- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * AOL’s New Globalization Strategy
- * The New Business Unit Will Be Hiring
- * Extend Your Brand with a Device Strategy
- * Why Focus on Education and Health Care?
- * New Venture Funds, Incubators, …
- * Ericsson Rambles on
- For further study:
- http://www.usdla.org/ (United States Distance Learning Association)
- http://tie.telemed.org/ (Telemedicine Information Exchange)
- http://www.iacee.org/ (International Association for Continuing Engineering Education)
- http://www.digitalthink.com/ (DigitalThink, a leading online training startup)
- http://www.webmd.com/ (WebMD, a leading health care marketplace)
It looks like I am currently too overwhelmed with reorganization activities and work to keep up with the schedule of producing the newsletter once per week. Therefore, please readjust your expectations: you will receive the newsletter also in the future but at irregular intervals, hopefully still a few times per month.
Also, there was a problem in my web hotel service which I have not had time to sort out so currently the site is not updated. A remedy will arrive within a week.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
AOL’S NEW GLOBALIZATION STRATEGY
So AOL is distancing itself from Bertelsmann as a vehicle to penetrate international markets. What is going to replace that strategy? To me it looks like AOL is offering partnerships to ailing national 3rd and 4th wireless and wireline operators. In not too distant future we will see this strategy to create a major competitor to the Vodafone-Airtouch mobile portal initiative (which I reported in one of the February issues of IOW). Especially if they would acquire Phone.com. I found the proof of this concept in a recent piece of news from Australia…
“AAPT Ltd., Australia’s third largest telecommunications company, will spend 100 million Australian dollars (US$60.9 million) over the next two years on a joint venture with America Online Inc. … The Internet joint venture will see the launch of a fully integrated Internet portal to deliver AOL interactive services and content to the emerging consumer wireless market in Australia.” http://www.aapt.com.au/
The new software service will allow people who use wireless phones to check a central e-mail box, check voice mail and respond to e-mail with a voice message. (CNET News.com)
Sprint PCS passed the six million subscriber mark in the first quarter; VoiceStream will make filling out its national footprint a priority; and Nextel claims the highest revenue per customer and the lowest rate of customers canceling service. (Dow Jones Business News)
THE NEW BUSINESS UNIT WILL BE HIRING
I am now part of the new business unit Mobile Internet Applications (BU BAPP), with a still undefined role but I will continue to be based in San Francisco. BU BAPP is currently building its organization and I am participating in the group which is putting together the strategy for partnering (partnering process and management, Ericsson Developer Program, incubator activity, deal flow management, equity investments, etc.). I am active in making suggestions in the deal flow management and equity investment area. My goal is to make Ericsson’s partnering with the outside world more focused, formalized and effective.
I just wanted to give my readers heads up that some internal recruiting will take place in this area in the near future. If you or some of your colleagues are interested in contributing to this by working in one of the Ericsson regional HQs or in Silicon Valley, please send the CVs to me at tapio.anttila@ericsson.com.
Since plans are neither solidified nor public at this point, I cannot say much more at this point and I will obviously not have time to answer a ton of emails wanting further information. But please send me your CV, it will be good to get to know your better anyway.
EXTEND YOUR BRAND WITH A DEVICE STRATEGY
Earlier this week I had dinner with executives from Ericsson Norway. They see it coming: the business model future mobile phones and wireless appliances is that strong brands such as banks will start giving them out for free or at a preferential price as a vehicle to extend their loyalty programs to the wireless world. Many banks and retailers have a much better understanding on customer consumption patterns than any telecom operator.
We should see this coming and take it into account in our strategy. We don’t have to tell our strategy to the operators, by the way. For them we will develop a win-win value proposition that enhances their strategic positioning. The private-label terminal deals can also be built so that they enhance operators’ competitive advantage, at least according to the Norwegians.
Or was it just the Norwegians making this up? I don’t think so. Last week both Gateway and Circuit City carved out deals to distribute LINUX-based AOL-branded screen phones starting from early 2001. http://media.web.aol.com/media/press.cfm?
WHY FOCUS ON EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE?
Two weeks ago I had lunch with Ash Padwal who is responsible for the government lobbying efforts for Lucent in Asia-Pacific. Him being of ethnic Indian origin, our discussion turned to how third world countries would ever embrace mobile Internet. It was easy to agree that a third world nations have to focus on the education and health care sectors to achieve SUSTAINABLE growth for the economy. No brain surgery, I heard the same from a German Economist working for Siemens China already five years ago. However, this made me think that Ericsson has restricted our mobile Internet focus initially to cover the sectors of financial services, travel and transport as well as media and entertainment.
Mobile banking or mobile video clips might not be the right entry strategy in India or China, particularly if you see mobile Internet as a vehicle to boost penetration of mobile phones down to lower income segments. When are we going to expand our market segment focus? How are we going to enter markets in developing countries?
It would be very interesting to look into what AOL, WebMD and DigitalThink plan for in terms of a globalization strategy and what role customer acquisition plays in that.
