IN THIS ISSUE:

* Saraide Extracts Value from Wireless Internet

* @Motion Leads the Location-Aware Wireless Portal Race

* Improvement Opportunities of the Week

* Wall Street Pick of the Week

* MP3 Generation takes the  ‘Global Village’ as a Given

I spent the week in San Francisco, hosting people from GSM Wireless e-Solutions who were over here to do some business. I had to spend most of the weekend at The Internet Summit in Los Angeles, therefore this newsletter is shorter than normal.

SARAIDE EXTRACTS VALUE FROM WIRELESS INTERNET

Saraide is a wireless Internet service bureau with a backend solution enabling the provision of operators with an “application dialtone”. Ericsson is a recent investor with a 22 % stake. Here is my brief analysis, having met with their VP of Business Development. http://www.saraide.com

Saraide will become a “category leader” in the service bureau space, with its IPO planned already for later this year. The second round investors (later this year) will probably include Nokia and Sonera. The Silicon Valley location and a CEO coming from the e-Commerce industry (ex-Verifone CEO) will help the company ramp up significant market value.

How will our affiliation with Saraide help differentiate the Ericsson wireless Internet offering? Will Saraide be another “Phone.com - a company which steals our value creation opportunity with better focus and more aggressive marketing? This is not entirely clear to me, perhaps some of the readers could shed some light into this…

@MOTION LEADS THE LOCATION-AWARE WIRELESS PORTAL RACE

@Motion (previously called Arabesque) released its @Motion service, a product that could make every wireless phone a portal access device. @Motion will sell its carrier-grade server to wireless service providers and will partner with content providers to give wireless subscribers a variety of personalized services such as unified messaging, Yellow Pages listing services, commute updates, travel reservations and stock quote services to wireless providers. The service will differentiate itself from competing wireless content services by paying special attention to localized content and time critical applications. (http://www.atmotion-inc.com/home.htm) (ZDNET)

@Motion deserves some extra analysis, like most of the companies in which the Deutsche Telekom venture arm is investing… http://www.thinkone.com

IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES OF THE WEEK 

I am sometimes accused of being overly critical and pessimistic about Ericsson’s performance. I have now limited my critical editorials under this section. All the rest is just about wonderful opportunities. Now, let go and dig some dirt.

Ericsson website still underperforms. How about training the ericsson.com search engine so that it finds relevant information about our products, including all their acronyms? Try find something on OTA… Why not establish a product or acronym home page, trying to anticipate how users might want to navigate by “guessing”. See http://www.ericsson.com/ipulse. This should be a model for all products and technologies from Ericsson, like GPRS.

Who coordinates our ad placements? Someone from Ericsson in Europe bought a two-page ad in a recent issue of The Industry Standard (http://www.thestandard.com), a leading weekly Internet Industry publication with a trend analysis focus. Our ad was selling one of the switches with a big and ugly picture of the box occupying the space. This ad did not fit the target group or editorial line of the publication and it unfortunately had a strong negative impact on our image among Internet industry professionals.

WALL STREET PICK OF THE WEEK

I already thought of stopping this weekly quoting of Keith Benjamin but now he suddenly comes up with some fascinating stuff on AOL.: “We are stunned by the current numbers associated with AOL’s broader Web-based communications tools. There are more than 40 million registered users of AOL’s Buddy Lists and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) services, who send over 430 million messages per day. ICQ’s 38 million registered users send an additional 330 million messages a day. These are more messages in total than the 500 million letters sent each day via the U.S. Post Office. What new applications will drive us to keep on communicating? AOL seems to be a good habit that’s getting better. New interactive devices will enable new interactive directory services. AOL can provide status indication and action. Are you there? Are you online or offline? Are you available?”  - Keith Benjamin, Sr Internet Analyst, BancBoston Robertson Stephens (http://www.internetstocks.com)

For comparison, there are roughly one billion SMS messages sent in Europe per month (not day!). Those provide direct revenue, though. The habit for instant messaging is there, now is it time for Ericsson to add value to it!

MP3 GENERATION TAKES THE ‘GLOBAL VILLAGE AS A GIVEN

I had a cup of coffee with a Korean teenage portal startup based in Silicon Valley. Suddenly Nicole, the VP of business development says: “We are making these content partnerships and one of the negotiations was with a leading MP3 site, MP3-2000. This Raphael Kang from Korea has created the site during the last 12 months and he is only 12 years old. There he was standing in our reception with the whole family from Korea, including the five-year-old little brother!” Looking at the “company information” you can see names from all over the world, working as a virtual team.

Raphael is not alone. The founder if a leading PC hardware portal http://www.anandtech.com is roughly 16, the owner of Nullsoft (WinAMP MP3 player) sold the company for some USD 200 million for AOL. He could not get into his company cocktail reception at a downtown club because he has not yet had his 21st birthday.

QUICK TAKES - On the IP research front, the Internet-scale namespace research looks highly relevant for Ericsson from the mobility and location based service perspectives… UrbanJunglePack from Berlin is a precursor of wearable mobile publishing… - (To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)

SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING - A Phoenix couple were suspended from their nursing jobs over an adult Web site they say they started to raise money for their kids’ college education. This can have some interesting ramifications… .(go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories)

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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.