- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * The New CEO for InfoSpace
- * My Neighbor Moves On
- * Wireless Multimedia Forum Launched
- * When Will m-Commerce Happen?
- * Mega-Player Group to Speed Up Content
- * Finland Gets More Coverage in Top Media
The Internet bubble did burst and company valuations have come down substantially. The market is now full of good buying opportunities, it is a question of finding the right ones. For Ericsson it is very important to understand that the New Economy will be built even if the stock prices came down - there is no such thing as going back or slowing down.
The bubble for us to watch is the expectations built into the stock prices for the successful market introduction of mobile Internet. Don’t forget that the ‘tracking stock’ of mobile Internet, Phone.com, came down from a 52-week high of $208 to $50. This is not necessarily good news. Now we need to be the leader in setting reasonable expectations for each generation of infrastructure. We need to decide whether we want to promote GPRS as a technology that gives 115 kbps or merely 40 kbps. We need to make sure WAP is put in the right perspective. We need to make sure investors understand the continuum when moving from 2G services into 2G+ and 3G services and that there is a superior business case for the global market embedded in it.
Wanna come to sunny California and your boss says ‘no’? Take a look at my updated Events Calendar on http://webacademy.ericsson.se/resources/majorevents.htm. You will certainly find some good excuses there.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
NEW CEO FOR INFOSPACE
Infospace recently announced they have appointed Arun Sharin, the nr 2 executive at Vodafone-Airtouch (and a Cisco Systems board member!), to become their CEO. I have to say this demonstrates the remarkable transition Infospace has been able to execute in only one year. First the acquisition of Saraide, now the high-level recruitment. Will mobile operators rely on Infospace as a strategic application development partner? Or will they rather go to Sonera ZED who have much more hands-on experience? How will Phone.com respond?
It is also remarkable that the entire growth history of Infospace is full of “ethnic Indian acquisitions”. Infospace founder Naveen Jain, Arun Sharin and Saraide CEO Hatim Tyabji have all their roots in the software superpower India. Should Ericsson hire a Chief Anthropologist to understand what is going on?
MY NEIGHBOR MOVES ON
My neighbor Paul Ferris from CS First Boston did what he promised to me three weeks ago and left the company to set up a $200m VC firm with ’some friends’. Just two months ago he expressed interest in leading possible VC activities at Ericsson. I still think it is a loss for Ericsson not to have people like Paul onboard. But maybe time will change things. And he still is my neighbor… Here is the news story from Red Herring:
“Credit Suisse First Boston is leaking some of its own talent into the VC world. Two top researchers and two top bankers — including Michael Kwatinetz, head of technology research, and Paul Weinstein, leading data networking analyst, are leaving to start their own VC and investment management firm. Azure Capital Partners will most likely focus on the networking and software sectors. “This was a pretty big blow,” says Bill Burnham, a former CSFB analyst who’s now a VC himself at Softbank. He notes that the two departing bankers — Paul Ferris and Cameron Lester — were highly regarded.”
WIRELESS MULTIMEDIA FORUM LAUNCHED
A new industry body has been established for the promotion of wireless multimedia applications and ensuring their interoperability. Headquartered in San Diego, Wireless Multimedia Forum is another example on the need need for Ericsson to have more presence on the US West Coast. The new industry body is headed up by PacketVideo, a leading close-to-IPO technology company focusing on bringing their proprietary extensions to MPEG4 into a default standard for applications on mobile devices. According to their close partner Sonera, PacketVideo sees the critical importance of content and applications to the success of 3G. So now PacketVideo is heading up this organization with a Silicon Valley marcom specialist company Stardust.com which has close links to Cisco, 3Com and about every major player in Silicon Valley.
Qualcomm, Cisco and Phone.com - they all started small and they all are excellent marketer. Let’s make sure we corner them well ahead in this one! www.wmmforum.com
WHEN WILL M-COMMERCE HAPPEN?
