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I spent the week partly in Monterey attending the Wireless Data Forum annual meeting and the WirelessDeveloper 99 show, also in Monterey. Later in the week I attended the Young & Rubicam Ericsson internal seminar in Stockholm on marketing to the Generation Y (teenagers) segment.

Palm Reach WAP portal – the show goes on

Zaheed Haque (http://www.palmreach.com/info/english/the_company/the_team.html) is building his wireless portal called Palm Reach with a goal to get a leading position on theWAP market. Since I was in Sweden, I could not resist the temptation to offer him a dinner in order to understand better what is going on. Particularly our US people (EWIS) seem to think Palm Reach is totally harmless. Maybe, if Ericsson gets something on the market by July…

Palm Reach has become a member of the Nokia WAP Developer Forum (http://forum.nokia.com) and their solution has already been tested by two members of that forum: Deutsche Telekom and  Telecom Italia Mobile. By the way, Nokia has already organised two WAP Developer Conferences, one in Finland and one in Amsterdam.

Palm Reach sees the ISP market as an important opportunity – users can save money by dialling a toll-free number directly to an ISP WAP site, thus bypassing a telco gateway. ISPs will be early supporters of WAP for market development purposes.

Zaheed maintains that his Java-based technology platform is highly robust and scaleable ad that his main challenge lies in getting access to content. He plans to adress this content partly by embracing the Netscape Open Directory Initiative (http://directory.netscape.com, http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease726.html), a move which (according to him) would strengthen his position particularly on the US market and in the open source community. Expect an announcement within two weeks.

Zaheed visited Silicon Valley a few months ago and he actually paid Geoffrey Moore (http://www.chasmgroup.com) two days of work to help refine his ideas. You certainly remember Geoffrey Moore, the author of “Inside the Tornado” and a venture capitalist at Mohr&Davidow who was the keynote speaker at the Ericsson top management meeting in San Diego last October. Pretty ambitious. Zaheed also said: “Tonight is my first night out in eight weeks, after the launch we worked the whole company 48 hours without sleep.”

WirelessDirect has a proprietary e-commerce engine with which they offer,  through their website and their network partners and business partners next day delivery of fully activated wireless service and phones. Over 40 million wireless shoppers will open more than 30 million new wireless accounts next year – including 20 million seasoned customers who change carriers each year. WirelessDirect has the technology and service to compare multi-carrier offerings and to order new service on the spot. Next week I will receive a password for their beta site and will be able to tell you more. – http://www.wirelessdirect.com

Wall Street favorites – the pick of the week

Last week Keith Benjamin recommended us to go and buy, among others, Priceline.com, Lycos (again!), InfoSpace and Amazon.com.  “…We believe Amazon is quickly building one of the Internet’s most dynamic and scalable business models, such that its current investments should drive considerably higher top-line growth and eventually greater profits. We expect investors will gain a better appreciation for Amazon’s growth opportunities as the company reveals its strategic investments and business development plans. We don’t question if there are additional businesses the company will enter which will partially explain the major investments. Rather, we question how many new business categories Amazon will enter in the near term and how quickly we will learn about them. We continue to speculate that travel, software and toys are near the top of the list. We recommend buying the shares in advance of what we believe could be a flurry of positive announcements regarding further investments or launches…” – Keith Benjamin, Chief Internet Analyst, BancBoston Robertson Stephens.

MarCom Platforms – Wireless Data Forum and WirelessDeveloper 99

The WDF Forum in Monterey (http://www.wirelessdata.org) had some 200 people gathered in a rather incestuous industry event. Very few new product announcements, very few new customers, old faces we would know anyway (the guys at OmniPoint or Airtouch). Compared with DemoMobile 99 or the upcoming IBC wireless Internet conference in San Diego (http://www.ibcusa.com/USC/2352/) this was a flop. Lots of Ericsson (and Lucent) people attended, though. Sadly, there was a BlueTooth Session scheduled in the program with Ericsson mentioned as one of the presenters. The session was cancelled with the notion of “scheduling conflicts”. We should make sure BlueTooth is presented in an industry event like this. Period.

WirelessDeveloper 99 (http://www.wirelessdeveloper99.com/) was a separate event in Monterey, organised in conjunction with the WDF event but with different organizers. The show did not have much more audience but it was more professionally organized and there was a clear business development focus with an emphasis on how to develop wireless Intrnet services with sustainable business cases. Their problem was the affiliation with WDF, this show should have been organized separately or in conjunction with Internet World or Comdex.

Marketing to teenagers – can we catch up?

Young & Rubicam organized an excellent seminar at Ericsson in Stockholm, bringing in as a coordinator the world-famous trend reseracher Marian Saltzman. We are late in addressing this market and my question is: will it be already too costly to try to catch up Nokia and others? Anyway, in my view the focus should be taken away from terminals only to total solutions (covering wireless portals, ISP solutions, etc.). Ad agencies like Y&R should be used more actively in our business development (Nokia does it!), Marian had just recently worked with e.g. Disney and Sony. The teenager segment is where both the web and prepaid are extremely relevant which is why we should give this segment special attention in our wireless Internet business development efforts. Some amazing quotes:

“Teenagers are masters of multitasking.” (multitasking multiplies operator revenues )

“For teenagers, connectivity is assumed, mobility is expected. Other important attributes are instant gratification and personalization.”

“Chinese spend 24 % of their household income on their kid.”

“Teens are members of a tribe called ‘global youth’, a glocal generation.”

“In marketing to teens, inclusive is in, exclusive is out.” (Adidas beats Nike)

“Fashion is unfashionable for stylistically literate people such as teens.” (see personalization)

“Organizing their own life is a high priority for teens.” (wireless portals!)

END NOTES – Virgin Megastores will start selling CDs online and more notably establish 12 live radio channels. (http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,35978,00.html?owv)

 

That was all for last week, this week I will be in Stockholm, speaking at the Scandinavian venture capital conference E-Challenge. The rest of the week I will be back in San Francisco to get some work done.