Seth Godin caught my interest once more with an article, this time on how to do business development successfully. I think he is mostly right on. Take a look yourself…

This report forecasts that the worldwide smartphone market will grow from 160million units shipped in 2009 to more than 500 million in 2012.  I am asking myself how much of that was initiated by Apple’s iPhone vs. the inherent interest/need in having a PC substitute with you all the time.

In any case, it is good news for the mobile industry who will enjoy impressive growth also in mobile data services as the smartphone users will of course drive that market too.

This morning I came across a blog on Android and then saw that it belonged to a big network of other smartphone blogs (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm and Windows Mobile). Now as it looks like the company behind it, Smartphone Experts, ranked among the fastest growing companies in the Inc. 500 list and was even the fastest growing one in the retailer category.

Looking at their concept is a model case for how to effectively use blogs and its communities to attract people and serve as entry points for the online shop network that they own or partner with.

To make this concept work it is crucial to provide neutral and up to date information in each of the different smartphone categories. I think this is a great example of how communities can be used to win in a highly competitive industry. While this is a retail specific B2C approach it shows still what potential online communities have also if you are in a smaller community B2B type of business. What is needed to succeed in B2B as well you can read on our blog site in some of the next blog posts.

The mobile industry is on its way to its largest event worldwide: the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

I expect that there, too, fewer exhibitors and far fewer visitors will attend. As the event has been overcrowded over the last few years, it could turn out to be a pleasant experience — although exhibitors of course won’t like it at all, not to mention the organizesr.

We plan to be there and also to record a video that we will post then onto this blog and onto our Product Marketing reference work website.

If you take a look at the exhibitor list, you will see how many companies are attending per country. I did a little counting; question is if there is a correlation between the number of companies from a country and how big wireless is in these countries — relative to their size, of course.  I think it does to some extent correlate with the activities undertaken, although it does not say anything about how successful these are; for that I would have to also add up revenues. Some other observations: Spain of course has so many companies attending because the event is hosted in Barcelona, Spain. China has only a few, but two very big ones with Huawei and ZTE. France, Ireland and Israel are heavily supporting startups, so they have many small ones. The low attendance rate from Japan maybe reflects the economic situation there.

MIT wearable computing video

MIT wearable computing video

Three books I was just reading I’d like to review for you.

Ken Follet, World Without End
I was reading Ken Follet’s first Middle Age book The Pillars of the Earth a few years ago and loved it. Naturally I got his latest second book World Without End as well and can highly recommend it. On 1100 pages Ken Follett brings the Middle Ages to life. He is not only an outstanding story teller but also works hard researching the details to make his stories appear as real as possible. I am personally a big fan of Ken Follett as I think in addition to great story telling skills also hard research work nearly like a scientist is is his recipe for success. You don’t need to have read his first book at all, by the way- you will still be able to understand just about everything. But I recommend you read them both. His new book drew me deeply into the Middle Ages with all its roughness and daily fight for survival. Ken Follet provides insights into daily lives ranging from simple laborers, nuns, priests, builders, noblemen, knights, and all the way up to the kings. One other part of his success is that he brings into his story human beings with all their strengths and weaknesses: intrigue, prejudice, politics, greed, rudeness, ambition, persistence, revenge, warmth, caring to name just a few. 1000 years have passed now but not much has changed at all in this respect, you start thinking, and I am convinced this is actually true. I can highly recommend this book to everybody who loves to be drawn into a different world but also likes interpersonal relationship stories. I was glued to the book and my family was surprised to see how fast I read through these 1100 pages.

In short: great entertainment in a realistic, very well researched Middle Age setting showing lives across the whole population from day labourers to nobility.

