Saudi Arabian telecom firm Etihad Etisalat (Mobily) announced on Sunday it has launched a free WiFi service covering Makkah’s holy sites for pilgrims.

The free service is available to pilgrims and members of the public during this year’s hajj to help families keep in touch online, the firm said in a statement.

It is the second time Mobily, through its data arm Bayanat Al-Oula, has offered the wireless service free of charge during the annual pilgrimage - one of the pillars of Islam.

Khalid Al Kaf, Mobily’s CEO, said the service covers all the holy sites, including Mina, Arafar and Muzdalifah.

Free, The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson
Random House Business Books
$14.55 (hardcover) at amazon.com

What happens when advances in technology allow many things to be produced for more or less nothing? And what happens when those things are made available to us for free?

This is the question posed by the latest book on global business trends by Chris Anderson, editor of US new economy magazine Wired, and author of The Long Tail, which considered the impact of unlimited digital shelf space on how goods are bought and sold.

Anderson argues that as computer processing speed doubles every 18 months (Moore’s Law) and internet bandwidth trebles every year (Gilder’s Law), the cost of anything made of bits and bytes will reduce in cost so far over time that you might as well round it down to zero.

He then explores a host of other business models that survive by making it possible to offer one product or service for free, by charging for other related products or services.

A quick trip through history finds the obvious example of Gillette razors, where the reusable razor was virtually given away because customers would buy disposable blades forever.

Or the budget airline model where seats on flights can be sold for free because money is made in other ways: advertisers paying to reach the passengers; credit card handling fee; charging for check in bags, even charging cities who want the airline to land there because it boosts tourism.

The book rambles a little as it compares different business models and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses with examples from the past and present. Most readers will draw inspiration from only a handful of these examples that chime with their thinking or directly relate to their current businesses.

The central idea - that free is a price that touches ever-expanding parts of our personal and business lives - is woven throughout.

Perhaps the most insightful moment in the book comes from research by behavioural economists who compared the reaction of people to buying a chocolate bar at a very low price, to their reaction when given it for free. Even though the chocolate with a low price tag was so cheap it made little difference in people’s wallets, the psychological barrier of parting with any money at all was enormous when compared to the instant uptake of the free offer.

In summary, any business that is able to offer something for free will find a much larger customer base than a business that charges. That hardly qualifies as the greatest innovation in business thinking this century, but finding ways to exploit a price of zero, and make money elsewhere for a business, is a challenge that is increasing day by day.

My wife does the shopping for our kids’ birthdays. I am only vaguely aware of what they want, and whether they’ll be delighted or disappointed on the morning of the Big Day.

My son is approaching his 16^th birthday, and I have learnt a great deal about the way people will consume news, information and entertainment in the future from his behaviour over the past few years.

My mind has been boggled by the technology he and his friends have mastered, and which they use to communicate with each other, entertain themselves and even (occasionally) use to improve their school work.

The Xbox 360, the netbook, the on demand television, the iTouch and the mobile phone are all standard issue to my son and his friends. They no longer congregate on street corners to ‘hang out’ (is that an eighties term?), but now meet in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Halo, chat on MSN, and open windows to each other’s lives on Facebook.

I have already become the dinosaur whose poor grasp of current technology is laughed at, just as I laughed at my parents’ inability to master a video recorder.

None of this will be news to a parent of teenagers. They’re all at it.

But one thing has shocked me in the past few days. I was helping my wife wrap birthday presents and discovered we have bought him a portable hard drive, on which will store all his downloaded music, videos and games.

The drive cost $150 - quite a sum for storage in this day and age. But the capacity is a whopping, gargantuan, elephantine…

…One Terabyte!

The only time I ever wrote about Terabytes was in articles about Cray Supercomputers - the type of stuff that could work out the spread of radioactive material from a nuclear explosion, or the destructive force of a hurricane.

Now, my son is about to have that much storage in his backpack.

He will be carrying his own television station filled with all his favourite shows. He will have more music than Virgin Megastore can cram into it hugely expensive mall outlets. He will have computer games that will occupy him for 50 percent of his leisure time.

He will have more media crammed into a box the size of a hardback book than the BBC had in every film can in its archives from World War II until the advent of digital video.

The mass storage he will have at his fingertips is a massively disruptive technological leap forward. He is no longer a consumer of the information and entertainment that traditional broadcasters and publishers want him to consume. His choices are entirely his own, with every desire catered for somewhere on the Internet.

A 16^th birthday is a landmark in any young man’s life, but this particular birthday may have as profound an effect on me as it has on him.

The battle between Microsoft and Google will make fascinating viewing this year, with Microsoft parking its tanks on Google’s search engine lawn with the launch of Bing.com, and Google parachuting behind enemy lines with the launch of the Chrome web browser.

The battle has only just begun in the United States, and may not be felt in the Middle East for another year or more.

Both companies have near monopoly market shares to lose. Analysis of traffic to Arabianbusiness.com shows that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has 78 percent of the browser market compared to Google Chrome’s 3 percent share. It is noteworthy that three years ago, Explorer’s share was 87 percent, so there has been a decline.

On the search side, Google is imperious with 87 percent of all indirect visitors finding Arabianbusiness.com via its web site; a figure unchanged from three years ago. The combination of Microsoft’s efforts with search, including MSN, Live and now Bing add up to a mere 0.5 percent this month, less than half its share compared a year ago.

This data is from the present day backwards. The future is far more interesting. I have been using Google Chrome for around two weeks now and there is no doubt in my mind it is a better browser.

I still use Explorer for some web sites that are not yet compatible with Chrome, and find it cluttered and ugly. My menu bar is five tiers deep, even without tabbed web pages. Almost one-quarter of my browser window is taken up with these menus.

Chrome is only three tiers deep, including tabs and bookmarks. There is no need for a separate search menu in Chrome because you search in the URL address line, and Google predicts what you are looking for and offers you both direct links to web sites and links to search terms. It does this so fast, it gives you the answer before you have even fully formed the question.

I also love the instant access to thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites. It is quick, easy and effective.

Try it, and let me know what you think. Click here to download.

It is much harder to conclude that Microsoft’s Bing has made any great technological leap over Google. They look almost identical, apart from a pretty picture surrounding the search box in Bing, which seems pointless to me. Everything else is the same. You put in a keyword search and it allows you to receive answers based on whether you are searching for web sites, news, images, maps, etc. Exactly the same as Google.

Microsoft claims that it cuts through the clutter of suggestions that a user gets from Google, and delivers a more relevant answer to your search. This is certainly not obvious to me when I have experimented with Bing.

More in depth reviews of Bing seem to have ignored any technological improvements over the Microsoft Live.com it replaces. Instead, the debate is restricted to whether “binging” could become as commonly used a verb as “googling”. (”Living” never caught on!)

And Microsoft is throwing its prodigious marketing muscle behind Bing, with a series of television adverts in the United States to promote it. Take a look, and see if you can work out whether you’ll be binging in the future.