- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * FierceWireless - Your New Reading Companion
- * Narrowband Is Erotic, Broadband Is Pornographic
- * New Mobile Venture Funds, Incubators
- * Mobile Internet Information Sources and Marcom Opportunities
The Fall ‘00 conference season is on and I am missing important events while transferring over to the new role. One of them was the Jupiter Global Wireless Forum in Stockholm on Sept 25-27 (wireless.jup.com/forum/index.html) and the other one PCIA GlobalXchange in Chicago on Sept 26-29 (pcia.expoventure.com). If anyone has attended one of these events and has material or reports available, please send me the URLs and I will share them with the others in the next issue of IOW.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
FIERCEWIRELESS - YOUR NEW READING COMPANION
It does not make sense for me to repeat the main industry news of the week all over again when other people have done it better. Instead, I have chosen what I think is the best news source for your: FierceWireless (www.fiercewireless.com). The publisher, Jeff Giesea, is a 25-year-old Harvard graduate who has the ambition to build ‘The Industry Standard’ for the wireless industry. The weekly email newsletter is quite mature and focused on the essential news of the week with a great deal of insider insights. Jeff is said to have one of the best mailing lists for the mobile Internet industry - some 20,000 high-quality individuals have joined since the start in February this year. I remember when I met with Jeff in May and he said ‘my God, I am going to visit my mom over the weekend and I should find time to write the newsletter as well…’. He sure has come a long way since then.
Myself I try to keep a more subjective, provocative and Ericsson-specific focus for my newsletter - and also more 3G-related.
For example, on top of the obvious main headlines on HandSpring phone, DoCoMo/AOL deal etc., I learned from the two last editions of FierceWireless that 1) Ericsson spin-off BrightPod from RTP is now out of the gates, 2) Sprint has a deal with PacketVideo which again has a deal with Qualcomm, 3) Vodafone has a VC fund, 4) it will take the European and US markets two years to reach the $400 million of mobile commerce revenues generated in Japan today and 5) FunMail is the greatest mobile killer application I have seen so far!
NARROWBAND IS EROTIC, BROADBAND IS PORNOGRAPHIC
I firmly believe that broadband applications and mobile applications will grow apart rather than converge into one. The basic reason for this is the one I try to illustrate with the somewhat provocative title above: broadband services will always strive for more all-revealing definition, more pixels, more audio quality. We lazy coach potatoes are programmed by Hollywood to want this. But if the bandwidth simply is not available, imagination kicks in and creative popular culture emerges and adapts to the limitations of the medium. This is what we see in Japan with i-Mode but also in Finland with Sonera seriously talking about ‘WAP-poetry’ as an application. If you try to launch all-revealing mobile Internet services such as video clips, your TTR (time-to-revenue) will be long. Doing it the ‘erotic way’ results in fast TTR. Simple!
Services that really succeed in capturing the ‘erotic’ potential of mobile Internet will be massive revenue generators. In Western Europe the key will be to take the (Dec 00) 20 billion monthly SMS messages up to a new sustainable level of end-user creativity when more bandwidth is available (GPRS). An example of how that can be done is FunMail (www.funmail.com). A user can do his/her instant messaging via the FunMail server which automatically renders appropriate animation that matches to the message. Particularly if the user has some control over the selection of the animation (all girl-friends are not forgiving geeks), this could become very popular, even more than the popular electronic greeting cards on the web. Advertisers can be linked into the business model by reserving the ‘beer bottle’ for Heineken, for instance. The latest issue of FierceWireless has an article on FunMail. By the way, the company already has a partnership with our prospective partner ActiveSky. Judging by their working with Macromedia (Flash), an announcement on a major cooperation with Nokia is close.
