- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * BU BAPP Partnering Is Being Built
- * Thoughts from Internet Summit 2000
- * Wireless Advertising Association
- * Phone.com Developer Conference
- * Learning 3G in Oxford
I am back in the game after a (too long) European trip, including a week of vacation in Odessa, Ukraine. Talked to the Ericsson people there - they are pushing hard to increase mobile usage in this economically challenged country. Telling by the latest Nokia models the mafia bosses and their smashing girlfriends are carrying, Ukraine will catch up real soon. Sometimes you need to go to the spot that has a reputation of being backwards to really understand the revolution that is happening: who would believe that an Internet cafe in Odessa has Internet connectivity which rivals the performance my DSL line in San Francisco? And that the 15-year-old in the family I was visiting in the poorest part of Odessa has a clean 56kpbs phone line to connect to his ISP…
Lots of other things have happened, more on that below. I start now being quite busy in my line activity at DIA/BAPP and I will definitely continue publishing these newsletters every two weeks but spend less time on research. That means perhaps less new startup leads and more snappy opinions.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
BU BAPP PARTNERING IS BEING BUILT
I am currently working in helping to build up the partnering function for BU BAPP. All those of you who sent me their CV, I have reviewed them and forwarded most of them to Gunnar Borg who is heading up the partnering unit. You might want to follow up with him and those of you who would still like to apply for a partnering job, please do so with Gunnar.
We are building a knowledge management and business intelligence function for BU BAPP and we will soon be able to approach the product units and market units with help. If you have partnering candidates for Ericsson, please look at the organizational charts under http://internetapplications.ericsson.se and start building a list where you describe your candidates and try to place them under the right solution unit. This way we will be able to get off the ground faster when we are ready to ask for your input officially. I expect you all have mapped at least a dozen high-quality companies by the end of August.
THOUGHTS FROM INTERNET SUMMIT 2000
Internet Summit 2000 was held at Laguna Beach near LA and just like last year, this was an important gathering of top names in the Internet industry. The event was hosted by the Industry Standard magazine and co-moderated by Mary Meeker, the hottest stock analyst in the industry.
The general message in the event was: the stock market correction is over, the casualties have been buried and now it is time to move full speed ahead (I am not sure I fully agree). Internet companies promise to focus on executing their business plans faster - companies like Yahoo who have always been good at it will probably prosper in the years to come. The ones who were in the game in order to buy a Porsche for their girlfriend as a Christmas present this year will fail.
As always, social programs are the value in events like this. I made sure I was there well in time to attend the surf school (in the sea, not on the web). Part of my surf team was Bambi Francisco, the Internet editor of CBS Marketwatch. Later, I had lunch with her and Cory Johnson, Editor at TheStreet.com. I showed them R520 prototype and did my best to evangelize GPRS. Both wanted to interview me and feature the phone. I had to decline but I hope that by next year I have had my spokesperson accreditation and will be able to do it.
Last year ‘wireless’ was mentioned four times over the three day event, now there was a full session (half-day) dedicated to it. The co-moderator Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital had put together an industry brief and a panel discussion which was, as usual, very US focused. Speakers were from Phone.com, Sprint PCS, Infospace, AOL and NTT DoCoMo (Takeshi Natsuno). The Japanese have stolen the ‘leading alien’ role from Europe.
Arun Sarin, the CEO of Infospace, gave the wireless keynote and highlighted m-commerce as the most attractive mobile Internet opportunity. As you might know, Arun was still three months ago the nr 2 guy at Vodafone/Airtouch. He also sits on the boards of Cisco and Schwab. In the future Infospace is planning to move into the enterprise space with their solution as well as focus more on unified messaging. We have currently no cooperation with Infospace and now the relationship would be there to integrate Infospace services into WISE Portal. Moreover, Infospace’s stock price has collapsed from $55 to $26-27 due to an overly ambitious $4bn merger with web portal and applications company Go2Net.
Verisign is becoming one of the core holdings of your ideal Internet stock portfolio. After the acquisition of Network Solutions, the company is playing a key role in how the Internet performs and evolves into the future. They plan to expand into digital rights management and document delivery as well. On an international level, they use a franchise model to let companies run their operations on national markets (franchisees include BT and Telia). The most interesting thing was that they plan to offer geolocation services ‘in a few years’. This company should absolutely be put in ‘tier 1 partner watch list’. Motorola has already understood this… http://www.verisign.com/press/2000/motorola.html
The founder of Epinions talked about self-organizing systems - how collaborative Internet systems can grow a knowledge base and make it available to people, with minimal human resources involved in maintaining the system. Maybe EDAP should study this a bit more carefully, there might be lessons there on how to organize our developer knowledge base. http://www.thestandard.com/powerpoint/nirav_tolia.ppt
See the event homepage with some of the presentations on http://www.thestandard.com/events/summit2000/.
