I am back this week in California (lived and worked here until end of 2000). Last time I came to the US (Boston) they gave me a hard time at the immigration asking all kinds of super smart questions. Now I decided to be a tourist visiting friends which seemed to have helped the immigration officer also, reducing his questions to “What are you doing in the US?”, and “How long are you staying here?” This time he even wished me a nice stay and good day, wow, what a change from former times, when you got the feeling they preferred you stay out of the country. Marketing is not only important for companies but equally for countries, especially if you depend on trade and highly qualified “alien residents” (what a name) to keep the high-tech industry a leader.

The weather is now gorgeous here and nearly “boringly” the same with no rain but blue sky every day until September/October. Nature shows itself right now in great colors and the trees and grass are still in their best colors, which will of course soon change as the grass hills turn brown - or “golden” as the people say here of their “Golden State”. It is a all a matter of how you view things - especially here! The following picture is of Half MoonBay.

As we reported yesterday, IBM has opened its own “Innovation Factory,” to generate ideas and new products and services for telecom customers. But it’s not exactly a new idea – either for the high-tech world or for IBM.

In his 1985 classic Harvard Business Review article, The Discipline of Innovation, management guru Peter Drucker argued innovation was one-third innovation and two-thirds disciplined hard work that should be planned and managed systematically in companies. The life sciences started using the name “innovation factory” in 1999. After another Harvard Business Review article in 2001, Building an Innovation Factory describing how to spread innovation collaboration between partners, it started to catch on more widely.

IBM was already a member of the Rhode Island-based “Business Innovation Factory”, taking over management of the Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Pilot Project in the fall of 2005. They are presumably leveraging this experience – e.g. piloting social networking tools – in the new venture.

The wider need in the telecoms industry was shown in IBM’s worldwide survey of high-tech CEOs. The majority of the 700-plus CEOs said depended mostly on generating new business models to gain a business lead. Telecoms CEOs put the emphasis instead on product and service innovation. IBM found this a paradox, because in their view business model innovation generates faster-than-average margin growth, and technology differences are often slim. In comparison with other CEOs, telecoms CEOs also downplayed their role in spearheading innovation. IBM put this down to the urgent need for telecoms businesses to monetize their high capital investment in next-generation services over IP. The survey concludes they are not collaborating externally nearly as much as they need to - a need that the CEOs actually acknowledge.

The survey looks like a top-class piece of market research, giving IBM reason to expect a good takeup, with clear business benefits: product time-to-market and business model innovation through participation of top level management. Mike Hill, IBM’s Telecommunications Industry general manager, says in the PR:

“Our telecom clients are facing a host of competitive pressures that demand the ability to drive new revenue streams, test new business models, and accelerate the pace of innovation”.

I’m sure it was only coincidence, but the PR came out just a day after the US’s slip from first to seventh place in

WEF’s “networked readiness index” - measuring national ICT resources and preparedness (behind Singapore, most of Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland). A good time to get some positive press!

Today IBM announced a software platform that is supposed to work as an online market space for high-tech companies. The project is called Innovation Factory. This is what IBM says in a press release today at the US largest wireless industry event - the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, Florida:

Innovation Factory uses a blend of Web 2.0 social networking technologies to help companies rapidly conceive and test new products and services, accelerating a launch process that often takes years down to mere days.

We have not been able to write too much recently as business has kept us globetrotting since the beginning of the year and seems to be continuing that way.

In short order we have seen some of the beauties of the North repeatedly, such as Helsinki and Stockholm. Of course this time of the year they hide a good part of their beauty behind bad weather.

This week we had a chance to see the train station and the office of a client’s client in Västerås. Half way West between Stockholm and Linköping. We were told the area is beautiful and has hundreds of well maintained castles. Yes hundreds. This sounds a bit unreal but it is true. In a few months one should be able to enjoy this area more. Wikipedia says this about the major town:

Västerås is one of the oldest cities of Sweden and Northern Europe. The name originates from Västra Aros, which refers to the estuary of the river Svartån. The area had been populated from Nordic Viking Age,

before 1000 AD. In the beginning of the 11th century it was the second

largest city in Sweden, and in the 12th century became seat of the

bishop.

