- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * 3G Killer Applications?
- * Fall Internet World is Big but a Bit Boring
- * New Mobile Venture Funds, Incubators
- * Mobile Internet Information Sources and Marcom Opportunities
Oops, two weeks pass quickly these days… One of the recent highlights was my meeting with Mark Anderson. His Strategic News Service newsletter is a weekly publication written without all the bells and whistles of professional publishers but nevertheless he has an impressive following in the industry, allegedly including Bill Gates and luminaries alike. His perspective is highly strategic and global which is sometimes lacking from the analysis of the young lads on Wall Street. I think Ericsson should have a company account for SNS. Please subscribe to a trial version at www.tapsns.com and send a request to LME/Z Karin Gartzell if you think Ericsson should subscribe as a company.
Mark said a lot of things that are in line with the Ericsson strategy. No wonder he strongly believes in our company and our stock as a long-term investment. If I have to lift up one issue where his opinion differs from ours, it is the importance of speech recognition and voice-enabled Internet applications. Like most Americans, Mark is a big believer in this. With both Speechworks and Nuance now being close to $3 billion market cap companies, the expectations are high. The ‘Voice’R'Us’ company Ericsson has still not voiced their position in this…
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
3G KILLER APPLICATIONS?
I would like to get to know more of the 3G application development at Ericsson. What creates the differentiation between a 2.5G application and a 3G application? Why should an operator invest in 3G networks from an application revenue generation perspective? Why should an enterprise invest in 3G solutions? A brief poll in the ERA and DIA organizations did not indicate that these questions would already be fully answered. I am trying to collect and make available relevant material and identify people involved. Therefore, I would be grateful if you readers could kindly forward to me any presentations, white papers and project descriptions related to 3G application strategies/development. Also, I would appreciate names of people involved. Who in your market unit is in charge of applications?
FALL INTERNET WORLD IS BIG BUT A BIT BORING
The Internet market has matured to a point where the IT industry has seamlessly merged into it and consummated the visionary part of things under a more boring but profitable ‘let’s get it done’ activity. I always detested PC trade shows where stands were crowded by ‘Wordperfect girls’ giving out T-shirts and chewing gum.
Well, anyway the show was huge and probably served its purpose of attracting a lot of developers to the Ericsson stand. Maybe we should also have some wordperfect girls - we don’t know well enough how to draw crowds to the stands. It’s not the people, it’s the perception that counts: my herd instincts always make me stop and listen where I see a lot of other people gathered.
Ericsson Internet Partnering might also in the future take a closer look at the partnering portfolio we present. I was not aware of us partnering with Airflash which was present on the stand. They have close ties with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Inktomi. How do they fit in our value web? Maybe very well but is this a conscious decision?
Of the few cool companies exhibiting, I would pick out Digiscents (www.digiscents.com). This company transmitting smell over the Internet caught the attention of the audience and there was a 20-minute wait to sniff a demo. The technology today is based on a cartridge of pre-selected scents with a mixing capability but their mathematicians are working on smell capture algorithms… The VP of Business Development said that the interest from mobile phone manufacturers has been overwhelming…
NEW MOBILE VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Sun Microsystems has formed a new business unit, the Wireless Excellence Center, and a $100 million venture fund for the wireless market.
MOBILE INTERNET INFORMATION SOURCES & MARCOM OPPORTUNITIES
Hmmm… Packetvideo still wants to build that competing industry association for 3GPP on wireless multimedia. Their earlier attempt was called Wireless Multimedia Forum (WMF) and it was pushed back by Nokia and Ericsson, among others. Their new attempt is to have the Cisco-centric marcom company Stardust set up a wireless conference alongside with their iBAND event focusing on IP multicasting. First they will grow the conference together with iBAND then spin it out and relaunch WMF with the increased industry support. Smart. Hopefully someone will attend the event - called WISE by the way - in San Jose next week. http://events.stardust.com/wise/ - Nov 6-7, San Jose
The Internet Standard is organizing an event on brand identity online, we should send someone there especially now when the ericsson.com site has been relaunched and we are starting to show some competence in this area. http://www.thestandard.com/events - Nov 30, San Francisco
INTERNAL DISCOVERIES
Hey! Type in your browser the URL http://phones.ericsson.com. You get a blank page saying ‘Um …what are you looking for ?’ Who is the flower power in charge of this??? Looks like the page title leads to someone at BCN in Holland…
Please visit http://dia.ericsson.se/diastory/library.htm for a wealth of presentation material on DIA mobile Internet Solutions! Send possible contributions to Viveka Leksell (BCT).