WIRELESS ADVERTISING ASSOCIATION
Participated in one of the first meetings of a new industry association, Wireless Advertising Association. WAA is a new industry body focusing on how wireless advertising will evolve and what concrete steps should be taken to guarantee technical standards, form factors, business models, interoperability, etc. This is the ‘IETF of mobile advertising’ if you know what I mean… I chose to sit in the location-based advertising work group that had members from Qualcomm, Infospace, AOL, OpenGrid, Vindigo, Contra (ad agency of Nokia) and other companies that would make people roll out the red carpet in Stockholm. The is a marketing and partner search opportunity!
Ericsson will participate more actively in the future and you should forward all your mobile advertising market requirements, ideas and partner candidates to Börje Persson (ERA).
PHONE.COM DEVELOPER CONFERENCE
Participated in the first day of Phone.com Developer Conference to hear the keynotes (Saied Tavakolian from our IPO office covered the rest). Phone.com is becoming to mobile Internet what Xerox became to copy machines - the market views that they ARE mobile Internet. The event ran over four days and gathered an audience of 1500 people. Phone.com claims now the following data for THEIR company/technology: 4.1 million mobile Internet subscribers worldwide, 12 million phones shipped, 77 operators (with 240 million subs) as customers, a developer network of 110,000 members (60,000 added in the last quarter!). The company launched a location-based service initiative with open APIs for application developers. As a curiosity, Phone.com had cancelled the participation of all Microsoft delegates and sent them their money back… However, most of the presentation are generously available on http://www.phone.com/u2/post_u2_2000/ .
The Phone.com message is: US is the leader is deploying WAP, Phone.com is the leading WAP vendor in WAP and GSM is the laggard technology. “The GSM markets are finally starting to move quite fast with more terminals available”. “In Asia GSM is also gaining foothold in some countries.” (Ben Linder, VP of Marketing). You have to be a marketing genius to get away with that but Phone.com does! It is all about perception and converting ‘newbies’ into the Phone.com ecosystem!
Talking about channel conflict ;-), Phone.com made a controversial move to invite Yahoo to keynote at the show. The billionaire-senior-VP Ellen Siminoff gave the talk and focussed on Yahoo ‘adding value with every click’ and excelling in fast execution of launching new services. Yahoo is confident on the fact that walled garden of operators will fall and Yahoo will be increasingly seen as a partner in the operator community. Interestingly, Yahoo is getting increasingly active in enterprise communications and home communications. One of their key messages is that users want an evolutionary experience, not a separate site for broadband or wireless - we should listen, this is extremely important and their 156 million users will go this way.
BT Cellnet is Phone.com reference account. Their key message seems to be that they want to exploit their first-mover advantage and partner with all players who have operational solutions to offer right now - this includes adversaries Phone.com and Microsoft. Ericsson would easily get in their as well if we had something that works - today. Easy. There is nothing more to say about BT. Act o this one first.
The last thing to say about Phone.com is that they are masters in using their corporate citizenship to their advantage. They are seen as the “US government representative of mobile Internet’, with ex FCC Chairman Reed Hundt as their board member giving a keynote at the show. This helps them get goodwill and build bridges towards developers in the standards battle where innovative technology leaders Qualcomm and Lucent battle out the European political carnivore Ericsson. (This is how they want the market to perceive us.). We should focus more on our corporate citizenship program, I see no activity nor results on that front.
LEARNING 3G IN OXFORD
To avoid getting bored when people were on vacation, I participated in the Herschel-Shosteck 3G course at Oxford (the other one, not the one in Connecticut). The main message from this consultancy that is often rather critical towards Ericsson was that they rank Nortel nr 1 in 3G because the company builds its market message on the business case around the cost of migration. On the contrary, Ericsson’s message is full of yaddayadda about videoconferencing and other exotic applications which will according to HS not drive the market. I think we should listen to them a bit.
These events are extremely good for networking and competitive assessment. That Cisco marketing lady from health-conscious Santa Clara is a different person after five pints of bitter, trying to head home on a bicycle (as a gentleman I lifted her up, of course)… In order to gain sympathy and bonding, I fell into the river during our punting trip - the things we do for Ericsson, man! On the course the teacher provoked dialogues where you can listen to Lucent and Motorola strategic argumentation from the Lucent and Motorola people themselves and sometimes you pick up golden nuggets. Ericsson had five people out of 70 and next year it might be a good idea to send a business intelligence reinforcement.