NEW VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Alert! We could participate in the new Bertelsmann VC fund which has partly a wireless focus. Please send me email if you are interested and I can forward to you their presentation. The decision should be made by the end of April.
Chinadotcom, which provides e-commerce services and a network of Web portals to the Asian-Pacific market, said it reached an agreement with Softbank Investment Strategic to create a new $100 million joint venture company, which will provide business and technology services. Chinadotcom recently announced a similar partnership with Trans Cosmos. http://www.corp.china.com
eStreetCapital.com, a company that connects entrepreneurs to investors, said it launched an online venture capital marketplace. The site operates by evaluating the business plans of companies in search of venture capital. Businesses with plans that survive eStreetCapital.com’s evaluation process are introduced to investors, who are members of eStreetCapital.com.
Lycos launched an incubator: LycosLabs will focus on Internet firms involved in next-generation wireless; providing applications services for small firms; virtual word-of-mouth e-commerce; and e-commerce infrastructure. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000329/tc/tech_lycos_1.html
ERICSSON RAMBLES ON
It is very interesting that Ericsson has set up a partnership with a Chinese ISP Chinamotion.com and are “jointly looking to create a new model of operations for mobile phone use on the Internet in Mainland China. There will be a WAP platform, mobile e-mail platform, and Bluetooth technology. Their intention is to found a business-to-business (B2B) solution for the retail sector, with migrations solutions for paging and trunk radio reaching out via the mobile Internet platform.” This is all great - I wonder whether they could put something in English on the website http://www.chinamotion.com since this might be of interest to our partners and investors…
The Swedish barcode technology and service startup Bar-Mail has revealed their cooperation with Ericsson Mobile Phones. Go to their website and read about their adventures in the wonderland of Ericsson in early stages of the partnership. Delightful reading. http://www.bar-mail.org/info/history.html
QUICK TAKES
Holding company iGate Capital said it acquired a 25% stake, for about $35 million, in Atlanta-based Air2Web, which enables businesses to create and deploy applications and content to users via wireless devices. We know Air2Web quite well. http://www.air2web.com
Smartreminders.com is an e-mail service that enables users to receive free e-mail messages on a variety of subjects of their choice. The messages can be also delivered to the user’s wireless device. The service launched earlier this week. http://www.smartreminders.com/
Simplexity, which has developed an online system of matching consumers and small businesses with telecommunications services according to their needs, said it received $27 million in a second round of financing with Sonera among others participating. http://www.simplexity.com/
Magnus Jändel from Ericsson has left Ericsson to become the CTO of a Swedish multiplayer game startup Terraplay. http://www.terraplay.com, magnus.jandel@terraplay.com
It looks like Aether has stolen the role of the main wireless partner of Reuters from the earlier contestants Ericsson and Nokia. Is this another conspiracy to bring Palm Pilots to Europeans? http://www.mediacentral.com/channels//allnews/03_22_2000.reuff-story-bctelecomsreutersequant.html
Bell Labs is teaming with Novell on the adoption of a new network software standard called PAM (for “presence and availability management”). If it eventually becomes an “open” standard, PAM would enable providers of various services, such as phone, paging, Internet, and cable TV. Given Novell’s competence in directory-enabled services and instant messaging, this announcement worries me. Also, the consortium makes the right move by addressing the problem from the multiple device perspective and not just by building a solution for mobile phones. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2000/nf00330a.htm
SmartPrice.com got $4m first round financing to develop a comparison shopping site for long distance services. It is good to keep an eye on these marketplaces, they will arrive at mobile voice and mobile Internet market place sooner rather than later. http://www.smartprice.com/
A bunch of Motorola engineers have decided to leave Motorola in Chicago and establish a software company InfoSpeed which provides tools for creating applications in B2B wireless e-commerce. The first $1m was recently secured. http://www.infospeed.com/
TIBCO, Yahoo!, Reuters and Global Crossing Invest $26 Million In WebEx Inc… SAP Ventures Invests in WebEx Inc… What’s going on here? The meeting-service-ASP WebEx can meeting-enable portal sites with their technology. A good candidate to join the GPRS Applications Alliance. IPO was filed earlier this week. Keep an eye on these guys. http://www.webex.com/home/
Do you know the location-based technology company Cell-Loc in Canada? Or better yet, is there a study at Ericsson somewhere which would list all relevant location-based technology startups? http://www.cell-loc.com/
Yodlee announced its intention to port its e-personalization platform onto mobile phones. Their competition is Vertical One. Go check both. http://www.yodlee.com, http://www.verticalone.com
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING
Remember Resrocket and the DRGN (Distributed Realtime Groove Network) in 1995? It was one of the first attempts to create collaborative music online. Now the company has been renamed Rocket Network and they just got $h15 million of venture funding. They have also launched Harmony Central (www.harmonycentral.com), a collaborative online recording studio. All this will be relevant for wireless one day as well… http://www.rocketnetwork.com/
Last week, the European unit of Forrester Research released a report that said interactive digital television will overtake the Internet as the primary platform for e-commerce in Europe by 2005. It’s called T-commerce. http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000328S0009
(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 at irregular intervals, a few issues per month. For subscriptions go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists.