QUICK TAKES
GEO Interactive Media Group, a provider of wireless streaming video solutions, signed an agreement with U.S.-based ClickPlay Inc. to create the world’s first wireless preview network… …Nigel Rundstrom of Nokia Japan speculates that streaming video, such as sports highlights and electronic postcards, may be the first applications of the new technology. http://www.emblaze.com/
I wonder whether we are following Tao, a UK startup and the creator of Digital HeavenTM; a binary portable, functionally rich, high performance and compact, fully customizable, media content software platform for digital appliances connected to home and mobile networks. This came up our meeting with Sony who is genuinely interested in the company. http://tao-group.com/2/tao/index.html
Another Sony startup favorite was NTRU who claim to offer the world’s fastest secure public key cryptography system available today … operating 20 to 400 times faster than any alternative. The company say they easily scale up to enable the infrastructure necessary to support the billions of consumer devices that will be connected to do such things as make frequent wireless transactions. http://www.ntru.com/
Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, has launched his new open peer-to-peer groupware platform company called Groove Networks. We should definitely look into how we can partner with them in creating the next generation mobile messaging platform. Or? http://www.groove.net/
You have certainly noticed by now the foundation of IMUnified, an industry body initiated by Yahoo which aims at creating interoperability between proprietary unified messaging technologies. Members include Yahoo, Microsoft, AT&T, Phone.com, Prodigy and Tribal Voice. Ericsson is not included. OZ.com confirmed that Microsoft had proposed the organization invites Ericsson to its board but Phone.com had vetoed the proposal. There we go! http://www.imunified.org/
It might be a time to build a special Ericsson developer program to have third parties develop mobile health care solutions. This market must be huge worldwide and it links both medical and fitness industries to invest in further monetizing their user base. How can we ignore this? Take a look at companies like Cardiobeat (http://www.cardiobeat.com/Demo/technology_.html), FitSense (www.fitsense.com), VivoMetrics who just got $7.5 million from CSFB (www.lifeshirt.com) and Sensatex (www.sensatex.com). (Sensatex is a result of US military research where soldiers wearing a sensor shirt can be remotely monitored in terms of where bullets go in and come out. Increases battlefield effectiveness and efficiency significantly by separating the wounded from the dead.)
Adam Holt from ETL reports on an open source video project which he says might become the Napster of video. “Interesting to see this press-release which marks the evolution of a hacker group becoming a funded venture. One to watch how they develop their mobile story as the Internet is already full of pirated movies based on this file format, and they have a much more open-source approach to life than PacketVideo, Active Sky, SolidStreaming, GEO Emblaze, etc.” http://www.projectmayo.com/
In his open-source project watch, Adam also ran into MojoNation, basically an open-source peer-to-peer filesharing solution with a micropayment system built-in. Get paid for the disk space, bandwidth and CPU cycles you make available! http://www.mojonation.net/
Phone.com and SnapTrack are teaming to develop and market SnapTrack’s SnapSmart location server software and Phone.com’s Mobile Location Server platform in a coordinated manner for the wireless industry. The companies will work together to ensure that the two products are interoperable and will support each other’s efforts to market the combined solution to wireless carriers worldwide. As my readers remember, Phone.com wanted to acquire SnapTrack but Qualcomm got it first. This gives them some comfort for the lost opportunity.
NeoPoint apparently copied our ChatBoard and is filing a patent application for it as well. It works with their newly launched smart phones. http://www.neopoint.com/products/neopad.asp
Take a look at GadgetSpace, an Ericsson spinout from North Carolina. “By placing intelligent execution of real-time mobile interactions into the Internet cloud, the GadgetSpace service dramatically accelerates and simplifies the process of bringing the Internet- and Intranet-enabled Enterprise to the wireless world.” This is Dale Hanson and the rest of the team of Billy Moon who was issued the ‘walking papers’ from Ericsson some two years ago. Billy is now rumored to be working for Cisco in their wireless initiative. http://www.gadgetspace.com/solutions/index.html
Lucent is ramping up its mobile Internet partnering activities, the companies that have been promoted most are Net2Wireless, TrafficStation and Argo. What happened? What made Lucent wake up? In related news, Argo closed a $20 million round. www.argogroup.com
Palm and Hewlett-Packard’s VeriFone division said Thursday they would develop wireless payment technology for hand-held computers, with an eye toward tapping into the growing wireless commerce market. This is worth looking into more carefully. http://www.verifone.com/news.
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL BROWSING
To get food for thought on how mobile Internet business models will evolve, read the latest mformobile issue and the interview of their lead m-commerce analyst. http://www.mformobile.com/newsletter/mail011100.html
(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 the Next Generation Mobility unit of 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.
