- IN THIS ISSUE:
- * Peer-to-Peer: A Friend or a Foe?
- * Qualcomm’s New BREW
- * Dissecting a Wireless Stock Analyst: The Finnish Mafia in Action
- http://www.peerprofits.com/ - The portal into P2P information.
- http://www.openp2p.com/ - Another P2P portal from O’Reilly.
- http://conferences.oreilly.com/p2p/ - The upcoming P2P conference.
- http://www.gonesilent.com/ (InfraSearch) - http://www.knownow.com/ - http://www.userland.com/ - http://www.groove.net/ - http://www.opendesign.com - http://www.aimster.com - http://www.xdegrees.com - http://www.grandcentral.com - http://www.kalepa.com/ - http://www.emikolo.com
I just completed an update on the IOW Events Calendar. I thought of giving it up but there is no one at Ericsson to my knowledge doing this. Please enjoy the results of this extra sweat… Reading event programs is a great way of learning about markets, vendor differentiation, operator business logics and emerging business ecosystems. http://webacademy.ericsson.se/resources/majorevents.htm
When browsing the events catalogue, you might note that I have stuck my neck out there and promised to speak at a mobile media event in April in Beverly Hills, CA. This is the culmination of our focus at EUS NAM 3G on 3G media and entertainment during 1Q01. Please help me deliver a good presentation by sending me examples on leading edge Ericsson mobile entertainment work worldwide! http://www.iwirelessworld.com/
Some people have complained that hyperlinks in my newsletter are broken. This is probably due to browser incompatibilities which add an ‘invisible blanco’ in the URL. Just clean that up manually if you encounter the problem. Of course always I test all the links I refer to.
Best regards
Tapio Anttila
PEER-TO-PEER: A FRIEND OF FOE?
We have all heard of Napster. What potential opportunities and threats lie behind P2P (peer-to-peer) technologies, the evolution of distributed service architectures where all actors can be simultaneously originators, aggregators and distributors? Is the role of an ‘operator’ threatened? Or is it rather the ’service provider’ who is under a gun? The VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson claims to have evaluated over two hundred P2P business plans so far. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are shepherding their Java programmers to exploit this new potential for collective investor generosity.
Should Ericsson buy Groove Networks and offer the P2P QoS service solutions to customers like UUNet? Could publishing technology from Userland or microserver-based publishing solution from KnowNow turn mobile Internet into a two-way interactive medium? At least this would be a differentiator of 3G from its more asymmetric predecessors… Or should WISE Portal adopt the ‘Looksmart-killer’ Infrasearch and its publisher-driven search technology that enables effective searches in ‘walled gardens’? iPulse has a decentralized architecture but its business model sounds ‘anti-P2P’. To be or not to be?
I am not trying to give answers to complex questions like this in this newsletter - I would hardly even be able to do that. I would rather point at the relevance and importance of the problem and offer you a list of URLs for further study:
QUALCOMM’S NEW BREW
Qualcomm launched its BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) platform and related SDK (available in May 2001) which enables faster development of applications on CDMA chipsets. This is a brilliant example of creating an ecosystem: take the least common denominator in phones and start building added value on that, thus increasing barriers of entry and diminishing infrastructure manufacturers and handset vendors role in the value creation to the entire market. The whole thing is of course supported by world-class marketing communications.
Qualcomm is trying hard to expand into the application space - the acquisition of SnapTrack for $1bn a year ago was one of the first signs of that. Look for further announcements on cooperation with Microsoft as their crusade against Openwave (Phone.com) gains momentum. How is Ericsson planning to play this game? http://www.qualcomm.com/brew/
DISSECTING A WIRELESS STOCK ANALYST: THE FINNISH MAFIA IN ACTION
Reading TheStreet.com, I ran into Tero Kuittinen, an impressively well-informed and verbally talented stock analyst from my home country Finland. Tero is a Vice President at Halsey Advisory and Management and an advisor to Wharton Equity Partners. His analysis on the future of mobile data is to the point: “If clumsy old text-messaging can display such staggering growth — even as the profit margins for SMS remain in triple digits — what might happen when more rich mobile data solutions arrive in force? If you can find a research firm that correctly predicted the SMS boom in 1995, trust their word. If you can’t — why believe what these people say about mobile data now?”
