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.

Much less famous than Ive are a pair of Who’s Who debutants who remind us that innovation is alive on this side of the Atlantic, despite the state of education. The brothers Ben and Jonathan Finn founded, in 1993, a company called Sibelius which creates musical notation software, allowing composers to write music on computers — and to collaborate via the internet on joint compositions. That may sound cacophonous, but from an old toy factory behind Finsbury Park station the Finns have set a global standard in a field which touches all of us just as much as the electronic devices that play the music. A multi-composer fanfare to them: knighthoods next, I hope.