Amas Report Makes For Odd Reading

I’ve mentioned Amas’ reports previously and the latest one is as fluffy as its predecessors…

The main thrust in this edition is broadband “takeup”. It doesn’t mention whether it’s actually available or not, which seems more than a little counter-intuitive, though admittedly they do mention availability in their own office:

Despite a Dublin city centre location, and sharing the same street as the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, AMAS has been turned down again for a DSL connection.

You’d think that they might have factored that into the headlines…

The other part of their report relates to the mobile web:

Leading companies and government bodies have a poor mobile and PDA internet presence, according to research conducted by AMAS.

Wow! Great headline, but who are you actually talking about?

A survey of 100 organisations, split evenly between public and private sectors, shows
most have adopted a mainly defensive strategy to the mobile internet to date.

That’s incredibly vague and the followup statement doesn’t actually collate with anything:

A majority of both public and private companies have registered a .mobi mobile domain, presumably to protect their brands.

Let’s look at that statement more closely. Which companies are they talking about? Companies in general or the 100 that they looked at, but haven’t actually named?
If it’s Irish companies in general I’d love to know where they’re getting their stats.

While it’s nice to see them talking about mobile sites this kind of vague reporting is not helpful. If you are going to focus on 100 sites and 100 only then why can’t you actually mention which sites you are talking about?
They claim that none of the sites they checked scored 5 on the ready.mobi test (they didn’t even tell people where the test was located!), so at least I know they weren’t looking at ours!