Well, you should know that Tero is also a senior strategist at SpringToys, A Finnish startup developing mobile entertainment applications. Moreover, Nokia Venture Partners is an investor in SpringToys. Tero obviously does not want to rain on his own stock options… But that said, when do we at Ericsson get all the Swedish analysts properly involved in the Swedish mobile Internet startups?
Read Mika’s analysis on Nokia, on the smart planning for the success of European mobile operator IPOs and other highly educative material: http://find.thestreet.com/cgi-bin/texis/author/?au=A0638472&hs=2
NEW MOBILE VENTURE FUNDS, INCUBATORS,…
Nomad Venture Partners has formed a $75 million fund focusing on wireless and handheld device markets. http://www.nomadventurefund.com
New Things is a newly launched venture fund focusing on wireless and mobile communications. Average investments will range from $2 million to $4 million. http://www.newthingsvc.com
Viventures Partners, a venture capital firm, said it has raised $598.5 million for its second fund, Viventures 2. The fund received one third of its capital from VivendiNet, the Internet arm of Vivendi Universal.
INTERNAL DISCOVERIES
The new address for the DIA (or perhaps now EIP) Virtual Library is http://internetsolutions.ericsson.se/virtuallibrary/.
The IBC MVNO conference in Rome was a major success with some 500 participants. The Ericsson MVNO team has kindly made the conference material available on http://mvno.ericsson.se. By the way, check out the FAQ section of the site - very informative!
Mobile Internet has hit the mainstream! Even companies better known for their hopelessness are now developing wireless apps: the Ericsson travel agency Rosenbluth is speaking at a conference in Toronto on a topic ‘Wireless Travel”. Time to try out what kind of trouble Rosenbluth could create for us wirelessly? http://www.acius.net/m-com_schedule.html
The Ericsson MAI Senior Specialist Christoffer Andersson writes in his internal newsletter (subscriptions: Christoffer.Andersson@era.ericsson.se): “Starting at the second half of this year and blooming in 3G next year there will be a substantial market for more advanced applications, like those produced in kJava. The question is now when we should start supporting kJava and how. If that is something that the mobile Internet needs in order to take off, how much should we encourage its take-up? Should we recommend developers to develop for competitors’ handsets? Should we OEM a third party SDK? I believe we have to take a strong position right now, embrace kJava and let the developers know that we do. Practically the entire industry is committing to this new standard and it is more a question of when it will be widespread. The standard is still not fully mature and things like GUI standards and security, but it does not look like the other handset manufacturers are going to wait. We might even be better of supporting them and letting them take the first hit of being bleeding edge while we follow things closely and learn from their mistakes.”
QUICK TAKES
Popsystems launched AddpopT, a software product enabling mobile tribes. AddpopT allows mobile people with shared interests to form groups — mobile tribes — and easily interact and exchange information within these tribes. Popsystems is based in Finland. http://www.popsystems.com/index.html
Indiqu and Rogers AT&T Wireless are planning on bringing interactive games to BlackBerry pager users in Canada. Hmm… Sonera owns some 20 percent of Indiqu. We just received the Rogers 3G contract - any opportunities for partnering here? How about finally bringing Sonera ZED services on the WISE Portal platform?
Sony suddenly has a world-wide mobile gaming strategy through its announcement to team up with the i-mode partnership of NTT DoCoMo, KPN, Telecom Italia, Hutchinson, AT&T Wireless and KG Telecom. iMode is trying hard to “make hay while the sun shines” and conquer the market while the WAP community is having an existential hangover.
RIM is emerging as a strong handset manufacturer. The company is reportedly testing GPRS devices in the UK and according to Ericsson sources it is very advanced in its k-Java developments - an area where Motorola seems to be the leader. Too bad the stock is still overvalued.
