- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * Time to Gravitate – US Needs 3G Now!
- * OpenMobile Adds Fuel to Competition
- * DemoMobile 2000
- * Schmoozing Brings Results!
- * New Mobile Venture Funds, Incubators
- * Mobile Internet Information Sources and Marcom Opportunities
We are back again, this time the newsletter was produced in time but corporate IT virus squad has been fighting the malicious virus on the rampage and seemingly withheld my email from the last few days. So I decided to wait for a while so you don’t delete this along with the other 400 mails you must be receiving…
The Ericsson Venture Partners announcement has created a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley and a fairly significant part of my time has gone into talking to people and explaining to them that according to my knowledge our organization is not yet up and running to discuss any cooperation. A friend of mine suggested after seeing the announcement that a better way to do this would have been to make a few investments quietly first, build the organization and then make the announcement together with those investments in order to solidify the credibility.
Please enjoy the rest of the news featuring the changes in my job responsibilities, the discovery of a new hot wireless ASP as well as a report from DemoMobile 2000 in Pasadena, CA.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
TIME TO GRAVITATE – US NEEDS 3G NOW
We all know that the mobile market in the US is growing extremely fast right now. In a few years this will lead into spectrum scarcity which would widen the lead Europe and Asia have vis-a-vis North America in deploying mobile Internet services. Of course Ericsson won’t let that happen. Jose Cangas is leading a sales team in the US to focus on preparing operators for the new spectrum auctions that would give the US market the opportunity to deploy 3G networks. The first of such auctions is for the 700 MHz band and it is scheduled for March 2001. Expectations are high and some marketing wizards have already dubbed the 700 MHz as the “Boogie Band” in anticipation of its multimedia capabilities. Read more on the related Ericsson activities at http://www.exu.ericsson.se/EUS/R/home/700MHz/html/presentation.htm
I have a small announcement to make. I have switched jobs and joined Jose’s team with a responsibility for helping the “Internet industry” (media companies, wireless ASPs, etc.) exploit this opportunity as part of bidding consortia. I will also help put together the end-to-end solution offering for our customers. This means I will now look at DIA and the Consumer Segment from the infrastructure sales perspective, just like certainly many of our readers at MUs worldwide. This will be exciting! Ericsson is all about 3G – and now it is time to gravitate!
It is still all about the New Economy, Internet and IP. I will continue to publish Internet Opportunity Watch as promised before, on a bi-weekly basis. The focus will perhaps shift slightly towards 3G related news and opinions. My travel hub (sometimes called a home) will move to New York City but I will still work mainly with the help of my Silicon Valley network, spending a lot of time on the West Coast.
OPENMOBILE ADDS FUEL TO COMPETITION
What makes Thomas Zilliacus – who founded Nokia’s Asia/Pacific operations at the ripe age of 28 in the early 80’s - leave his prosperous consulting practice in Singapore, take his Japanese wife and move back to Finland? Why would Dr Pekka Tarjanne who spent 14 years as the Secretary General of ITU, let anything interfere with his comfortable retirement? Last but not least, what makes Sven-Christer Nilsson take the boat over to Finland, as if there were not enough inspiration in Kista?
The fact that ‘nightlife’ in November in Helsinki starts already at 3pm? Hardly. The answer is OpenMobile, a new seemingly hot mobile Internet startup.
“OpenMobile Corporation is building a complete global network that will enable distribution of all wireless services, offering wireless content developers and wireless operators exciting new possibilities. By bringing together operators and content providers in an open and non-exclusive environment, OpenMobile will provide mobile value-added service users with global distribution and an information system with endless possibilities. In addition to its European operations, the company has operations in Asia and expects to open operations in the Americas within the next 6 months.”
OpenMobile is building a ’super-portal’ which acts as a conduit to bring innovative mobile Internet services to operators. Their business model is based on revenue sharing. I have written about franchising as a business model which enables fast growth with low cost of capital. The world is waiting for the ‘mcdonaldization’ of mobile Internet services – 3G will be much easier to sell if we all want to a Big Mac Menu. Ericsson could have done it. Vodafone-Airtouch could have done it. Nokia could have done it. Sonera is trying to do something similar with ZED. But there is too much power conflict involved – which leaves the door open for new entrants like OpenMobile.
How should Ericsson react? Comments, please! By the way, I was alerted to this opportunity by Geoff Hollingworth at EUS because his boss Hans Davidsson is an advisor to a IdeaEdge Ventures in San Diego and because they were looking into the opportunity. Most of the roads lead to the US West Coast! http://www.openmobile.com
DEMOMOBILE 2000
I spent two days imprisoned in the Pasadena Ritz-Carlton in California, attending DemoMobile 2000, a startup event in the mobile Internet space. The event attracted some 400 people but was not as good as the inaugural show 18 months ago – somehow there are just too many of these conferences right now. However, there were some neat product announcements and I have chosen to list five (in my opinion) best ones here. The networking was extremely useful, more of that in the following chapter.