Another implication of producing compelling services in the narrowband context is that the service platform should adapt to respective sub-cultures. Let me explain. I have a friend in Finland who actually consults Nokia in their new business development and he complained that Nokia people are so nerdy (all my friends are not engineers) that they don’t even understand that T9 type predictive text input should be adapted to the vocabulary of the Helsinki dialect and the special jargon of the youth subcultures in the city. Well, I had not thought of that one before… That would be a great differentiator for Ericsson’s youth phones: phones that speak your language!
A third phenomenon that seems to kick-in faster than we thought is end-user as a mobile content provider. Quios (www.quios.com) has launched a service where individuals can start publishing their own mobile channels that can be subscribed to by others. The quality of the channel will be rated by the subscribers. I chose the channel ‘Cairo Hot Spots’ and I look forward to my weekly SMS update on the club scene in the ‘city that never sleeps’.
We need urgently a business development effort to create compelling media and entertainment mobile portal services for 2.5G networks, following a creative, end-user-empowering, fast time-to-revenue service vision.
NEW MOBILE VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Ha! Looks like Goldman Sachs and Vodafone-Airtouch are imitating Ericsson and Merrill Lynch: Vodafone Ventures ($145m) will be the principal channel for Vodafone’s private equity investments in wireless and Internet opportunities. Goldman Sachs has agreed to assist Vodafone Ventures in its investments in exchange for the right to co-invest on a selective basis.
Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola announced the formation of LIF, Location Interoperability Forum, to work on standardization and market development issues related to location-based services. The organization seems to be hosted by a certain ‘Victoria’ in apparently Sophia Antipolis in France. Americans would never launch anything so secretively… Take a look: www.locationforum.org
MOBILE INTERNET INFORMATION SOURCES & MARCOM OPPORTUNITIES
Tornado-Insider is staging one-day startup events in November in Stockholm, London and Munich, perhaps our venture and partnering people should look into this opportunity. tornado-insider.com/upstart/stockholm.asp
QUICK TAKES
FirePad and LoudCloud cut a deal whereby LoudCloud will offer FirePad format video content on its video content delivery service. This is said to be the first streaming video solutions on Palms. I wonder whether our prospective partner ActiveSky would agree… www.firepad.com/ www.loudcloud.com www.activesky.com
Samsung is launching what it claims is the first TV-mobile phone at the Sydney Olympics. The SCH-M220 TV mobile uses CDMA and receives standard NTSC analog TV signals. Now could this be the preferred scenario of watching video on a mobile device? (Financial Times)
Here is an interesting innovation to boost the utility of your mobile phone investment: Vox2 launched Vox.Link, a mobile phone ‘base station’ that makes an incoming cell phone call ring on every phone in a user’s home or office – but with a distinctive ring to set it apart. Outgoing wireless calls can also be made from any home or office telephone using Vox.Link. Supports Nokia and Ericsson phones, retails for $179. Can our new Bluetooth home base station do this as well? www.vox2.com/
Qualcomm said it will integrate streaming video technology from PacketVideo into its chipsets and system software for CDMA phones. Here comes San Diego again - will the Qualcomm/Ericsson story repeat itself? www.packetvideo.com/current_press_sept19.html
iQRadio from Qsent is one of the first nationwide radio portals, covering over 13,000 radio stations from a handheld device. They just got a $20.5 million second round of financing. www.iqradio.com/
Please note that Pixo launched the Pixo Internet Microbrowser 2.0 designed for GPRS, cdma2000 and EDGE networks. No gateways needed. www.pixo.com/
And what else? Nokia cut an enterprise m-commerce solution deal with Tibco, Texas Instruments announced blueprints for HandSpring Visors, Lycos announced a WAP directory, Sonera ZED services will be shipping in the US during 1Q 2001…
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL BROWSING
Adam Holt alerted me on a new fad, GPS-based treasure hunting, also called geo-caching. “Geocaching is a new treasure hunting game. Armed with a Global Positioning System (GPS) device and coordinates, you can locate treasures that others have stashed in unusual places. Take a look! http://www.geocaching.com/
(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 Division Internet Applications in San Francisco). The report will be published twice a month. For subscriptions go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists.
