- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * Software.com - Oops, a New Company to Watch!
- * Person-to-Person Payment Platforms Will Be Huge!
- * Blocking the Brain Drain
- * Even WAP CRM WASPs Are Coming!
- * Apple Will Fuel Palm’s Future Success
- * New Venture Funds
I just arrived at PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. I attended the welcome cocktail/dinner and sat down at the table with Esther Dyson who is talking to a guy from http://www.twest.com in Germany. He wants to look into mobile Internet asap. Esther (the event organizer and industry guru) wants to talk to me as well. Then the CEO of http://www.giftedsolutions.com joins the table and says they are actively looking into wireless. A group of hebrew-speaking executives sits down and one of them sees my badge and says we need to talk. That was Isabel Maxwell (daughter of Robert!), Founder and CEO of Commtouch (http://www.commtouch.com). She is a big fish. Then there was Martin Varlavsky, founder and majority owner of Viatel in the US and Jazztel in Spain. He is also doing a major ASP venture in Germany called EinsteiNet plus he is co-bidding for a 3G license in Spain with Deutsche Telekom. Oh yes, and then there was the head of AT&T Ventures who said they are distancing themselves from AT&T and offered his help. Well, looks like mobile Internet is hotter than last year! Whoopi Goldberg will be here tomorrow - I hope she wants to talk to me as well…
Well, I guess the new BT mobile portal announcement was a real wake-up call to many. Promising to pour $250 million into mobile portal services as well as to sell 500,000 WAP phones by the end of June this year is a strong statement of direction. How aggressive will BT get? Three weeks ago I talked to my longtime friend from the videoconference days, Mike Carr. Mike is now reporting to the CTO’s office at BT HQ and after guiding successful deals with Excite and Looksmart, he has recently moved with his family to Silicon Valley. BT has a still unannounced plan to establish a $1bn venture fund in the Internet space and Mike and his three colleagues were in Palm Springs at the same corporate venture funding event as myself preparing their strategy going forward. So the answer is: yes, they indeed have woken up.
I also talked to Guy Kawasaki during the Garage.com breakfast last week. He said they have entered the European market with an office but it was a surprise to him that some European startups don’t seem to want American money, they want European money instead. Maybe Ericsson could join the likes of Guy and use his celebrity status to bridge this gap? The seed of victory lies in Ericsson’s ability to bridge different market conditions in different parts of the world..
Best Regards - Tapio Anttila
SOFTWARE.COM - OOPS, A NEW COMPANY TO WATCH!
Software.com signed a definitive agreement to acquire @mobile.com, a wireless Internet application service provider, for approximately $400M. The @mobile.com acquisition will help Software.com deliver wireless Internet offerings, including unified messaging and instant messaging. In addition, the agreement will add support for wireless applications to its carrier-scale LDAP directory. I said in my previous newsletter that Phone.com would acquire @Mobile. Hey, we all make guess wrong sometimes! I know Software.com from the times about a year ago when they first entered the mobile Internet area by acquiring a company I was looking at, Mobility.net. Well, we could also buy Software.com (before Cisco does), it would have cost last week some $5bn, now we are talking about at least $8bn. But on the other hand, the market cap of Phone.com is now at $14bn. In fact, WISE Portal should perhaps create a “Tier One” partner program where we gather companies that provide the most promising mobile portal applications and content dial tones as of today: Software.com, Infospace, Sonera Zed, Looksmart and Livemind. I would like to see what Phone.com says to that!
PERSON-TO-PERSON PAYMENT PLATFORMS WILL BE HUGE
Ebay and Wells Fargo came up with the unavoidable: how to facilitate payment activity between individual buyers and sellers. They entered an alliance to launch a new service allowing individuals to accept credit card payments instead of personal checks when selling their goods online. This thing will be huge: we all want get rid off things we don’t need and turn them into cash - but we did not know how. So far Nokia has seen the opportunity in personal payment platforms and Nokia Ventures is an investor in PayPal (http://www.paypal.com). What is Ericsson’s answer?
- BLOCKING THE BRAIN DRAIN
Mobile Internet is now very hot and some people with plenty of experience have left Ericsson. My prediction is that this situation will get much worse by the end of the year and it will be one of the main concerns of the central HR organization. Therefore, we should establish a special task force to deal with it. Does it already exist by the way?
Remedies to the situation can be found quite easily. One of them is to spin out BU MIAP or make a tracking stock out of it. Giving stock options to employees in the new unit would attract and retain the best talent. We should also take good care of the employees who left. By establishing the “Ericsson Alumni Program” we would help them retain their ties to Ericsson, see us as the partner who has a “first look” into their developments as well as offer them positions if they wish to return to Ericsson. We should remember that a year or two outside Ericsson usually increases individual’s value to Ericsson, not vice versa.
Before setting up your own company you should take a look at the Ericsson Business Innovation program at http://bi.ericsson.se. They have a good track record of spinning out new business ideas from Ericsson, such as ConnectThings and WirelessCar. I have some friends there and I can make the introductions if you like. http://www.connectthings.com, http://www.wirelesscar.com/
EVEN WAP CRM WASPS ARE COMING!
