- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * Ericsson Catches Up in New York
- * Help Set Up and Ericsson WAP Application Database!
- * We Should Work with Those Who Create the Future
- * An Upcoming Ericsson Workshop on “Teenagers, Chinese and Harley Davidson Riders”
- * Improvement Opportunities at Ericsson
The tempo on the wireless Internet market is increasing and Ericsson is also starting to tackle the essential problems such as the positioning of WAP, GPRS and 3G. We all know that the explosion of the market will not start tomorrow - how to utilize the “building period” for competitive advantage? We should understand the War for Mindshare which has started and which will continue until the “tornado” hits in. Marketing excellence will create tens of billions of dollars of market value, the symbol of business innovation. Let’s try to take our share of that.
- ERICSSON CATCHES UP IN NEW YORK
The week in New York was full of Ericsson activity, perhaps over 500 Ericsson people made their way to Big Apple. Ericsson Business Consulting had their sales conference there, CyberLab East organized the kick-off for the Ericsson Developer Program, the MISE Team got together, a MISE Business Model Seminar was organized and Ericsson participated in the Fall Internet World 99 exhibition.
The MISE Team stands for Mobile Internet Solutions by Ericsson and it is a cross-PU management team defining Ericsson’s strategy, market message, developer relations, partnering strategy, etc. for wireless Internet (which we have started to call mobile Internet). The group is working with high tempo and you should expect lots of results by the end of the year. You can get a glimpse of some of it by following my http://webacademy.ericsson.se.
The MISE Business Model Seminar was a great success with over 30 participants. The purpose was to expose the audience to a dialogue on how Internet business models are devised. See http://webacademy.ericsson.se under ‘Business Models’, the seminar material will be available in a few days. Preparations are underway for the seminar in Stockholm on Oct 26th, see the intranet site for details.
CyberLab NY organized a highly successful workshop to discuss the Ericsson Developer Program and how to go about building one. External authorities were presenting and delivering a view that we need a common developer platform for our various products and technologies: SMS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, EPOC, 3G, iPulse, eBox, GSM on the Net, etc. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that Ericsson will follow the recommendation - the feedback was encouraging, though. (By the way, I took the liberty to add SMS to the list myself - Ericsson has the tendency to regard SMS as a thing from the past when it actually is one of the strongest competitive weapons we have as we now have to perform in Internet time (= today) and not in 2001.)
The FIW 99 itself was in my opinion surprisingly busy. HandSpring (http://www.handspring.com) made an impressive debut with a number of important partners showing GPS, Bluetooth etc. Springboard modules with shipping dates in 1Q2000. The major East-Coast venture capital incubator CMGI (http://www.cmgi.com) who recently bought Altavista, exhibited their whole portfolio of companies, something I never saw at FIW before.
The wireless Internet industry does not use FIW as a marcom platform, even if it offers an excellent access to the developer community. Phone.com was almost absent, they apparently rely on their own extremely successful developer program. Nokia is somehow making the mistake of profiling themselves as a firewall product company at these shows. Motorola was not even there. And then we have Ericsson with a large stand and a substantial number of products. I think our participation at FIW 99 left much to be improved in the future. On the level of perception (which marketing is about), our stand was empty compared to the others’. When I see it, I feel ashamed. We did not attract crowds, we did not tell any story. At exhibitions I visit two kinds of stands: 1) the ones I planned to visit and 2) the ones that seem to be popular and make me think I have perhaps missed something. Most MBAs who passed our stand probably wondered: this exhibition costs Ericsson more than our first round of financing, do these people know the value of money?
HELP SET UP AN ERICSSON WAP APPLICATION DATABASE!
Geoff Hollingworth at EWIS has taken the initiative to put together a list of all Ericsson WAP applications and make that list available to all of us. Let’s give Geoff a helping hand!
WE SHOULD TALK TO THOSE WHO CREATE THE FUTURE
SoftBank is one of the most well-known “Internet keiretsus”, an investor and an incubator which defines new category leaders by investing in them and that way validating their business model. One of their first investments was the push media company FreeLoader back in 1995. It was sold for $40 million to Individual, Inc. SoftBank own substantial minority stakes in category leader companies such as Yahoo!, E*Trade, E-Loan, InsWeb, Webvan, etc. The company is the creation of Masayoshi Son who is now listed as Japan’s richest person. More on him at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0705/6401146.htm.
A couple of months ago, SoftBank cut a deal with News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) and a French media conglomerate Vivendi to help establish SoftBank’s US-based Internet company portfolio on Asian and European markets. Last week Atviso, the venture arm of Softbank and Vivendi, started throwing in capital ($70 m to start with) to establish the SoftBank Internet portfolio on the European market. E-Loan and Buy.com will be the first companies to cross the Atlantic.
