for mutual gain. "Sometimes when we engage, we make decisions entirely contrary to our interests," he said.