With the launch of Google’s Nexus One mobile phone and a lot of blog posts trying to make sense of what they have seen (or actually not really have seen yet but just read about themselves) it is good timing that real statistics on the development of the mobile web came out as well. BTW, there were also two blog posts out there on the Nexus One that I found most knowledgeable and making the most sense: I, Cringely (as usual is right on it) and NYT (quite unusual actually ).

Read Quantcast’s statistics and you know more details about how the mobile web developed in 2009. There are a few spots in the world where cheap phones and with that NOKIA still dominates. Mostly it is all iPhone and iPod Touch dominated already.

It is the time again when you can read “smart” predictions for the coming year. One risks being wrong more than correct but “no risk, no fun”, I guess, so I am putting my thoughts into it too; so here are three quite safe bets:

• Apple enters the e-book reader game and might well kick e-books into the mainstream. I hinted about this quite some time ago but with the Apple tablet rumors getting quite concrete one target market seems the e-book and with that a new category, the multimedia e-book. To use e-ink readers with b&w only always seemed dull.

• social communications for the enterprise is a hot new subject. What Apple is for consumers, salesforce.com is (a little bit) for enterprise. Constantly trying to innovate, in salesforce.com’s case more re-coining the same buzzwords (SaaS, cloud). But with its latest announcement, to offer social collaboration capability starting some time in Q1 2010, this will get high visibility, and enterprise CIOs, productivity experts, online channel experts as well as marketing&communication departments will have something to talk about and do.

• the mobile Web will grow even more. With Apple’s iPhone the whole mobile phone industry dramatically changed. Suddenly the mobile Web was not only talked about but became a reality. Fast mobile data networks are becoming a necessity to be able to serve these power users. Blackberry e-mail push like services have worked with simple GPRS quite well for a long time already but mobile Web surfing not, and that requires fast mobile network infrastructure. Interesting to see that also here Apple is shaking up an industry that they have not served at all in the past. Nokia and all other mobile vendors will come under tremendous pressure and with Google entering with its own phone (selling it directly and via a few operators) this will only intensify. But most importantly with the growth of the mobile Web (eBay had record Christmas sales for mobiles) enterprises need to make their websites mobile ready and keep them up to date with new mobile browser developments as well.

I was quite surprised when I saw this chart today as there are a few companies in this top ten list of biggest corporate R&D investors that I would not have expected. I expected Toyota there, the Swiss pharmaceutical companies Roche and Novartis but for sure not GM and Ford. Guess they kept it a secret what they all do with this huge amount of R&D money. Also surprising was Nokia being ranked second even. Also here the pure amount of the investments says nothing about its quality and success.

This week we have seen two major announcements that are clearly relevant for social media communications: first Microsoft said they would integrate both Facebook and Twitter into Bing and then Google announced an integration into search with Twitter and others. “Financial terms” were exchanged between Google and Twitter is what Marissa Mayer disclosed at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco so it is at least clear that there are business interests behind it.

I think this will be the start of much more social media relevance and for sure also the use of private social communities (disclosure note: that we also offer as a service to deploy and manage) where companies built their own communities that are relevant to them and the stakeholders that they see as relevant.

At the same event Web 2.0, the most commented on presentation was btw exactly about this topic where Sean Parker, an entrepreneur who was founding President of Facebook and founder of infamous Napster and others and at the age of 27 was already a VC at Founders Fund, talks about a paradigm shift away from information services towards network services: “Why companies like Twitter, Facebook, Ebay and Apple (but not Google) will determine the future of the Internet” or “Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people”. His slides can be seen here.

Today I attended for the first time the Swiss Comdays 2009. This event is organized by the Swiss telecom industry regulator BAKOM and brings together the Swiss telecom management to listen to 30min presentations on telecom topics the first day and the second day the talks are about the media industry.

In general I don’t like such talking events as they are a platform for great speakers and not surprisingly are ideal for politicians to show off. Now these Comdays were no difference, with one exception:

A group of utility companies presented in a side room of the event (all supported by the BAKOM) how they plan to roll out FTTx.
I found these talks much more interesting and informative and thought that they should better run such events at these Comdays where they pick one topic and have key stakeholders give presentations.
Now as it turns out Switzerland seems to become one of the first countries in Europe - after Sweden and Asian countries - where utilities will invest into FTTx network infrastructure and then open the network to service providers who offer then Internet, voice, TV or any other telecom/datacom service (Open access model). Of course this has not been an overnight decision but took as in the case of the Zurich EWZ utility nearly 3 years of discussions and at the end a “Volksentscheid” (people’s vote) meaning that they will now be investing 200 million CHF into a fiber network over the next few years. Also other utilities such as in Basel, Genf, St. Gallen and Bern have decided to do the same and formed a cooperation between each other where they will use/apply what the EWZ with its “Zürinet” learned and uses. Also they decided just last Friday to establish some common service rules which will allow them to share technical standards and possibly even OSS solutions reducing the overall planning/rollout/operations costs.
The local incumbent Swisscom acknowledges this development but of course does not really like it.
This investment is a good start for Switzerland to become one of the leading countries in the deployment of high speed broadband access via fiber networks all the way to the  homes, companies and organizations.
The work for all these utilities and many others who will now follow has just started, though, and there is lots of work ahead still. One of the things ahead will be e.g. to explain to the end users what high speed data actually means for them and why this will be needed. Not an easy task for this industry, which is more used to talking ICT lingo between experts rather than using easy-to-understand analogies. Maybe an online community site is needed to do just that and also bring the key stakeholders (utilities, telcos, service providers, system vendors, system integrators, regulator, politicians, end users) together on a discussion forum where they also find excellent information on this topic.