NEW MOBILE VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Investor and SoftBANK invested $56 million into StartupFactory (Rolf Skoglund and Sven-Christer Nilsson). As my long-time readers may remember, I met with Masayoshi Son, the owner of SoftBANK, a year ago at the Internet Summit and suggested that Ericsson would be the right partner to make SoftBANK properties go mobile worldwide. Well, the idea was indeed able to raise some interest at Ericsson and at least now a Swedish company is bringing it forward.
Po Peabody of Lycos/Tripod has launched a new incubator concept Village Ventures. It is a vehicle to help more remote and marginalized US cities and regions to set up VC funds and incubators. It already has five funds up and running. Certainly a good idea. http://www.villageventures.com/
Met with Crimson Ventures, an Asia-backed VC that is the lead investor behind, among others, Transmeta. They are setting up a new $600m fund with a wireless focus (closing in October). Dominique, my host, introduced me to their new partner, John Vice, who will start on first of September. John was earlier the head of Nortel’s wireless division and one of the key architects behind their 3G story. One more useful deal flow source in the future… (http://www.techfundcapital.com)
Association for Corporate Growth is one of the new web-based M&A marketplaces - recommended browsing! http://acg.org/
Met with head of AOL Investments, AOL wants to co-invest with Ericsson in the mobile Internet space. We do not currently have an organization to take up a discussion like this so the deals go to Motorola and Nokia.
Met with Intel Capital, Intel wants to co-invest with Ericsson in the mobile Internet space. We do not currently have an organization to take up a discussion like this so the deals go to Motorola and Nokia.
MOBILE INTERNET INFORMATION SOURCES & MARCOM OPPORTUNITIES
Mitchell Levy is a consultant based in Silicon Valley who has built up a practise on e-commerce with a special focus on B2B. Recently he seems to have started focussing on mobile Internet and m-commerce as well. You might want to subscribe to his newsletter at http://ECMgt.com.
The Swedish Technical Attachees’ Office in Silicon Valley is planning to organize Mobile Magic, a startup show in Silicon Valley on October 17. They are planning to bring leading Swedish mobile Internet startups to the Valley to present their business ideas and raise money. I think this is a very good idea and should be supported by Ericsson.
QUICK TAKES
Categoric Software, an enterprise alert infrastructure provider and a competitor of Tibco Software, was long on my list of companies I tried to make Ericsson partner with. The BUs came to a conclusion that we rather work with Tibco. Recently Nokia Ventures and Deutsche Telekom’s venture arm invested in Categoric as a part of a $13.8m round. I knew this would happen because Thorgeir Einarsson is one of the most persistent entrepreneurs I know - and the management team always counts. This case ended up with Ericsson giving the ideas and Nokia the money - but at least the mobile Internet ecosystem grows…
Room33 and FusionOne seem to be in alliance for WAP synchronization services. Find out more in their press release. http://info.room33.com/
Just met with Steve Meyer, Partner at Techfund Capital. Since I last spoke with him two years ago he had been the CEO of Puma Technologies (http://www.pumatech.com/) and built the company from $500m into a $4bn market cap. Since then the ‘bubble’ has burst and we are back at $800m. Nevertheless, that serves as a merit for Steve and now he specializes on wireless at this Silicon Valley VC company. He gave me three valuable leads: 1) Canesta (http://www.canesta.com/) is developing holographic user interfaces for PDAs and set-top boxes (kind of ‘keyboard in the air’), 2) Scout Electromedia (http://www.scoutelectromedia.com) is doing wireless lifestyle devices for the youth market and 3) Worldlingo (http://www.worldlingo.com) claims to have the only accurate translation service into 12 languages. (http://www.techfundcapital.com/pages/stephen2.htm)
Met with QPass, a leading digital commerce service company based in Seattle. This is a tier 1 partner candidate for us when building mobile information services solutions. They also partner with Viafone. (http://www.qpass.com/)
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL BROWSING
Supermodel Claudia Schiffer is getting her own Palm. I think this is just the start. Claudia’s Palm is a Palm VX of metallic aquamarine blue, featuring ‘Claudia’ branding, and software specifically applicable to the Claudia lifestyle. It
offers clothing-conversion software, helpful if you do frequent shopping in Oslo or Osaka. But its main features are of a more serious nature: the Claudia Palm’s fitness software, diet software, and exercise-tracking software will actually count calories for you, charting what you need to do and what you need to avoid in order to achieve your optimal weight. http://www.unstrung.com/server/display.php3?id=177&cat_id=2
Yale economics professor Robert Shiller has written a book Irrational Exuberance, a critical view on the stock market phenomenon in recent years. This is recommended reading for all who want to better understand ‘the bubble’ and whether you should still invest in the stock market. Look it up on Amazon.com.
(go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories)