Google introduced its “wireless number search”. Just type in the number equivalent of a letter as always and google figures out the word. Then they have improved the search by doing some tricks on the backend. Too simple to not have been done before! This is searching web content, though, not existing WAP sites like Fast Search does. www.google.com
OracleMobile presented their mobile portal which combines enterprise and consumer content under a seamless user experience. User has a lot of presets available, the need for typing has been eliminated to a large extent. Jacob Nielsen, the usability guru sitting next to me, liked it too. Seems like Oracle has come very far in their mobile Internet offering which still serves more of the purpose of a catalyst for their database product sales. The latest news includes their entry into the mobile web hosting business. www.oraclemobile.com
IBM showed a great well-working Bluetooth demo using their new notebook line and Ericsson T28! They launched Bluetooth PC cards (shipping by the end of ‘00) as well as announced a Bluetooth-enabled IBM Workpad (a Palm OEM). They also showed 802.11 interoperability with Bluetooth with live service discovery and application sharing using Netmeeting and PowerPoint. Finally Ericsson got some credit as well. By the way, there are 60-70 million laptops on the US market, please don’t forget that!
DoDots is a digital infrastructure company that provides online and offline companies with technology that enables all web content to be branded, appropriately packaged and distributed. Any content that can be delivered in a web page can be delivered in Dot products, such as streaming media, commerce, transactions, games, music, etc. This is clearly another Brikks-like technology for our mobile portal people to evaluate. www.dodots.com
Synchrologic announced ReadySyncGo!, a free personalized synchronization service powered by the company’s new ReadySyncGo! The service will be available in Q4 2000 with the enterprise edition released by the end of the year. ReadySyncGo! acts as a personal assistant — providing valuable information based on travel and appointments. For example, based on a calendar entry, ReadySyncGo! will automatically generate driving directions from the airport to your appointment. The full itinerary for the trip, including hotel, air, and car reservations with confirmation numbers will be synchronized and available on any device at any time, along with the current weather and forecast. Personalized alerts, such as flight delays and meeting reminders, are also pushed to select devices. This looks like the most complete and airtime-hungry sync solution I have seen so far. www.synchrologic.com
And what else? MessageMachines (www.messagemachines.com) launched their subscription-based Personal Messaging Assistant service with presence management capabilities. Is Encryptix (www.encryptix.com) a friend or foe to the MeT initiative? The MoDo device of Scout Electromedia (www.modo.net) sells for $99, has no service fee and gives the youth market a live (!) city guide where ever they happen to be (in big cities in the US). Philippe Kahn (www.lightsurf.com) took a stab at a digital camera accessory with his affiliate Motorola, Bluetooth planned later. Intel downplayed Bluetooth, said it would be standard in laptops only in 3-5 years. Why? Sprint will have 20 Internet-ready handsets for sale by year-end. Their new partnerships with PeopleSoft and Siebel tell about serious focus on the enterprise market. Right4Me (www.right4me.com) is a mobile community portal, currently testing with HK Telecom, based in technology from UniMobile. Visto (www.visto.com) is building a set of APIs for companies to do private label services with – we should pay attention! AudioBasket (www.audiobasket.com) gives you an automated way to update your MP3 player with premium news sources – partnering so far with Time Warner and Deutsche Telekom.
Event coverage: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,38602,00.html
SCHMOOZING BRINGS RESULTS
Ericsson should encourage values and culture whereby our representatives use all opportunities to further the success of the company and its objectives, to be the company ‘evangelists’. A lot of that work is informal networking at places where important people gather. Being an Ericsson evangelist at DemoMobile feels like selling thirst quencher in the desert. Getting perceived results is extremely easy: one for appetizer, one for main course and one for the dessert. Let me explain.