During the Internet Summit last July, I did talk to Masayoshi Son himself and asked whether he would like to work with Ericsson to make wireless Internet happen worldwide. He was clearly interested. I think we could have in SoftBank a partner who perceives Internet as a global opportunity and not just as a Silicon Valley opportunity (Kleiner-Perkins) or US opportunity (CMGI). I believe it is all about finding the right keiretsus and defining your competition. We don’t have enough MBAs to work with the entire Internet industry, we need to use the momentum of those who control a portfolio of companies. I see in front of my eyes the press release: “SoftBANK partners with Ericsson to bring the wireless application dial tone of leading Internet companies to mobile operators worldwide.”
UPCOMING ERICSSON WORKSHOP ON “TEENAGERS, CHINESE AND HARLEY RIDERS”…
Cyberlab Singapore is organising a workshop focused on teenagers. The title of the workshop is “Teenagers, Chinese and Harley Davidson Riders: Creating products to fit distinct communication cultures”. It will be held on the 24- 26 January 2000, in Malaysia. Please see the following web-site for a lot more information about the event. http://cyberlab.eno.ericsson.se/Activities/Natural_Interaction/buddy_events.html.
IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES AT ERICSSON
Two weeks ago I was looking for a phone that would work with my new Ericsson Chatboard (http://www.chatb.com) and I ended going on the Internet and the Ericsson mobile phones webshop at http://www.ericsson.com/US/consumer. I took up the dealer locator and typed in my ZIP code ‘94133′ in San Francisco. Seven first matches were displayed with contact information. I called them all and none of them sold Ericsson phones. A typical comment was: “We don’t sell them any longer, I wonder why they still keep listing us.” Maybe there is nothing wrong with the Ericsson phones, maybe it is just too difficult to buy them?
WALL STREET PICK OF THE WEEK
MapQuest and Infospace formed a strategic alliance to provide their content on non-PC devices. Is their primary phone vendor partner going to be Nokia or Ericsson? “MapQuest and InfoSpace announced a strategic alliance whereby MapQuest will become the exclusive provider of mapping and driving directions throughout the InfoSpace network, which now reaches more than 86% of the Web. We believe the agreement bodes well for both sides as it significantly extends MapQuest’s reach and expands the breadth of quality products offered by InfoSpace. On a separate note, we believe the increased traffic numbers that we have witnessed from both Media Metrix and Yahoo! serve as a positive for eSourcers, which benefit from increased page views and strong volumes. These data points continue to strengthen our belief that both companies are poised to deliver exceptional Q3 results with upside to our estimates.” - Michael Graham, Sr Software Analyst, BancBoston Robertson Stephens (http://www.internetstocks.com)
QUICK TAKES - The Venture company is a new venture catalyst in Silicon Valley with European affiliations, something the Ericsson Business Innovation unit could eventually use… Oingo.com is a new “meaning-based” search engine. It would be important for Ericsson to focus on new search technologies since navigation on bandwidth-constrained devices should be optimized to always find the shortest route to the desired information… Internet startup hiring mania starts to hit mobile operators. The head of strategy and development at Airtouch Vodafone joined a free PC startup PeoplePC… A German comparison shopping engine DealPilot got acquired by Bertelsmann. This type of technology is important for wireless Internet… The blue-chip startup Support.com cut a deal with Excite@Home to establish a PC support portal. The company has some proprietary technology to automate the application management process. When will this be available for mobile phones and services? Should UpFront Solutions at EPA partner with them? NoWonder.com is another support portal worth checking out… The voice portal market is maturing, Webley just got a $15 million second round. However, General Magic is swimming deep with its stock currently under $2, even after the myTalk deal with Excite… Trivida is coining a new term on the Internet market: Networked Personalization Service Provider. It makes personalization transferable between websites… The speech technology company Nuance closed a $40 million round (!) with investors including Cisco and NTT. The company also launched a new voice browsing technology… - (To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING - Wall Street Journal writes about Kevin Prigel, a 20-year old stock analyst and founder of StreetAdvisor.com who released last week a rumour about a potential deal between Excite@Home and AOL and made the market cap of the former jump $4.2 bn… Also on Wall Street, the recent press release on the Ericsson - Electrolux joint venture has analysts wondering what Ericsson actually stands for. Americans know Electrolux for vacuum-cleaners and they have classified the announcement to mean that Ericsson will start manufacturing “phones that suck“… up Nokia and Motorola phones from the market. Pretty funny. Rumours tell their slogan is “nothing sucks like Electrolux”… Seriously, to get on the publicity bandwagon with this, an alliance with either Webvan or Webhouse Club would not hurt http://www.wired.com/news/news/wireless/… Always wondered what the vertical portals are all about? Finally I found you an example which brings it all home to you: BevAccess.com is a portal for the alcoholic beverages industry. Freshnex is a vertical portal for the perishable foods industry and GoFish for the seafood industry… The customer service ASP FaceTime licensed earlier ICQ from AOL and cut now a deal with Novell to make their solution available as a DigitalMe service… Kleiner-Perkins launched a facilities-based service provider Broadband Office with impressive real-estate player backing… - (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.
