With the controversy around the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2011 awards having no women shortlisted, but a couple of men who have done next to nothing all year, I thought I’d work out the exact voting results from the jounalists who nominate people, based on the BBC data.

You can see the full table below. The short version is that quite a few women got a couple of votes, and Rebecca Adlington came joint 11th with 6 votes, but it seems that journalists don’t watch many women in sport.

There were also far too many journalists wasting their votes on embarrassing votes like the Manchester Evening News voting for Dimitar Berbatov and the retired Patrick Viera, and the Daily Star Sunday voting for Lewis Hamilton after the worst year of his career, and that’s what I really find interesting about these results.

[table “3” not found /]

This time next year, the Kindle Fire will cost $100 to make – think of that, next time someone tells you that Amazon won’t make money on tablet hardware.

People keep talking about the just about break-even $199 price of the Amazon Kindle Fire as if it’s a loss-leader “Razors and razor-blade” model, but it’s simply not.

First of all, anyone who’s bought a razor recently will notice they cost a lot more than the piece of plastic it’s made out of justifies – the “Sell razors cheap to sell blades” model is long dead.

Secondly, The Kindle Fire might cost $200 to make today, but not that Amazon know they’ve got a hit on their hands, they can go back to suppliers, make bigger orders, and reduce the cost price by perhaps $20 immediately.

Over the next year, as the hardware used becomes more commoditised, and the suppliers become better at making it for less, the price of this kind of hardware will go through the floor, and Amazon will be sat waiting, ready to make plenty of profits on their new product line.

One the biggest risks of cloud computing is not technical, but contractual, as proved by the failure of Backify, a popular online storage and backup provider, who, thanks to a falling out with their back-end provider Livedrive, ended up losing all their customers data.

Both sides are now firing public statements about who is at fault, but the end-result for their users is clear – customer data deleted, and not recoverable.

There’s not much good that can be said about the behaviour of either party. For example, Livedrive deleted all customer data then emailed the users, when they could obviously have emailed them giving some notice period first, and Backify aparantly asked Livedrive to delete their reseller account, without realising that this would delete all their customer data.

I’ve not got any easy answers about this situation, but I’ve got a couple of questions for you to ask your online service providers, whether they’re “cloud storage” or “online backup” or what we used to call “web hosting”.

Is this another company’s service that you are reselling?

Are there any third parties who can close my account or delete my data?

If your provider answers either of these questions with a yes, then I believe you should take a very long look at who you deal with, because the day that your provider and their provider fall out, the real loser will be you!