Ericsson says m-commerce will be huge when people have WAP phones. Jesse Berst from ZDNet Anchordesk says it will take ten years. This is must-reading for all Ericsson employees. Investors will listen to Jesse Berst. Who is the person defending Ericsson’s interest and does Jesse know him/her? http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_4686.html
MEGAPLAYER GROUP TO SPEED UP CONTENT
CMGI, Novell Inc. and Sun will partner to create a global network of data centers to speed the delivery of Internet content. The network will be run by a new company called CMGion. The new company’s goal is to build a network of data centers around the world that cache content locally. This will allow authenticated users to access the same information in the same way no matter where they are or what device they’re using. The company says advanced caching will speed up content delivery. Click for more.
FINLAND GETS MORE COVERAGE IN TOP MEDIA
I read an intriguing article in this weekend’s Salon Magazine on “Finland, the Open-Source Society”. It analyzes the key success factors behind Finland’s wireless success and focuses a lot on Nokia. I think the article is an excellent piece that helps us all understand what Nokia can do, will do and might find it difficult to adapt itself to. We should always seek to understand our competition better, shouldn’t we? http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/04/20/chapter_six_part_1/index4.html
To my Finnish colleagues I would like to point out that the article mentions that Mr Jarkko Oikarinen, the inventor of IRC protocol (chat protocol), has joined a mobile Internet startup in Oulu…
NEW WIRELESS VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
ideaEdge, a new venture accelerator, incubator, and management firm based in San Diego, announced its launch. Qualcomm and Silicon Valley Bancshares have agreed to directly invest in the company. Investor AB is one of the capital investment partners. Hans Davidsson from Ericsson sits on the board. http://www.ideaedge.com/website/index.htm
Shelter Capital Partners ($300m) will focus on Internet businesses, media and content technologies, and wireless technologies. http://www.shelterventures.com/home.htm
Mayfield Fund said its eleventh venture fund closed at $1 billion. Mayfield XI will make average investments of $15 million, at least $100 million is allocated to mobile Internet. http://www.mayfield.com/second/newsfrset_3.html
BA Venture Partners, a venture capital partnership funded by Bank of America, said it formed a new $500 million venture fund. Part of the focus is on wireless. http://www.baventurepartners.com
ERICSSON RAMBLES ON
After one year from my initial ‘Ericsson website underperforms’ article - it still underperforms. I tried to find information on Upfront Support product both by browsing and with the search engine - got a press release from October 99. Can’t we do better than this? Don’t we have product home pages? Can’t you get to those by just typing the product name somewhere? Maybe the product name changed? So what, it was once called Upfront Support and a reference should be found with that name.
And what is the link ‘health issues’ doing on the first page? Why be negative? Could a marketing professional give an opinion on this? I always thought one of the basic rules of marketing was to avoid implying negativity. Like selling ice cream with an ad featuring sumo wrestlers… “you don’t necessarily get fat by eating our ice cream”.
QUICK TAKES
Internet Advertising Bureau set up a task force to address issues around mobile Internet advertising. Ericsson should urgently participate. Two months ago I also ran into senior executives from MediaMetrix who were interested in measurement of WAP traffic. http://www.iab.net/news/content/wireless.html
MobileStar Network out of Dallas just got $38m series B funding. The company basically offers WLAN-based wireless ISP service with coverage in public areas such as airports and hotel meeting areas (2-3 lowest floors). The idea is good. How much can you do with the money given? http://www.mobilestar.com/
Mikael Edholm, Director of Corporate Business Development at LME/DM, takes a board seat at room33. “room33 are extremely well-positioned to take up a variety of m-commerce initiatives,” said Edholm. “The mobile phone will become a credit card with an antenna and room33 has the potential to become a leading provider of m-commerce capabilities via the room33.com mobile internet service.” http://www.room33.com
RateStream.com has patented real-time currency conversion technology which changes site’s currency to suit user’s preferences. Potentially very useful for m-commerce. http://www.ratestream.com/products.html
KachinaNet.com has developed an intelligent server technology that streamlines the delivery of content and commerce helping users navigate a site effectively and easily from any wireless device, eliminating the need to scroll through large amount of data on a small screen. Tim Courtright at EPA (Upfront Solutions) is looking into it. http://www.kachinanet.com
Conita is a newcomer in the Personal Virtual Assistant space, on top of Portico, Wildfire, etc. At least my friends from Deutsche Telekom recommended to take a look. http://www.conita.com/
Kivera, which develops location services for Web, wireless, and in-vehicle navigation, raised $9.1m round A. The company seems to be challenging MapQuest/AOL, applies an ASP business model. http://www.kivera.com/
GeoVector is a San Francisco based company which has developed technology that enables using a mobile phone as a location-aware pointing device. This brings to life my old dream about ‘lookmarking’: being able to walk around and point at interesting objects and store them for later use in your web-based virtual world. http://www.geovector.com/technology.html
Eastman Kodak will cooperate with LightSurf Technologies to develop a technology that will enable digital cameras to transmit photos instantly through cell phones and post them on the Web. LightSurf is the most
recent venture for software entrepreneur Philippe Kahn. Motorola has licensed technology from LightSurf.
