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Internet Opportunity Watch by Tapio Anttila A weekly report from San Francisco, published every Monday. Focus on pinpointing opportunities for the Ericsson Internet business development. Subscribe at http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists. You can also read archived copies. |
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INTERNET OPPORTUNITY WATCH FOR THE WEEK OF 17 JANUARY 2000 Transmeta launched their Crusoe processor in a webcast which was completely inaccessible due to all the hype around the announcement. Next weeks will show how the markets will react to this. Read the white paper and post your comments to my webboard at http://webboard.ericsson.se/~webacademy. Is this announcement relevant to 3G handsets? http://www.transmeta.com INFOSPACE CHALLENGES ERICSSON InfoSpace.com teamed with Intel to supply infrastructure services for Web sites, merchants and wireless devices to the chip giant's new Web-enabled appliances... InfoSpace platform was chosen by Vodafone-Airtouch to provide wireless information services to their customers. Note this includes mobile transactions and instant messaging. Infospace was the first company to extend MSN Instant Messenger to mobile devices... InfoSpace.com teamed up with Verisign and GemPlus to deliver first-in-class wireless security by providing end-to-end encryption and digital signatures in the Short Message/SIM Application Toolkit environment... Infospace.com bought PrivacyBank, an online privacy intermediator. Ericsson should have a privacy solution as well. It is generally speaking enough to watch Infospace and see what all Ericsson should be doing... By the way, all this happened between Dec 20 and today. SONERA IS ERICSSON'S GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY Investment service Motley Fool on Sonera: "... This type of thinking and inventiveness make Sonera an extremely compelling company. Unfortunately, Sonera is not providing these services on a worldwide stage as of yet, which means that they lack the inevitability that we would ideally like to see in a Rule Maker. The thing I keep coming across in regard to Sonera is that it has tied its fortunes very closely with one company -- it's Finnish brethren, Nokia. They released SMS in tandem, and Sonera is relying on Nokia's sales force and its leadership in the mobile communications arena. Sonera -- a great investment? You bet. A Rule Maker? Not yet. But there is plenty of time for us to revisit this one, since the company's greatest products seem yet to come." As you know, I have been saying Sonera would be a perfect global partner for Ericsson. http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker000104.htm?ref=yhoolnk SHOULD WE GIVE AWAY 2 MILLION R380s? A business model whereby the terminal is offered to the customer on a subsidised basis and the money is recuperated by striving for maximising revenue over the lifetime of the customer (and not over the product) is becoming more and more popular. The famous "free PC" startups go for an example, of course. However, there are also non-PC platforms where this has been applied. The wireless home terminal Qupid is one example, iOpener is another, email devices MailStation and MailBug use the subsidised retail model as well. And now we have a Linux-based wireless home terminal from Norway, FreePad ( - thanks to Adam Holt for the hint). So - how about applying that model for WAP phones. At least we could better forecast how many terminals will be sold if it were decided upfront... THESE THINGS GOT ME EXCITED! NeoMedia Technologies says its PaperClick ToGo technology is now available. This service works with WAP-enabled and HDML-compliant devices. The use of numeric PaperClick codes makes navigating the Web easy for small handheld devices with limited keypads. By converting any URL address into a short phone number-like PaperClick code, cellphones and PDAs can be used to surf the Web as more WML content becomes available. This is potentially a way to facilitate users to surf beyond operator's portal... What do you think? I got totally excited. http://www.paperclick.com/togo/ Another startup (seed stage) which looks promising is GroupServe with their "wireless groupware" technology. They claim to have plenty of patents in the area. Definitely worth looking into. http://www.groupserve.com/GShomepage.html eSubscriber.com offers an end-to-end solution for businesses to sell subscription-based services online. Customers include AT&T Wireless and Sprint PCS. This kind of companies can help 'virtual operators' of the future dethrone the encumbents... NEW VENTURE FUNDS Kyocera and Goldman Sachs have established a $285 million fund for Japanese start-ups... IBM established a $500 fund for side-by-side investing with VCs to provide financing for IBM hardware, software and services to Internet companies that have completed their first round of venture financing... Inprise/Borland announced a $60m venture fund focusing on on wireless technologies as well as on Linux... RSA Security (newly announced partnership with Ericsson) announced its second fund at $50m... Telecom Italia is planning