Olaf Ihlau, Weltmacht Indien
When it comes to books on India or China the Germans are typically not the experts. For China, American-born Chinese (”ABCs”) or in India the British have better insights and hence are able to write more accurate books. Peter Ihlau’s new book on India seems to be a rare one, though, from a German correspondent who has worked on Indian stories for now 30 years for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the magazine Spiegel. As I am not someone who can judge the quality of a book on India I only assume, based on his background, that he writes well. The book not only writes about India’s newest developments in IT outsourcing and the huge number of excellent universities producing half a million engineers every year but also spends a big part on its challenges, and there are many more than one might think of: strong influence on daily life of countless different religions; huge poverty in most rural areas and in the slums of the urban cities; ongoing tensions with nuclear-armed Pakistan about Khasmir; anarchical areas in the northeast of the country that are entirely out of control; a caste system that is officially illegal but practically existent everywhere and determines people’s faith by virtue of birth.

In short: comprehensive insight into the daily challenges of the next superpower India, the book is in German only right now.

Marvin Appel, Investing with Exchange Traded Funds
In case you still have invested money in mutual funds you might not like this and many other books on ETFs as they would tell you that you not only waste lots of money paying high management fees but in addition not even increase but decrease your chances for investment success. This book here on ETFs is written by an American investment consultant and covers the viewpoint for US investors. Still most of what he recommends can be applied by Europeans as well. The book is excellently written and leads you step by step to a flowchart of a decision-making process that allows you to maintain the “ultimate ETF investment strategy portfolio”.

In short: excellent book explaining how to use ETFs and providing a great flowchart on a portfolio selection decision-making process. Also very usable for non-Americans.

I just read another great blog post from Bob Cringely, this one on how to pick IT consultants. In case you have not heard of Bob (Robert X. Cringely to be precise) he’s been an IT writer for now “30 years in and around the PC business”. Looks like he has worked in other areas too, such as the oil industry, at least one other great blog post from Bob mentions that he attended OPEC meetings. Bob writes pretty long and exhaustive blog posts so you need to put a little time aside for reading his blogs, but it is worth I can tell you! He also does not take himself too seriously it seems - at least that’s how I read his own short bio “Sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and intrepid adventurer Robert X. Cringely - the nerdiest of them all?”.

From his IT consultant post this check list here could come handy when you select IT consultants for a project:

“Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.

1 ) “This can only be accomplished through a large custom development project.”

2 ) “Of course your data is safe.”

3 ) “We’ll need a day or two for optimization and debugging.”

4 ) “Yes, we’ve done this before. There are several companies using this product (or technology). They really like it.”

5 ) “Server consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”

6 ) “Storage consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”

7 ) “The upgrade (or change) will be seamless and will not affect production.”

8 ) “The upgrade (or change) will be transparent to users.”

9 ) “Yes, we tested this thoroughly before installing it.”

10 ) “If you install Tivoli it will solve all your support problems.” “

In case you have not already read or even seen our other blog, IT PR, I recommend you take a look.

It focuses more - as you might expect - on news and public relation aspects using new media technologies.

The current blog post on “Web 2.0 monetizing” summarizes the latest discussions on this subject and Adrian - our man for this blog - has his own opinion of course too…

On Friday the CEO of startup Mahalo.com (and former GM at Netscape) wrote a blog that caused a lot of backlash in the US tech scene and found its culmination with Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington taking a shot at the topic too.

First of all, I must say that this discussion is a bit amusing here in old Europe. Guys, I am glad that you got so excited about the topic and now really seem to understand that VC money (even if plentiful still in the US) is not there to blow on big title hires, designer furniture or other perks. Having also lived in that Silicon Valley dream world from 1997 to 2001, I know that group of people who got together (I think on Tuesday’s ) discussing how they could find other cool startup idea buddies that got 5-10 million USD funding, all having more or less the same business model and all wasting their money with the same TV commercials to get their B2C online store up and running.

We all know that there was a market clearance happening, and a healthy one, I must say. The interesting thing is that there are still some guys out there that survived it somehow and are even now thinking that the only reason why they failed at the time was that their ideas were too early and NOW is once again the time to build the 20th or so Web 2.0 company in the exact same space - in which most IMHO (as we will soon see, too) will bite the dust.