In this issue: Is Our Wireless Internet Strategy in Symbiosis with Symbian? - Yahoo and Sprint PCS Form Wireless Internet Pact - AllAdvantage.com, The Future of Direct Marketing? - Translation Industry in Transition - Be a Celebrity, Have an Office in Milan for Only $9.95, via JFAX! - Wall Street Favorites: Pick of the Week - Deep Purple in Sweden

This is a weekly newsletter describing the non-confidential part of my work during the past week and how I see market evolution 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. For subscriptions go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists.

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I spent most of the week in Stockholm at the GSM Data customer seminar and talking to loads of Ericsson people. We are progressing faster but at the same time Nokia was holding their WAP Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. No time to rest, Swedes!

Is Our Wireless Internet Strategy in Symbiosis with Symbian?

Symbian has succeeded in cutting deals with leading database vendors for the inclusion of lightweight databases on EPOC devices. Says Computergram International: “If mobile databases are successful on the Symbian platform, both Palm Computing and Microsoft are likely to lose market share to the wireless pretender in areas where the palmtop traditionally rules such as sales force automation and remote data entry. Christopher Moseley, marketing and communications manager at Symbian, said that Symbian was not competing solely with Microsoft and Palm but also Hewlett-Packard Co and others. Symbian and Sybase are initially targeting the financial, healthcare and industrial sectors.”

My point here is that Ericsson’s wireless Internet business development is not focusing enough on developing end-to-end solutions for the enterprise horizontals and verticals where Symbian has its main focus. Not very symbiotic. Correct me if I am wrong.

Yahoo and Sprint PCS Form Wireless Internet Pact

According to the press releases, the Ericsson - Qualcomm deal would give us a big chunk of the CDMA handset market. Well, it won’t if we don’t move faster. CDMA handset manufacturers (including Pekka Ala-Pietilä, the CEO of Nokia) live in California and speak IP. This latest deal with Yahoo puts Yahoo media on CDMA handsets and Yahoo solidifies its lead as a wireless Internet innovator. The little USD 80 million acquisition of Online Anywhere (http://www.onlineanywhere.com/) will help Yahoo reach this goal. http://www.sprintpcs.com/news/1999/06_02_99.html

AllAdvantage.com - The Future of Direct Marketing?

Fadi Pharaon from BMOG mentioned this company in his presentation. The big idea of AllAdvantage.com is to pay you 50 cents an hour for keeping a little advertising window open on your PC screen, whether or not you respond. The window, called a ViewBar, communicates with AllAdvantage.com’s servers whenever your PC is connected to the Internet. It downloads adverts that change periodically, and you can switch it on and off at will. The only information you need to give the company to collect the money - capped at 40 hours a month, or Dollars 20 (œ12.50) - is the name and address to which you would like your monthly cheque sent. The company has now 1.2 million users, three month after their launch.

Yes, there are Juno (http://www.juno.com), CyberGold (http://www.cybergold.com), ClickRewards (http://www.clickrewards.com) and MyPoints (http://www.mypoints.com) but AllAdvantage.com goes beyond their business model by paying for ad viewing time, not click-throughs.

The intriguing part of this all is that the company could in the future build a payment scheme where you are being paid relative to how much information you agree to give about yourself, your private economy, etc. In this way direct marketing will be legitimized and the Internet privacy debate will be reduced to the “ethic fanatics” who prefer to stay outside the comfort zone of the commercial Internet. Hah! (http://www.alladvantage.com/home.asp)

This kind of business model opens of course attractive possibilities for wireless merchandising services.

Translation Industry in Transition

ETranslate (http://www.etranslate.com/) is the leader in the online translation space and they have recently acquired a company with 6,000 translators. The USD 30 billion industry (worldwide) is currently highly fragmented with no dominant market leader.

Translation services represent an important support function as the well-developed web industry in the US starts to penetrate global markets with a flora of languages. Wireless services represent an obvious opportunity: tourists in a foreign country can enhance their “digital travel story” by on-demand translation of audio files and scanned material.