Bluetooth has gained momentum in real deployment deals recently. Here is a brilliant one: BlueTags signed a deal making eBags the exclusive distributor for its Bluetooth technologies which allow travelers to register bags online and to electronically monitor the bags during their itinerary. Bluetooth may allow airlines to speed up baggage handling, to improve routing, to reduce lost bags and to increase security measures. The device also notifies owners when it has arrived at a baggage carousel. The company has also reserved two other all-revealing trade marks: BlueTag Kids and Tag Amore… http://www.bluetags.com/
The BlueTags TagAmore is a mobile love game. It takes place in bars, cafés and discos and over the Internet via web-enabled mobile phones and PDA’s. All the players involved in the game have one thing in common; the TagAmore. http://www.bluetag.com/html/product_concepts/tagamore.html
FolloWAP, an Israeli provider of instant messaging platform and applications for wireless operators, has received a $10 million investment. http://www.followap.com
RedCyber AB distributes Western mobile applications in China. Its Shanghai office provides software development services to western companies. One of the company founders is David Almstrom, a VP of bizdev at ETC. The business idea is excellent and hopefully also the new Ericsson Internet Applications would see it as an opportunity (for WISE Portal). We in the USA would welcome initiatives like this as well… http://www.redcyber.net/
The 3G Portal is an impressive community site for the 3G industry. It is very difficult who is behind this initiative, except that the editors reside in the UK. Perhaps Ericsson should make a deal with this site to hunt for applications to be tested on MAI. Also, I am more and more convinced that we should embrace an open source application development strategy by cooperating with facilitators like CollabNet. I wrote about it two weeks ago and yesterday Unstrung had an article telling that the J2ME development and the whole Java leadership of Motorola is heavily reliant on an open source strategy… http://www.the3gportal.com/ http://www.unstrung.com/server/display.php3?id=434&cat_id=2
Abeama, which just announced its launch, provides mobile marketing software that helps companies manage customer relationships and promotions across a range of wireless devices. Great - this has been the missing piece of m-commerce! http://www.abeama.com
SocoCorp, a mobile application development company out of Seattle and Islandissimi, one of the Icelandic mobile operators, enter in GPRS application development cooperation. So what? Well, Soco’s management comes from Microsoft’s games division as well as from Realnetworks. http://www.sococorp.com/index.php
What else? Cisco and Openwave (Phone.com) established cooperation on voice browsing technologies; Nokia invested in InterTrust (ooops!)
(To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.)
- SELECTED THOUGHTFUL BROWSING
- The 3G Portal - http://www.the3gportal.com/
SNS Newsletter by Mark Anderson - http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/invest/trends/6112.asp - FierceWireless Weekly Newsletter - http://www.fiercewireless.com/
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NAM 3G Homepage - http://www.exu.ericsson.se/EUS/R/NAM3G/home/html/index.shtml
DIA Homepage (in memoriam) - http://dia.ericsson.se/
EIP Homepage - http://internetapplications.ericsson.se/
Internal MVNO homepage - http://mvno.ericsson.se
Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Stanford Law School, is perhaps the most prominent legal thinker on the intersection of the law and the Internet. Here is his main theme, read more in the article:
“…But our problem is that lawyers have taught us that there is only one kind of economic market for innovation out there and it is this kind of isolated inventor who comes up with an idea and then needs to be protected. That is a good picture of maybe what pharmaceutical industry does. It’s a bad picture of what goes on, for example, in the context of software development, in particular. In the context of software development, where you have sequential and complimentary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bringing new ideas to market. So the particular mistake that lawyers have compounded is the unwillingness to discriminate among different kinds of innovation.
We really need to think quite pragmatically about whether intellectual property is helping or hurting, and if you can’t show it’s going to help, then there is no reason to issue this government-backed monopoly.” http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/01/30/lessig.html
(go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories)
IOW EVENTS CALENDAR
http://webacademy.ericsson.se/resources/majorevents.htm
IOW LIBRARY - RECOMMENDED READING
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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.