To give you my opinion right away: I can’t imagine that Motorola and Verizon will by addressing some of the possible shortcomings of the iPhone ecosystem make their own Droid launch a success. Product management is more complicated than looking at  the market leader, writing down all its product specs and then simply bringing out a product that shows better features. This strategy succeeds only in a commodity market. But Apple and the iPhone, app store, iTunes ecosystem is NOT a simple product only but a thought-through end-to-end user experience product & service offering. The Motorola and Verizon folks have obviously still not understood this otherwise they would not have launched such a desperate campaign merely addressing - mostly - features. The strongest point was the openness of Google’s Android platform but also here they did a quick-and-dirty job. Not surprising knowing how desperate Motorola is these days to finally get back on track with a successful mobile phone after its long-time-ago success of the Razr.

But if you want to tackle Apple then you must take them on in a completely different way. And I think they are vulnerable because any company who is arrogant will miss opportunities or simply not do the best job possible. History has shown that over and over again. Unfortunately the Indian or Chinese style of product management, comparing spec sheet features one by one is not enough to make an impact. This has to be done differently…

On my way back from a business trip I read a good article in the Economist, “Some companies are finding opportunities in the recession”. They mention four types of ways how companies take advantage of the current downturn to come out even stronger afterwards:

• take advantage of bargain-basement prices to make acquisitions (PepsiCo bought two of their biggest bottling companies, paying $6 billion)
• invest heavily into innovation (Intel’s Craig Barrett “you can’t save your way out of a recession; you have to invest your way out”; P&G is doing its biggest expansion in the company history opening 19 new factories around the world and IBM is holding a series of “innovation jams” to find new innovation ideas)
• companies reposition themselves (Cisco is buying startups, moving into services and expanding its business portfolio away from a pure network hardware provider)
• and last, but not least, entire new companies are being formed, following in the footsteps of others that were also started during recessions, such as FedEx, CNN and Microsoft

Update: nice slide from Phil Kotler on this subject.

Who would have forecast only a few years ago that Dell would drive the innovation of laptop technology forward? Dell was well known for me-too, high-powered professional laptops for a relatively good price. Up until they ran into support problems and the “Dell is hell” story made its round, hurting the company quite a bit. Now that Michael Dell is back he seems to be doing a lot of great things. Firstly they started using social communities for innovation as well as for tech support, which also appears to have had a great effect on the culture of the company. And now they have announced the Latitude Z, which is full of great innovation. It is pricey still, but in a short amount of time I am sure this will all become more affordable as always.

Watch this:

Every so often fun things happen and shame if you only hear about it 4 weeks later. This time it is infamous Paul Carr’s very own story to accept Michael Arrington’s call to write the Saturday column at Web 2.0 blog/news portal Techcrunch. I think it is a smart move to try to lighten up the otherwise very dry reads about the dozen or more Web 2.0 startup news pieces every day mixed with a good dose of Apple, Google or Microsoft stories to increase readership - of course. Now I have to admit that I have not read Paul Carr’s Techcrunch columns yet but will start doing so from tomorrow on and with that read - yes - Techcrunch. His first intro post shows the kind of blog posts you have to expect and not take too seriously, or should you take it seriously? Bringing nothing to Techcrunch…; as the boss in the movie Good Morning Vietnam with Robin Williams said “…well, that is funny”.

Image: Flickr/Paul Shaffner

As the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger writes, the new launch of Google StreetView in Switzerland creates lots of protests among private people, companies, communities as well as annoys the country’s top data security officer, Hanspeter Thür. Already on Friday this Swiss data security officer announced that he would order to shut down the service if Google should not - as they actually already agreed prior to the launch of its service - take off faces, car license plates and other private information. In Europe and even more so I feel in Switzerland people do not take privacy issues that lightly as maybe it is done in the US.

The deal with other countries where Google will take such information off when people ask them to do so is not what they agreed to in Switzerland. They want Google to take it off immediately prior to going live. I think this is not that easy to do and for sure quite time consuming and costly. It might well be that Google decides to not offer this service in Switzerland at all. I would find that a shame, but try to argue with people who are paranoid when they see their house on the Internet. They should be maybe more concerned about what possibilities the military or the police has to check them out, but that is not known in public. To me they make an elephant out if a fly and as usual Google is quite amateurish in handling it.