Be a Celebrity, Have an Office in Milan for Only $9.95 - via JFAX!

For less than 35 cents a day, you can have an office in London or Atlanta, Frankfurt or Fort Lauderdale, Paris, Milan or New York. Your virtual office can receive faxes and voicemail — which you can then retrieve by computer or by phone (even a pay phone). Now you can tell your friends and business associates: “If you prefer, send your faxes to my London office — here’s the local phone number.” This special is good through June 10th. Call 1-888-GET-JFAX (888-438-5329) or 1-310-966-1800.

What a great marketing idea! A totally new take on unified messaging.

Wall Street Favorites - Pick of the Week

Last week Keith Benjamin gave some coverage to InfoSpace, the web content outsource company which has become increasingly actively in the wireless Internet space with recent agreements with e.g. Nokia (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/990603/ca_nokia_1.html). “Infospace has established contracts with leading Web networks to supply a broadening range of content, from white pages to yellow pages. Because of its outsource model, it is able to grow with little marketing spending, leveraging that of its partners. With most of its revenue streams growing in step with traffic at its affiliates’ Web sites, we view INSP as a proxy for Web growth, with minimal competitive risk, in our view. The company is positioned to continue growing in tandem with the proliferation of non-PC Web devices, which we expect are starting to sneak up on us as a major new platform. We believe our estimates are very low, based on the company’s short history of vastly exceeding estimates. We expect INSP to grow as fast, or faster, than the Web, allowing it to grow into a big valuation.” - Keith Benjamin, Chief Internet Analyst, BancBoston Robertson Stephens.

Deep Purple in Sweden

I ended the week by taking the taxi from Kista to Arlanda. The some 35-year old female taxi driver, Karin, suggested I take the front seat to keep her company. I got worried. She asks me: “Eric Clapton or Deep Purple?” I choose Deep Purple. She opens a box full of audio cassettes and starts playing Deep Purple MP3 concert recordings she has downloaded from the - Internet. She goes to several Deep Purple concerts per year and reads the newsgroup alt.music.deep-purple daily, posting usually an article or two herself every day. I am listening a full 30 minutes about what different people on the newsgroup say about Ritchie Blackmore and whether the Jon Lord’s piano solo we listen to resembles of Gershwin or not.  Her favorite song is “Lazy”, she has downloaded a dozen of different (amateur) concert recordings of it… Well, I guess it is not only the Star Wars and it does not all happen in the US… http://www.deja.com (search for Deep Purple), website http://www.deep-purple.com, the Swedish concert recordings in MP3 from: purple@algonet.se. You will find Karin next weekend at http://www.karlshamnrock.com/english/index1.html (in person).

END NOTES - Personal knowledge management is a very interesting area from the perspective of mobile applications: how do you navigate fast to the piece of knowledge you need? Look at Natrificial at http://www.thebrain.com as well as Minciu Sodas Virtual Laboratory in Lithuania (this guy is somewhat original). http://www.ms.lt - The domain god.org seems to be up for sale, bidding starts at USD 100,000, pretty cheap… http://www.god.org - Two Finnish entrepreneurs with investment banking background are new entrants in the wireless Internet service provider battle with European-wide ambitions and US venture money. Swedish launch planned for June 99. http://www.iobox.com/ - One-to-one digital eProduction is a useful media complement to, for example, direct marketing via mobile phones. No wonder Kleiner-Perkins is backing Impresse. http://www.impresse.com/company/index.html - Nullsoft, the maker of WinAmp MP3 player, was sold to AOL for over $200 million - enough money for the 20-year-old founder. http://www.nullsoft.com. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,37239,00.html?owv - US West is in deal with BackWeb for personalized broadband media delivery solution - including a wireless play. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,37373,00.html?st.ne.fd.tohhed.ni

That was all for last week, this week I am actually back in SFO and will be attending the Asia Silicon Valley Capital Highway Conference (http://www.aamasv.com/conference/) tomorrow and on Tuesday.