2000 Applicate launched its I-Mobile platform enabling CRM software vendors to provide their privately branded applications as a wireless service via the Internet. The I-Mobile ASP platform provides CRM vendors with full-service wireless content for outsourcing application management, end-user support and application hosting. I-Mobile, a component of Applicate’s application delivery network called VirtuApp, is WAP compatible. This is an example of customer relationship management going mobile and becoming WAP-enabled. This capability should be an integral part of WISE Portal so that we can offer it to every mobile e-business! http://www.applicate.net/
APPLE WILL FUEL PALM’S FUTURE SUCCESS
The success of Palm Computing’s IPO may have hinged on the fact that the company is brimming with talent from Apple Computer, a pioneer in the handheld computing market. Much of Palm’s management team came from Apple. Ex-Apple executive Satjiv Chahil will take over as chief marketing officer for Palm. Chahil joined Palm last week. In addition to Chahil, two of the current board of directors worked at Apple along with the vice president of worldwide sales, the vice president of platform engineering, the vice president of product development, the vice president of marketing and the director of the Palm.Net service. In related news, Apple and Palm are rumored to be working on a joint device.
NEW VENTURE FUNDS
Benchmark Capital is raising a half-billion dollar fund targeting Western Europe. Benchmark joins a growing list of American venture capital or startup firms targeting Europe, including Walden International Investment Group, Atlas Venture, Chase Capital Partners, and Garage.com.
Venture capital firm Monarch Partners announced a new $300 million wireless fund. Also, Value Trend Capital Management and Berkshire Capital Holdings are set to launch The Wireless Fund, a mutual fund focusing on wireless stocks, early next month.
QUICK TAKES
Nokia partners with Cisco and CMGI to bring wireless services at the disposal of traveling businessmen at airports. Although the first phase is about wireless LANs, this is the first sign of Nokia working with CMGI, a leading global Internet powerhouse…
TANTAU Software, an exhibitor at Demo 2000, partnered with Compaq to distribute its mobile e-commerce platform worldwide. These are carrier-class people from Tandem, enhanced by Finnish competence, Ericsson should follow them carefully…
I have been wondering how Sonera ZED will possibly be able to fulfill all the expectations the market imposes on it. Their new content alliance with Indiqu looks promising, I listened to the founder at CTIA…
Visto.com launched their wireless service. As you remember, Visto has an investment from Nokia and upcoming trials with a European operator…
Zoomon AB, the web-based vector graphics company, is adjusting their strategy to include hype words b2b and wireless. Something for our 3G people?…
A UK company Intuwave has ported Macromedia Flash on EPOC for mobile multiuser games and other mobile multimedia applications (Adam Holt at ETL knows more)…
Take a look at Savera which develops real-time prepaid billing solutions for mobile networks. This will be big when prices become dynamic. It is a US company financed by Swedish VCs…
Centra has developed a live business collaboration solution which could be synergistic with iPulse…
Is anybody looking into the Pixo micro-browser technology? They have announced recent agreements with Samsung as well as with Lycos. The microbrowser also will have online transaction capabilities and support for WML and HTML content. Additionally, the microbrowser will take advantage of new packet data networks, such as GPRS and cdma2000…
Watch out! Looks like the French company Webraska is getting a strong foothold in Europe as the content provider/ASP for mobile driving directions. According to Wall Street Journal they have an emerging relationship with Vivendi to make a deal with the global Vivendi/VodafoneAirtouch mobile portal…
XYPOINT is one of the wireless technology companies which has revamped its old business model to better harness the wealth created on the mobile Internet market today. Their location-based service technology was side-tracked for the moment and a new mobile content-delivery solution was introduced and put on the driver seat. Also, the company announced it free information service in cooperation with Altavista, a first sign for the “free ISP business models” entering the mobile Internet business.
There are still also idiots in this world: a long-time voice mail and unified messaging leader Tecnomen from Finland has a fully-fledged mobile Internet product strategy but the company is part of Kyro Corporation which operates in sexy industries such as safety glass and energy. A spin-out and an IPO would easily bring them $1bn market cap. CriticalPath just made a wireless messaging deal with Tecnomen and saw its stock soar.
CNET Networks formed a new group committed to bringing mySimon’s online comparison shopping services and CNET’s content to all wireless platforms. CNET Networks’ wireless services will enable mySimon users to instantly compare products and prices from their wireless devices. “Comparison shopping is the killer app of mobile commerce,” says Josh Goldman, president of mySimon. This is a top-level portal candidate for WISE Portal. Unfortunately WISE Portal management has decided to cease talking to new partner candidates due to lack of resources. They have also stated that they will only talk to new content partners if an operator-customer explicitly requests it. Is this proactive?
Research in Motion (RIM) stock is up 1,800% in the past 52 weeks, driven by strong demand for its BlackBerry device. Several companies are placing large orders and RIM’s distribution partners include BellSouth, RCN, Compaq and AOL. The surging demand for RIM products will lead to revenues in 2000 of $265M, up from $71M in 1999, says one analyst with Banc of America Securities. The market cap of RIM is today close to $9bn and the stock has tripled since January 15th. Mobile Internet is hot! You can also expect more good news at the BellSouth Wireless Data conference in San Diego next week. http://www.rim.net/, http://www.bellsouthwd.com/wave2000/
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING
Napster is the hottest thing in the MP3 community. It is a technology that enables users to create a huge virtual MP3 jukebox by enabling search and retrieval of music on their hard disks. Read here an article on the background of this Silicon Valley based company… - (go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories)
