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I spent the week mostly in Sweden in discussing wireless Internet. The TapioFriendz Business Networking party was a great success. Some 25 key people showed up and a few important new contacts were made. Don’t miss the next one!

Palm Reach WAP portal revisited

Zaheed Haque is building his WAP portal Palm Reach (http://www.palmreach.com) and I decided to give him a call to update myself.

Zaheed is planning to take first marketing steps in the “physical world” at the WAP 99 event in Stockholm on June 1 (http://www.sto.dfs.se/990601b/default.htm). They are preparing their own WAP gateway offering “with a small German company”. Palm Reach is in talks with Nokia which is not trying to build a wireless portal but instead sells technology and system integration to operators and hosting companies together with strong media relationships such as CNN. Nokia is also said to be interested in acquiring application companies such as calendaring etc. to complete their offering. What Nokia is doing is right in this phase of market development. Ericsson Mobile Internet  (http://mobileinternet.ericsson.se/emi/Default.asp) – as it is developed today – is the right product with the wrong timing. Now it is time for co-opetition, not competition. With Zaheed or someone else.

Since I was in Helsinki attending the greatest Nordic carneval of the year (Vappu), I might report some observations from newspapers as well as from the crowds of slightly intoxicated Nokia users and employees.

It was interesting to hear how Nokia’s wireless Internet business development is extensively using their branding and advertising companies to prepare the launch and pilot testing of the new services. The relationship is egalitarian: Nokia wants feedback from those companies to develop the right service – not just to communicate what has been developed. A big difference to Ericsson.

The evening paper Iltalehti is featuring “The Ten Secret Weapons of Nokia”. One of them is their use of philosopher Esa Saarinen as a leadership coach. According to the paper, Nokia approached Mr Saarinen to keynote at a Nokia leadership seminar. He proposed instead to run the whole event with slight alterations to the program: include the husbands and wives and focus the event on improving the family relationship. Esa Saarinen – who became a professor of philosophy at the Helsinki University around the age of 25 – is today one of the cornerstones of the Finnish society and the instrumental to the transformation of the national value system away from knives and booze into hockey world champions with a Swedish coach and into personal development empowered by what he calls “creative pig energy”. I guess you didn’t understand a word.

What’s more, Helsingin Sanomat was featuring an article trying to explain a new advertisement from Telia (!!). There a beautiful lady sleeps on a sofa, holding a Nokia mobile phone. In front of her a table crowded by empty bottles of Estonian vodka. The title of the article: “The Dream of a Call Girl.” Wow, how would that fit Ericsson’s brand values…

The emergence of music portals

RealNetworks Inc. has developed software that turns personal computers into jukeboxes, entering a promising new segment in the explosive market for digital-music delivery. A Thomson Multimedia unit is expected to unveil a portable device that plays music files from the Internet. IBM and Microsoft have their own initiatives to kick-start music delivery over the Internet. Hopefully we are looking into companies like http://www.audible.com and http://www.rocketbook.com and taking into consideration the potential need for additional multimedia capabilities in the future wireless terminals (other than video conferencing). By the way, the VP of Business Development, Internet Appliances of Be Inc. (http://www.be.com) asked me recently whether we have considered BEOS as an operating system for future multimedia devices. I did not know.

Wall Street favorites – the pick of the week

The BancBoston Robertson Stephens market capitalization of the 91 companies in the NETDEX (Internet companies) index is approximately $392.6 billion. This compares to the top 20 media companies, which have a combined market capitalization of approximately $476.6 billion. In the retail category, Wal-Mart’s market capitalization is approximately $201.3 billion.

Pick of the week: “As Lycos grows continually larger and gains increasing momentum, we see significant catalysts for the stock. These include the company’s filing of the merger proxy enabling it to talk more about the benefits of the merger. If the reception is weak, we could see improvement of the terms. If the vote fails, Lycos could become a jump ball for other bidders, which generally now have more expensive currencies. We also expect a strong quarterly report in May, based on recent gains in traffic compared to Yahoo!’s. We expect the stock will rise under most of the circumstances we envision.” – Keith Benjamin, Lead Internet Analyst, BBRS

Curiosity of the Week: Could spying be big business?

An excerpt of an email I got (from a direct mail service in Romania…): “…The SOFTWARE They Want BANNED in 27 Countries! Why? Because these secrets were never intended to reach your eyes… Get the facts on anyone using the Internet! Locate Missing Persons, find Lost Relatives. Obtain Addresses and Phone Numbers of old school friends, even Skip Trace DeadBeat Spouses. This is not a Private Investigator, but a Sophisticated SOFTWARE program DESIGNED to Automatically CRACK YOUR CASE with links to Thousands of Public Record databases. Find out SECRETS about your relatives, friends, Enemies, and everyone else!-even your spouse! With the New, INTERNET SPY AND YOU!! It’s absolutely astounding! Here’s what you can learn: License plate number! Get anyone’s name and address with just a license plate number! (Find that girl you met in traffic!).” Huh… sounds like a wireless Internet application… could it be this URL: http://www.internetspy.com/

END NOTES – Smartcode is a small French company recently acquired by Palm. They do, among other things, a Pilot version of Fonesync (http://www.smartcode.fr). – A VoIP company http://www.tundo.com is up for sale.

 

That was all for last week, this week I will be in Monterey at the Wireless Data Forum meeting.