I am currently in the process of obtaining a new 10-year passport. While I am still a German, though living in other countries for more than 10 years now, I was prepared for a horribly bureaucratic experience. To my surprise so far this has turned out to be a pleasant (since very efficient and quick) process. OK, I still don’t know why I need all this stuff:

• birth certificate
• marriage certificate
• “Abmeldebescheinigung” of the last place I lived in Germany

I have now made about 30min of calls to Berlin, Baden-Baden, Gaggenau and Munich, and was helped immediately - in one case they even volunteered to fax the “Abmeldebescheinigung” right to the Consulate here. Wow! That is a hell of a service.

Of course I don’t yet have my new passoprt, but things are looking good, and who knows, maybe it all will indeed go much more smoothly than I expected. So far I am truly impressed, and thought that was worth a blog post to encourage others as well!

An average of 130g per kilometer CO2 pollution is what the EU will request from the car manufacturers after it became clear that they will fail to cut the emissions themselves to that level by 2008.

The fact that FIAT is the best currently with 139 g/km comes a bit as a surprise to me, I would have expected the Japanese to lead. But even more surprising is Volvo from Sweden where they have ambitious goals to use bio fuel, but its own car manufacturer comes in on second last place - only Porsche is worse, which was not a surprise of course.

After a fair few months of speculation Apple has finally announced its iPhone. Comparing this device to the N800 mentioned a couple of posts ago makes the latter look even more overpriced. According to Jobs’ keynote speech Apple’s iPhone seems to offer almost everything the n800 does and a whole lot more for US$499 for the 4GB storage model (recall that the N800 has a mere 128MB built in flash).

Of course we will have to see whether Apple can actually deliver, and it isn’t due to really ship until July, but it is no surprise that dedicated smartphone vendors such as RIM had a bad time on the stock market yesterday. In theory Nokia should be able to build a similar product and have a massive cost advantage when it does but recently Nokia has seemed to go down the Microsoft route of ever more features rather than the sleek UI of Apple.

• Apple - not long ago - officially announced that they weren’t working on an iPhone. Now it appears though as if this was an official lie. The world’s largest contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. leaked that they got an order from Apple for 12 million iPhones. If it is now indeed true then this will be an attack on some of Nokia’s and in particular SonyEricsson’s music phones. From a product management point of view this makes a lot of sense and could well be the start of a next - even bigger - wave for Apple. Mockup pictures have been out for quite some time of course too.
• Allot Communications - an Israeli QoS data network company - had a successful IPO on the Nasdaq, raising net 78 million USD with a market cap of 300 million USD. Quite interesting to see that QoS has become hot again. It was already supposed to be dead back in 2000 when many Silicon Valley startups were into this. Timing is everything, as we can see here clearly once more.
• Germany’s biggest print media company Axel Springer Verlag has changed its business strategy for four of its newspapers (Die Welt, Welt kompakt, Welt am Sonntag, Berliner Morgenpost) to “Online first” which means that all relevant news will go first and immediately onto their websites. So they realize that there is no point in reading 1-2 days later about something in a print edition when before that it has already been spread on many online portals, not to mention the fastest guys covering it even sooner, via blogs. This strategy will become the norm for all newspapers.
• After Silvio Berlusconi had been firmly told that his company Mediaset was not welcome to bid for the German private TV channel ProSiebenSat.1, FTD has now reported that Do?an Holding has moved into the final round of bidders and seems even to be holding the highest currently (not sure how they were able to find that out, but it makes for a good story at least). Do?an Holding is a Turkish conglomerate. Interesting also to see that Do?an today announced the sale of a 25% stake in Do?an TV Radio (DTVR) to Axel Springer, which makes the two partners. The Do?an Group has more than 11′000 employees and is active in the energy, media, industry, trade, tourism and insurance sectors. If you click on their website you might have some funny moments watching the animation that leads to their logo…
• Ever since the private equity company Blackstone took a stake in D-Telekom, things seem to have been moving much faster, and more seems to be happening than in the last 20 years or so combined. Looks like they are now pushing to spin out (to some extent at least) D-Telekom’s systems integration arm T-Systems.