So did I speak Swedish in Pasadena? Yes I did. Magnus Nerve and Christian Hasselström from Tokyo were there, pockets full of iMode phones. The guys had left Ericsson three months ago and were now working for CyBird, the largest content aggregator for iMode. They said CyBird management was instrumental in the creation of the iMode service. We should keep contact with these Ericsson alumnis… http://www.cybird.co.jp/homeE.htm
Jacob Nielsen was there, you sure know that worldwide guru of usability. He will be embarking on a world tour with his guru colleague Don Norman. They will reach Stockholm in December and are planning a three-day seminar there. Maybe we could learn something from him? http://www.useit.com
Ran into Marc Pincus who founded the push technology company Freeloader a few years back and who since then has founded and taken public Support.com. He was with Martin Röscheisen, one of the founders of eGroups which was just sold to Yahoo. Marc and Martin had their pockets full of money and they were looking for something to do. Marc had seen Sky Dayton from eCompanies found a wireless incubator with Sprint PCS and he wanted to know whether Ericsson would like to do a similar incubator together with him and one of Ericsson’s customers, for instance VoiceStream. Maybe we should consider… I showed the chatboard to Marc and he was interested in establishing a third-party portal or service provider company for it. This would possibly help us with the channel conflict we have experienced.
When checking out the exhibition, I ran into Livemind (http://www.livemind.com) which seems to be executing fast their “context-enabled m-commerce” ASP service. They had just hired David Paulson, an industry veteran, from Software.com where he had been VP of Sales. Prior to that he was one of the founders of @Mobile and joined Software.com with the acquisition. David had an interesting insight into the recent merger of Phone.com and Software.com. He said the idea came from the founder/CEO of Software.com, John McFarlane whom David regarded as a ‘very bright young man’. John had also insisted on getting Don Listwin from Cisco onboard and he had negotiated the deal with him. David believed the new Phone.com could possibly be acquired by Cisco when the time is ripe. Jösses, this is what we all want, right?
Cocktail time. Ha! The Merrill Lynch guys are here! Now I can find out what the new venture fund with Ericsson is all about. Merrill Lynch was one of the sponsors of the event, hopefully they could answer this frequent question better than me. Frank Zammataro had a title of First VP, Senior Director, eAlliances & eInvestments, Digital Business Development, Private Client Group. Unable to judge his real importance from the title, I had to ask him some questions. Seemed like he was pretty switched on regarding mobile Internet investments but finding out exactly what the venture fund was about was “on his list of things to do next week”. He would like to see the fund focus on funding mobile Internet innovations in the financial vertical, though. With Frank there was a consultant of Merrill. He had the task of arranging a visit of ML top management to Sweden to meet with Ericsson. The guys are scheduled to fly in with their private jet. He promised to call me and ask for a contact at Ericsson. I guess ML is a big company, too.
Dinner time. Next to me is Mark B. Johnson, Netbatsu Development Officer at SoftBANK, the VC that own big parts of Yahoo and eBay, to name a few. He had moved in from Apple after running their developer programs because “Steve Jobs was simply too stressful as a boss”. I mentioned to Mark that Ericsson would still be a good partner for SoftBANK and that we are open for any discussions. Mark agreed and he was also very sorry about the fact that his boss Gary Rieschel had never returned my emails. Now we have a good mobile Internet contact at SoftBANK and they will visit our Berkeley Wireless Center next week.
Then the dessert and late-night drinks. Talking to Gina Bauman, a young lady from Estonia living in Silicon Valley and working for Nokia Venture Partners. Gina clarified to me that Nokia Venture Partners is actually purely ROI-focused and avoids doing investments in areas where Nokia would have a strategic interested. There is another organization, Nokia Ventures Organization (NVO), apparently a few thousand people, and they have a strong strategic investment focus around the product and solution areas. Looking at the website (http://www.nokia.com/inbrief/units/nvo.html) NVO is somewhat similar to our DIA. Gina took up the issue of co-investments with Ericsson. Nokia Venture Partners would apparently be interested in sharing deals with Ericsson, particularly in Silicon Valley. Neither of us had the position to go further on this track so we focused on the drinks instead.
Waiting for a taxi to the airport. “Are you going to LAX? Would you like to join and we can use the car-pool lane?” The kind offer that saved Ericsson sixty dollars came from Bill Jackson, Director of Business Development for Eastman Kodak’s digital camera division. There I was spending one hour talking to him about 3G applications of digital photography. He had not been too impressed by Philippe Kahn’s earlier demo on Lightsurf (http://www.lightsurf.com), uploading images will need 3G. Kodak judges Bluetooth to be too slow, they are backing a faster version of the new IEEE 802.11 standards since “our customers are already complaining that USB is too slow”. Photography usage can be divided into two categories: moments and memories, based on how long you want to store the images. Understanding this will form the basis of mobile media service development: 3G will be great for enhancing the ‘moments’ capturing and disseminating images in a multimedia messaging context. The key to success is to understand digital story telling, how to enable people to create a story with the devices at their disposal.
(By the way, I am laying out these results here openly since I don’t believe we are yet ready to act fast enough through official channels. Please correct me if I am wrong. Hopefully this will help.)
