This is a weekly newsletter describing what happened in my work during the past week and how I see that affecting Ericsson (as interpreted my me in my role 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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I attended the Institute for the Future seminar Outlook Project Exchange in San Francisco. Ericsson is a client of IFTF for their futures research -oriented studies. I have summed up some of my thoughts after the event. I had a good write-up ready and I was silly enough to delete the file so I am trying to recapture here all my thoughts.

I will add to this story during the week, keep coming back!

Identity Management Technologies are an opportunity for Ericsson

Managing the online identities of users to optimize the effectiveness of communications and to enable e-commerce to become more secure, private and customized, embeds a number of business opportunities that fit well in a company like Ericsson. How do create online project management solutions which optimize the use of roles and identities for better results? Take a look at http://www.neometron.com. How do we disguise online identity when we need our privacy to be enhanced? The solution might be http://www.zeroknowledge.com. How can we send “replicas” of ourselves out into the network to do tasks on our behalf, with varying identities (using agent technology)? There are startups in this area as well. How do you “directory-enable” the management of identitiesand related activities? Seen DigitalMe from Novell? It is highly compelling if users can start doing “parallel processing” as a communications behavior – it all means bringing more revenues to operators.

Ericsson is working in this area, although not enough. You might want to talk to Antti Erävaara from the LINK project, among others.

Global presence is (still) an opportunity for Ericsson

The social infrastructure of globalized business tries to find ways for fast access to global markets. Human networks are the starting point. AnnaLee Saxenian, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, says: “People say Silicon Valley is made of ICs – Indians and Chinese. Silicon Valley’s strong ethnic ties to Taiwan have enabled that country to surpass Korea and to become the 3rd largest info technology producer in the world.

A large company like Ericsson is competing with this emerging “lean and mean” global social fabric. Our global presence can be a valuable and money-making corporate asset – if it provides part of a cost-effective globalization strategy for our partners. Nobody will want to serve a feudal king if he is fat, deaf and slow – in this world people can choose which king to serve…

Virtual environments mature slowly but surely

Remember Ericsson Virtual World, the 3D multi-user product used to promote Ericsson Internet products in an immersive and interactive fashion as early as in 1997? IFTF focussed during the second day on virtual environments and how to make use of them in both business and entertainment contexts.

Palace (http://www.thepalace.com/) is said to have the most users, some 500,000 of them. Former Onlive Traveler CTO was speaking and that company certainly gathered the most experience so far on online 3D communities with voice over IP.

In a business context, NeoMetron http://www.neometron.com is building a project community solution featuring a modelling language for project management needs. It was very insightful to think of the possibilities of storytelling to convey the project history to the new project members to get them up to speed faster. Or managing roles and identities in an automated fashnion to speed up the project completion.

Selected quotes (stop and think about each of them for a second…)

“We are moving from five-year planning to adaptive management and planning processes. This means huge challenges for communications solutions.” – Mary O’Hara, Director, IFTF

“A narrowcasting infrastructure will be as important as telephony. Future organization have to find the balance between chaos and complexity – narrowcasting introduces effective tools to handle this.” – Jan Hauser, Principal Architect, Sun Microsystems (Well, this is more of my interpretation of what he said. This is an important viewpoint from someone who has had to help adapt his organization to the tidal wave called LINUX…)

“One of the most interesting websites I have found in a long time is http://www.cluetrain.com. ” – Thomas P. Armour, Senior Technology Officer, Central Intelligence Agency

Some useful contacts

Ericsson (perhaps Zopps?) should take a look at http://www.customercast.com/ which provides systems that integrate real-time, visual customer satisfaction feedback into all of a company’s business processes, easily and interactively via the Web. Talk to Elizabeth Burroughs at betsyb@customercast.com.

A direct opportunity for the Zopps project would be to involve Tony Christopher and DeAnna Burghardt from Digital Places (http://www.digiplaces.com) to facilitate the creation of successful communities. Tony has been the driving force behind Fujitsu’s WorldsAway (http://www.worldsaway.com/).

END NOTES – This week I will be attending Sun Microsystem’s executive retreat. I hope to have a good understanding on how partnerships and alliances are being run in a leading Silicon Valley company and what we could learn from it.