This is a weekly newsletter describing what happened on the Internet market during the past week and how that might affect Ericsson (as interpreted my me, Tapio Anttila, working for LME/DMA in San Francisco as a business developer with a focus on Internet applications and enablers). The report will be published every Monday (except holidays).

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This week I visited the Mobile Insights 99 conference in Palm Springs. This high-level industry event gathers some 300 executives in a happening that more and more expands on its data-centric origin towards wireless communications. These are my thoughts after the event.

Do the vendors understand the needs of corporate IT managers?

One of the dominant concerns at the show was how large corporations could more easily deploy mobile computing in their organisations and seamlessly integrate it to legacy systems. “1999 will be the year of device chaos, we will have even more complexity, not less”, said one speaker. “Customer support is a huge issue when we move into enterprise-wide deployments.” This is certainly why GoAmerica focusses on SME market - it can more easily adopt and put into productive use new technologies. Time-to-Productivity is important when you are dealing with rapid technology cycles.

Bluetooth - what is mindshare made of?

Intel made a quick demo on Bluetooth. The industry visions were nowhere to be seen - it was just a demo. The audience is excited about the potential of Bluetooth, the main question is: How do you secure it is more reliable and easier to deploy than IR (which has been a disappointment)? When the industry players talked about laptop standards, “proximity docking” was on the wishlist of Dell. A Bluetooth opportunity? Another key question: How will retrofitting legacy devices to handle Bluetooth be implemented? Ericsson’s name was not present. Bluetooth is perceived as an industry consortium led by Intel. The main innovations come from Motorola. Made in USA, you know.

Microsoft rocks over WAP

Jonathan Roberts, General Manager Market Development for Windows CE, made the usual pitch for CE and Microsoft mobile computing strategy. The message was: “We don’t want to be unpolite but this WAP is not really needed. CIOs will prefer CE, there is so much Win32 development already done.” Application development for CE is easy, as was demonstrated by Intertop. According to Microsoft, CE devices will be tied into services, not to PCs. Elsewhere at the event WAP got also supporters, but no big names we really behind it.

Synchronization is a key technology

The Motorola acquisition of Starfish (Truesync) was as much about marketing as it was about technology - synchronization is a key technology for the handheld device market to take off. Puma demonstrated their relatively new Intellisynch Anywhere, Enterprise Harmony from Extended Systems addressed syncronization in a multivendor environment.

Philippe Kahn has done miracles at Motorola - this is probably only a start…

“Sometimes we had to take a Motorola product and reverse-engineer it in order to find out what the company was doing.” Only Philippe Kahn can afford to joke like this about his employer Motorola - but the new Snap-On organiser for StarTac was a sensation and it will probably sell well as it starts shipping in April. The next version of Snap-On will have Internet access. Philippe will focus on pushing mobile e-commerce at Motorola. Another Motorola star is Ronjon Nag who is heading their handwriting recognition division and ha just come up with MobilePad Chinese Pager, shipping in two weeks in China for USD 150.

Symbian - poor boys stay in the farm league

One of the most amusing occasions was to see Ali Manson sitting on the podium floor after the panel discussion were all “industry leaders” (Palm, MS, IBM, HandSpring) had discussed the future of handheld computing. Hey Ali, why were you not up there? “You have to pay for to be there”, was his answer. Boy, Symbian is not on the radar screen. I went on to talk to Dr Gerry Purdy, the organiser of the event. Dr Purdy, have you contacted Ericsson about this event? We might have a few cronas in our budget for something like this. “I have started talking to Ali Manson about it. We might have and international vendor panel next year.” Boy, Ericsson is not on the radar screen…

About Mobile Insights as a commercial platform

Mobile Insights is extremely US-centric event. Both Nokia and Ericsson were absent. There was a small product exhibit with some 40 companies. Press was there: over 30 journalists, some big names. Lead sponsors were Microsoft and 3Com (Palm). A well-organised event. Largest number of visitors from companies like IBM (19), Motorola (13), Intel (12), Microsoft (11), 3Com (9), Fujitsu (8), WirelessKnowledge (7), Qualcomm (4)… and not so much from Symbian (2), Nokia (2), Ericsson (1), Siemens (1). GoMobile 99 is a their new event, coming up on Sept 22-23 in San Diego. They will pay all the expenses of 200 corporate IT decision makers to enhance visitor quality. Microsoft and WirelessKnowledge seem to be the committed lead sponsors.

End Notes

Audible (http://www.audible.com) is moving into the talk delivery space just when Internet radios are becoming hot. Their new client enables you to take subscriptions which automatically update a device with two hours of spoken text. The announced alliance with New York Times enables you to take an Audible-enabled device, freshly updated, in your car and listen to the newspaper while driving to work. Available on Audible Player, CE devices (software) and RIO MP3 player. Palm devices don’t have audio out jack (yet), otherwise this would be an enormous hit. Visto http://www.visto.com is one of the startups developing “desktop on the web” or “Hotmail on steroids” products. All these companies have future plans for mobile services. Visto’s founders have a background at Verifone, this is a serious company. Traveling Software presented their newly launched LapLink Enterprise Exchange Accelerator which boasts advanced compression, high-performance delivery protocol and sophisticated attachment filtering to deliver mail up to 15 times faster for remote users with MS Exchange. Geez, sounds like EVO. Server software with 10 clients is FREE. On the Go Software (http://www.onthegosoftware.com) introduced Quicken Expensable for expense reporting (Palm & CE). I envy those to whom expense reporting is this easy… Citrix (http://www.citrix.com) said it is working with two of the five leading wireless manufacturers in order to make its server based computing vision reality in the wireless Internet space. Symbol Technologies showed a retail application of Palm device with a barcode reader - Tesco and Safeway are piloting it in the UK. Vadem Calligrapher handwriting recognition software was one of the most popular demos - developed by a Russian scientist Stepan Pachikov. Another genius from behind the former Iron Curtain was Andrius Kulikauskas from Lithuania selling his personal knowledge management research project (quite exotic stuff…). I also changed my negative opinion on electronic books, SoftBook seems to have a viable business model (subscription-based subsidization), these things might suit well in the 3G wireless application portfolio. The PdQ phone should start shipping “before June”, it got spontaneous applauses, I cannot understand why.