a new venture fund in the US... NEWS FOR THE FINANCIAL MIND GoAmerica announced an IPO to fetch $100m from the market... Metricom launched a $425m secondary offering to build their network. What if they succeed?... More excellent investments: SmartServ is up from $1 at around Oct 1 to today's closing at 48 7/32. So if you invested then $10,000 you would have four months later $480,000... Another good stock has been Geoworks which today surged (from an October low at $3) to $31 9/16 after a WAP-related announcement... i3 Mobile, formerly Intelligent Information Inc., filed for a $65m IPO... INNOVATIVE BUSINESS MODELS IDT Corporation announced that ZeroDinero.com will provide free Internet service to all subscribers and free IP long SUBSCRIBE TO WEEKLY NEWS FROM FINLAND! Ira Stening from LMF has started to publish weekly news on the Finnish market. If you want to follow what happens on one of the most advanced mobile markets, send email to ira.stening@lmf.ericsson.se. Some samples: Sonera and the second largest ISP of Italy, Tiscali, establish a joint venture for directory services in Italy. Sonera will invest 5 million EUR in the subsidiary during the spring 2000. 060100 Nokia announces that GPRS-enabled phones will reach the market by the end of 2000. Nokia also states that GPRS-interoperability testing will be finished by March 2000. Professor Hannu Kari from Helsinki University of Technology claims in the context of GPRS, that the theoretical maximum of the transfer rate for GPRS is 40 kbit/s due to limited radio spectrum. 070100 QUICK TAKES - ExaLink from Israel has a goal to snatch the leadership position form Phone.com with its advanced WAP service platform... PocketScience came up with a snap-on email reader for Palm, might be a smart time-window product for the US market. I am sure European won't understand this, though... Columbia TriStar Interactive launched the first ever wireless film WAP site for the theatrical release "Hanging Up"... Khimetrics is selling a strategic price optimization solution. In the new era of dynamic pricing, this kind of competence will be of high value. "It's raining, let's go buy some ice cream!"..... Qarbon.com has developed "viewlets", a technology for enabling brief video product demos over the Internet, sounds Interesting for 3G... When more and more people have DSL at home and WAP phones in their pocket, services like x-Drive (your free Internet hard drive) become interesting... Exist provides a one-stop source of technology, application hosting and process management for e-commerce exchanges... emWare device networking solutions company (smart homes) which partners with Siemens and Motorola just got $34m round 4 financing... Check out Ananova, world's first virtual newscaster avatar. According to BBC, she will also be soon available on mobile phones... Go2Systems is building a massive mobile portal with "go2..." URLs reserved for almost anything? Does someone have more info on this company?... Xircom will be doing a GSM module for HandSpring... Webraska is the leading traffic information and route information company, no need to look elsewhere... The mobile personalization solutions vendor Intelligent Information Inc. changed its name to i3 Mobile and raised $32.7 m new financing... Iqorder is a mobile shopping portal which competes with startups like LiveMind, very relevant... Shadowpack launched its personalized wireless information service, calling it the first Personal Wireless Interface. Definitely a company to watch even if they today focus too much on pagers... The new alliance between MediaPlex and OpenGrid is the most advanced wireless advertising solution to date... - (To view the embedded hyperlinks, view this section online at http://webacademy.ericsson.se.) SELECTED THOUGHTFUL READING - Chinese government is banning the government use of Windows 2000 in favor of Linux... Seven-Eleven in Japan is building a nationwide e-commerce infrastructure including a wireless strategy... Time Warner is gone, read what will happen to the remaining media power houses... John Powers at BBRS writes an analysis voice-enabling technologies for the web, very useful reading even if he forgets wireless... Contemplating a career change? Wanna become a "pork commentator"? Check out word's largest pork portal eHarvest which sells 12,000 pigs per week. They just got $8m in venture funding from RaboBank... Ninth House Network has a corporate training portal, a broadband learning network, something for Ericsson Management Institute to look into... Vinod Khosla's Terabit Tsunami is a powerpoint presentation which will tell you exactly how the bandwidth market will evolve... - (go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se for links to stories) * * * This is a weekly 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 LME/DMA in San Francisco as a business developer with a focus on Internet applications and enablers). The report will be published every Monday. For subscriptions go to http://webacademy.ericsson.se/elists. |
| Responsibility @ this page: Information: Tapio Anttila, LMETAPI |
Latest changes: 11 April 2005 21:56 |
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