IN THIS ISSUE:

* MySAP.com will Roll out in September

* Hungryminds.com is a Sign of Something Bigger

* Saraide and Phone.com Continue the Marketing Push

* Wall Street Pick of the Week

* Born to Shop

The newsletter this week extends itself to the event calendar on the website - I found at least 20 new events which would be worth joining. Take a look at ‘Trade Show Watch” under http://webacademy.ericsson.se.

MYSAP.COM WILL ROLL OUT IN SEPTEMBER

SAP wants to build the biggest enterprise portal of all times: mySAP.com (http://www.mysap.com). The aim is to make enterprise applications available as personalized web-based services into any devices.  Through their alliances with IBM, Microsoft, Sybase and Symbol, SAP intends to extend their pervasive computing model into mobile phones and other non-PC devices. The platform behind mySAP.com is provided by Tibco (http://www.tibco.com), a company to watch. SAP is in alliance with Microsoft to develop solutions for Windows CE using the XML-based BizTalk Framework from Microsoft. Where is WAP in all this? Are we being marginalized?

MySAP.com will be fully launched on September 14th. If you know anyone at Ericsson who is doing business development with SAP, please let me know immediately.

HUNGRYMINDS.COM ARE A SIGN OF SOMETHING BIGGER…

An online learning startup HungryMinds.com (http://www.hungryminds.com) has an interesting business model: individuals can become teachers of popular topics on their site and share the resulting revenue.  The company just got $11 million seed-round financing.  This is an example of a category of “commerce-enabling consumer assets”: if you have too many gadgets in your house you can sell them on EBAY, if you know something other people would like to learn, start teaching it on Hungryminds.com.  In the future there will be no unemployed people, only those entrepreneurially inhibited.  Among those well prepared are Northern Cheyennes, a native American tribe who are busy selling handcrafts on the Internet (unique objects are not well-suited for cost-effective catalog sales!) and teaching their native language. (http://www.ellsons.com/nativeam.html, http://www.angelfire.com/ks/ltc/).  The most remarkable example I found is Joe Little Coyote Sr. who does not yet accept credit card transactions for his audio tapes but I am sure he has got plans to do so…

SARAIDE AND PHONE.COM CONTINUE THE MARKETING PUSH

I have strong opinions about Saraide. They do their due diligence of acquisitions with very smart criteria: if you read through European conference programs you can see that their GIN acquisition is present in most of the events I have selected from the mail flow to be worth reading: Calling Cards 99, Mobile Location Services, etc. They acquire marketing momentum which will ensure that they will be able to grow fast towards an IPO within the next six months without a major intervention of (expensive) Silicon Valley VCs. Even worse, I saw a September 1999 event program where Saraide was presented without their Ericsson affiliation, as a Nortel-backed company. By not being in the driver seat of Saraide we are letting the winds blow away our money.

Also, it is worth repeating that the Phone.com marketing strategy in paying off: they reached last week a $4.3 billion market cap (now down to $3.6 bn). Their problem is of course the apparent lack of exit strategy: they are simply too expensive for anyone to acquire (related to substance they have to offer).

WALL STREET PICK OF THE WEEK

Keith Benjamin recommends stocks which focus on providing tools for strong brands to become online plays. It would be natural for Ericsson to work with players in this category of infrastructure vendors. “…We believe there is increasing appreciation of the leaders in smaller categories with business models that can turn profitable faster. Companies providing content and services on an outsource basis generally fit this criteria. These include Digital River, Fatbrain, Infospace, Mapquest, and AskJeeves. We generally like companies that provide services to the big brands without risking investments in their own brand building. These toll-taker business models are starting to stand out. Examples include the eMarketing companies such as DoubleClick and MediaMetrix, which help marketers improve targeting and measure results, effectively taking a percentage of marketing spending.”  - Keith Benjamin, Sr Software Analyst, BancBoston Robertson Stephens (http://www.internetstocks.com)

BORN TO SHOP

Although teens are spending approximately $38 each time they buy online, they don’t see e-commerce as the Web’s biggest function, says a survey by Cheskin Research and Cyberteens.com (http://www.cyberteens.com).  Many teens view surfing the Net like going to the mall, an opportunity to explore and keep in touch with friends. Consequently, marketers are looking at ways to integrate social interaction with online shopping.

The quiz of the week: Find the seven business opportunities for Ericsson in the paragraph above! (Hint: It’s all about…)

QUICK TAKES - If bringing schools online is a promotional priority, the global program called Schools Online would be an opportunity to invest in… According to Zona Research, As much as $4.35 billion in e-commerce sales in the
U.S. may be lost each year due to slow download speeds… Motorola cuts a deal with Women.com to target women with pagers… Red Herring has a good article on broadband wireless, is Tantivy a threat to 3G is the US?… In the upcoming Mobile Software Forum in London GIN (recently acquired by Saraide) will be talking about their WAP cooperation with Nokia… MrWakeUp.com, a free, ad-financed reminder service where users can program alerts to be delivered to them via mobile phone, got USD 1.8 million financing (I mentioned this company a couple of weeks ago)… MixMe Networks, a Web site “featuring a proprietary content platform used to produce and deliver audio-based entertainment products” sounds really interesting, watch for their site become live (reminds me of ResRocket)… CustomerCast.com is offering real-time customer satisfaction feedback for decision-makers via the Internet, something we should mobile-enable as soon as possible… Buycons are buyable icons which enable bundling of compressed images and related merchandising data into exchangeable objects.  No mention of wireless applications yet, iPulse should probably partner with these people right away…  - (To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)

SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING -  I am sure by now most of you have read the latest Wired and their cover story on Nokia, it is must reading and for a full version you need to go and buy the magazine… USA Today came out with another promotion for Finland and Nokia as the wireless Internet testbed… Confinity who recently cut a mobile e-commerce technology deal with Nokia is showing a high profile in Silicon Valley and in their upcoming speech at the Jefferson Club they will be painting the so far most outrageous societal impact of cell phones: “…a radical elimination of all politics, in which an anarcho-libertarian capitalism replaces today’s nation-states…”…   - (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.