NEW MOBILE VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Palm Ventures will make strategic investments in the “Palm Economy.” Fund size $50 million.
Ignition is a wireless incubator spearheaded by former Microsoft senior vice president Brad Silverberg with $140 million from Softbank Venture Capital, Madrona Venture Group, and Qualcomm. http://www.ignition.com
MOBILE INTERNET INFORMATION SOURCES & MARCOM OPPORTUNITIES
Ericsson Internet Solutions has launched two business intelligence periodicals, “InSight” has a version reporting on main competitors and another one focusing on the financial services sector. They also have launched a trend watch newsletter called “Movement”. I found particularly the financial services newsletter very useful and complementary to other sources available. You can subscribe to all of them at http://internetsolutions.ericsson.se/bi/.
Jeff Pulver has launched the Presence and Instant Messaging Community at http://www.instantmessaging.org/. You can subscribe to their newsletter at http://pulver.com/imreport/subscribe.html. Highly recommended!
Remember when I first told you about Tornado-Insider, a European information source for high-tech investing? That was in May 1999 and the were just starting. Now the publication is covering Europe well indeed and it is highly recommended reading. http://tornado-insider.com/newsletters/subscribe.asp
QUICK TAKES
IWon.com will hit the wireless Web next month through an agreement with 2Roam, a wireless Web application service provider. Our mobile portal people should take notes, iWon.com is a fast-growing new portal site with lots of stickiness. This content will be available to mobile operators worldwide through WSPs. http://www.iwon.com
Mi-Co provides innovative end-to-end solutions enabling the wireless capture, storage and communication of pen-on-paper data for users of PDA’s, Handheld Computers and SmartPhones. The company secures in July this year development support and ‘funding’ from Ericsson. I hope it was an equity deal, otherwise we just built value we cannot exploit. http://www.mi-corporation.com/index.cfm
Intervix wants to transform its instant messaging gateway into a content management and customer profile gateway. The company is looking to act as the go-between for carriers on one side and dot-com companies on the other. Its gateway collects user data from its carrier partners and provides it to the content companies that want to use it. http://www.invertix.com/
Nearly half of the residents of five Chinese cities intend to buy WAP-enabled phones within a year, according to a survey of more than 7,000 conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou by Linktone.com. Really? This is good news you all should know and spread. http://www.sina.com/news/tech/2000/0830/tech.html
Luxxon which provides universal visual communications and streaming media, said it raised $21 million in its second round of funding from Allen & Company, Cisco Systems, Ignite Group, Luxmi Ventures, MKS Ventures, Sony Corporation of America, Viventures, and Zodiac Ventures. Luxxon has joined the Ericsson MAI program. http://www.luxxon.com/
Covigo, Inc., an emerging global e-business platform provider of next-generation transactional wireless applications and services for mobile devices, announced that it received $12 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Nokia Venture Partners and leading angel investors. http://www.covigo.com/
German Telesens AG has purchased 20% of U.S. startup Wapcom Inc. Wapcom’s iWay product lets mobile companies offer new types of content services and to precisely bill for them. Wapcom has R&D center in Israel. http://www.telesens.net/
New York-based Medium4.com has announced the development of content and delivery systems to provide video content to wireless devices. The Very Small Screen Initiative is being developed with the company’s Japanese affiliate and its European operations center in Paris. http://www.medium4.com/
You can now buy mobile ring tones at www.ringtones.com – for Nokia phones only!! This site was developed by Mobile Lifestreams in the UK and Materna in Germany who also have launched www.picturemessaging.com and mobile search engine www.mobilewap.com. Mobile Internet is an evolution – and Nokia understands it with their ring tone strategy. Where is Ericsson?
And what else? FirePad will son launch a video delivery system for Palm devices. Bluekite (www.bluekite.com) (the WebOnAir competitor which has most of the deals with operators) got $35m venture funding. The much-hyped WASP 2Roam (www.2roam.com) got $23m from Siemens, CMGI and Transcosmos. Nokia Venture Partners and Argo Global Capital are participating in a $20 million financing for Netsanity (www.netsanity.com) which claims to have a carrier-class preference management solution for mobile operators. Hiugo is a new community-based European WAP portal (www.hiugo.com). And the French are attacking with a portal called PhoneValley (www.phonevalley.com).
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL BROWSING
According to the report, “Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism,” mobile phones are changing the world more profoundly than any other new technology. Wow, urban metabolism was a new term to me – maybe I will learn more about it in New York City.
(go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories)
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This is a 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 EUS based in New York City and San Francisco). The report will be published twice a month. For subscriptions go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists.
