Why is it that there is such a fundamental difference between B2B and B2C marketing?

In order to answer this one has to look into the history of marketing.

During the years of the industrial revolution many new mass products were created.  These new products were unknown so marketing at that time had to first explain what it is and why one would need it. This is the same as today’s B2B marketing. Then over time these consumer products were well-known and there was no point in explaining what a fridge or oven or whatever is, and why it is good to have one; people knew that. So marketing shifted away from explaining and moved to differentiating itself and associating the product with an image such as good feelings or celebrities using it. The age of brand marketing started where people bought brands and less so new - unknown - products. Marketing literally forgot about problem-based marketing as it was not needed. Of course for B2B marketers this is untrue since there you need to identify and explain the problem/pain first. Often the customers do not even know about it since they have workarounds. Only once you tell them convincingly that there is a problem and that your solution will provide benefits will they be receptive. Consumer marketing would - and I also hope - not convince a CIO to use a new software across its organization. Of course companies still try to do that and are surprised when the targets protect themselves from vendors’ pleasantries and approaches. To get decision makers to events requires to address issues, problems that they might also face and then offer solutions to it. In my experience the more concrete that is done the better. It then also does not really matter if you have 600 people attending or “only” 60. If among the 600 you have everybody and their son then I highly prefer the 60-people event with very interested people who come to find solutions for current problems they face. So in short its about the quality and not the quantity. Some samples from ads in 1930 I collected below. One ad explains that a fridge allows you to make ice cheaper and more conveniently, another one uses a better can opening mechanism as a differentiator for beer, and one ad for a public rural telephone device says it is easy to use for - even - fruit growers. Back during those times every marketer was a B2B marketer.

Reading the book “Selling to the C-Suite” from Nicholas Read and Stephen Bistritz right now, I also came across this exact issue where they write the following interesting lines:

So it’s really not surprising that when we ask marketing directors in B2B organizations to explain their marketing mix, we learn that they are technically proficient at segmentation, database scrubbing, and targeting, as well as in using multichannel print, online, and digital media strategy. The names in the database are usually the right business contacts. And if their performance indicators are to release X number of press releases to analysts and journalists per year, run Y number of conferences and events to achieve minimum attendance goal, and pull Z number of leads from these conferences and trade shows, then most B2B marketing managers end their year feeling that they’ve done a pretty good job. And if they’re working in consumer retail companies, they’d be right. But not if they’re working in B2B. Most people don’t give this much thought because all through their career, marketing leads have been so-so, and they probably think that’s just how it goes. …

And to cut them some slack, how could they ever have been taught it when all the marketing theory taught in today’s schools is based on the household consumer goods model, which dropped the concept of problem-based marketing half a century ago?

So what is good B2B marketing is what needs to be answered next. Stay tuned….

It is the Ticket_AA.exe that would be the problem if I had opened it. I wonder how many people got this email and what the percentage of people is that actually opens the attachment.

“Big data”  as the name suggests has to do with masses of data collected from just about everywhere. We talk about terabytes and more of data collected from all kinds of sources such as information-sensing mobile devices, aerial sensory technologies, cameras, microphones, RFID readers, wireless sensor networks, social media, buying patterns and so on. The fact that 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years makes this an even bigger challenge as it is a constantly moving target. Currently used relational databases and  desktop statistics/visualization packages cannot deal with this unstructured data requiring instead massively parallel software running on large computers often grids of dozens, hundreds or even more of servers.

Its not surprising that Google is into this for quite a while since their search algorithm is doing exactly what big data is all about: collecting massive amounts of data and making decisions (search) based on analyzing them. Google is offering access to compute power now even to enterprises with its service BigQuery. More also in this Google blog.  Google was also there right at the beginning with its framework MapReduce that was then used in projects by others such as Yahoo leading to Hadoop, a story on this you find here.

Data collected are e.g. from web logs; RFID sensor networks; social networks; social data, Internet text and documents; Internet search indexing; call detail records; astronomy, atmospheric science, genomics, biogeochemical, biological, and other complex and/or interdisciplinary scientific research; military surveillance; medical records; photography archives; video archives; and large-scale eCommerce.

A McKinsey report on Big Data mentions e.g. these points:

• The use of big data will underpin new waves of productivity growth and consumer surplus. For example, we estimate that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent.
• The computer and electronic products and information sectors, as well as finance and insurance, and government are poised to gain substantially from the use of big data.
• Policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability will need to be addressed in a big data world.

