Who’s new in 2007 — and how are things in Sakhalin, Comrade Lobachov?

An entry in the new edition of Who’s Who isn’t quite like a knighthood — you can’t buy one, for a start — but it is nevertheless a distinction. It’s also a useful indicator of trends. Business leaders appearing in the big red book for the first time this year illustrate the march of international corporate life: a big hello to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo of Nokia, the Finnish mobile-phone giant, and Pierre-Henri Gourgeon of Air France-KLM. But the names that particularly caught my eye are Britons who have expanded the horizons of consumer technology. Much has already been written about Jonathan Ive, the Chingford-born designer at Apple Computer in California who led the team that created the iPod — a work of genius for the elegance of the ‘scroll-wheel’ which drives it, replacing the awkward little buttons on earlier generations of hand-held gadgets. Ive studied industrial design at Newcastle Poly, now Northumbria University — a fact which will prompt many educationists, for the umpteenth time, to lament that polytechnics which taught useful skills were turned into the sort of universities which mostly do not.