http://www.lightsurf.com/
The speech technology company SpeechWorks closed a new $20m round and filed for an IPO. Another one, Nuance, just went public with a close to $1bn valuation in difficult market conditions. A third, BeVocal, completed a $45m round with blue chip VCs. A fourth one, Webley, is getting funding from AOL and Net2Phone. Ericsson has not yet ‘made themselves heard’ in this area… http://www.speechworks.com/news/release.cfm
IntraACTIVE is a player in the instant messaging area with a private label business model including revenue sharing. Onemain.com and Lycos are mentioned as customers. http://www.intraactive.com/
eAssist.com, an online customer relations management services company, received $35 million B round. This is a hot new area. Wireless seems to be in their cards with an announced relationship with WirelessKnowledge. They also coined a cool new term ‘nanogratification’. http://www.eassist.com/corporate/index.html
Applicast offers full-service application outsourcing for mission-critical applications, such as SAP and Siebel, over secure private or Internet connections. Here is another Silicon Valley based ASP focusing on the SME market - ready to be mobile-enabled by Ericsson solutions! They have blue-chip partners. http://www.applicast.com/
Paradigm4, a wireless ASP, filed for an IPO. They seem to be closely linked to WirelessKnowledge. http://www.paradigm4.com/
Webfair, which supplies online business community management software, said it raised over $12 million in a second round of financing. Webfair’s products enable companies to implement content management systems with integrated communication tools. “WAP-compatible!” http://www.webfair.com/index.html
Virgin went for free Internet devices. The devices are provided by Internet Appliance Network, a one-year-old, New York-based startup which just completed a $20 million second round of financing led by Flatiron Partners. http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,13993,00.html?nl=mg
CardioNet, which is developing a wireless cardiac monitoring service for people with cardiovascular disease, said it raised $5 million in its Series B financing. Cool! I have always said we should work with the Finnish http://www.polarelectro.com/. http://www.cardionet.com/home.html
The VoteHere Election System provides its users with the ability to conduct secure, universally verifiable, Internet elections. Time to go wireless? http://votehere.net/
linkUall, an online collaboration tool offered to online business communities, vertical portals, small-business portals and ASPs now is available free through WAP-enabled devices. You might want to check it out since we in the US don’t have any WAP-enabled phones. http://www.linkuall.com/myspace/profile/spa_wap_acs.php
Nearlife, an MIT spinoff which creates virtual worlds that include talking props and animated characters that can respond in real time to stimuli, got an investment from Motorola Ventures. What are they after? Maybe 3G tamagochis? http://www.nearlife.com/
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING
Take a look at Jeremy Rifkin and his new book “The Age of Access”. http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indepth/docs/qa041000.htm
Metallica has filed a lawsuit against Napster alleging that the company encourages piracy by enabling users to trade copyrighted songs over the Internet. The suit — which alleges that students who use Napster “exhibit the moral fiber of common looters” — also targets a trio of universities where Napster use is apparently obvious enough to merit legal attention for the schools’ failure to block access to the software.
On May 5, SightSound.com will start selling downloadable full-length movies via the Internet. http://www.sightsound.com/Introduction.asp
Go behind the scenes at one of the world’s most elegant fashion shows and get an insider’s glimpse into the life of a supermodel! San Francisco-based UltimateBid.com provides an online marketplace where users can bid on taking part in events with celebrities. http://www.ultimatebid.com/