The Green Grid has made itself a name by being able to have three continents (US, Europe, Asia) to agree on a clear definition on how to calculate the PUE (Power Usage Efficiency) metric. The PUE value is inside a data center the power ratio of the total power used by the whole facility divided by the power used up by IT equipment. A PUE value of 1.3 means e.g. that 30% of the total power used is for cooling, power loss and other facility sources on top of the power used for IT (1.0). So the smaller the value the more efficient the data center. Of course this value depends on when it is being measured. During a cold winter day it will be better than during a hot summer day assuming free cooling is being used. The Green Grid wants data centers to measure the value over a period of 12 months which makes lots of sense.

Now PUE might not necessarily be the best value to use although it is great as mentioned that a metric has been agreed on internationally. There are the following shortcomings:

• PUE does not include information on availability, a more redundant data center would have naturally a higher PUE than a very low or not redundant data center
• total utilization of a data center is also not reflected, a new big data center with few clients can have the most innovative green measures in place but still achieve a bad PUE
• it is also very possible that measures reducing IT load such as consolidation of servers enabled with virtualization increase the PUE
• while electrical energy is important to look at also water used, CO2 production, reuse of waste energy and other resource efficiencies are not reflected
• an older data center will most likely have PUE values that will be higher than a new data center with latest innovative cooling systems used

latest news: interesting is that also IBM, who departed routing and switching as well as optical communications long time ago jumps back onto this opportunity.

The probably most visible European ICT startup ever Skype changes hands again. And this time Microsoft pays a huge premium that most analysts who don’t get the hightech world don’t understand. Of course Skype is not worth 8.5 billion USD, and Microsoft knew that, but this deal was a fight between Google and Microsoft and Google dropped the ball at 8 billion or so deciding to better build than buy.

What will Microsoft now do with Skype? Well that will be interesting to see. They could with their financial power create a very powerful telco where you communicate from your desktop, laptop or mobile with your peers. Microsoft has other technology in the unified communications area and could well integrate this all offering their enterprise customers local as well as wide area networking over the Internet heads on competing with the telcos.

If this indeed happens we will see. Guys like Cringely doubt it. I am not so sure if he is right though… ICT markets keep spinning fast and remain highly interesting.

• Data Breach Investigation report (DBIR) collects since 8 years valuable IT threat data
• Verizon is working on 1000 cases per year where security attacks succeeded, the results also go into the DBIR
• 92% of all security breaches come from stealing the password, a simple 2-factor login (e.g. security chip card) would very likely stop most of these incidents
• faster patching would not have prevented any of the investigated cases
• in most cases (70%) the intruders use non-critical business applications to come in and not at all the top applications where most of the IT security money is spent
• Verizon runs the backbone of the Internet if you like by providing 20,000 gateways in 160 countries
• through these gateways they are able to identify 1700 names/day of possible or actual intruders
• they are getting data for prosecuting cyber criminals and did so in 45 successful cases in 2010, 97% of these cases would have been preventable with the right security measures
• his bottom line message was: do more of the very simple things and do them very well instead of trying the sophisticated stuff as most attacks happen not there

It was the fourth MWC event in Barcelona now and possibly the second last one if the GSMA decides in June for a new host city. I think though Barcelona is the clear number one choice for several reasons:

• they have the event now fully under control and learned a lot from the mess the first year, it is almost perfectly organized now
• although hotels jack up their prices by 2-3 times during the MWC event week, it is still possible to get somewhat reasonable accommodations a bit further away even if you book very late
• traffic in Barcelona is manageable, I think that both Paris and Milano totally disqualify on this aspect as already now these cities are way too crowed and an event like the MWC will bring the places into a entirely chaotic situation. Starting each morning in a traffic mess is really no good for any event and for doing business.
• Barcelona can offer nice weather in February. We had mostly sun, blue sky, and >15 degrees Celcius. In all other possible locations weather will be most likely really bad in February with Munich the worst. How this can put a damper on attendees moods you can see year after year with the German Cebit. I really doubt GSMA wants to reduce attendance rates by doing the event in very likely miserable weather location. That alone leaves Barcelona as the only possible venue place from 2013 on IMHO.

Europa kann kein High-Tech, glauben Investoren, das hätten die vergangenen Jahre gezeigt.

writes the FAZ about the Nokia “merger” with Microsoft is what analysts say. Since the German newspaper FAZ does not publish comments in case you criticize anything they write ( I tried 3-4 times and they never published my comments ) I write a little bit about this here. If that simplified statement would be true question is will that deficiency influence other non-high-tech industries sooner or later as well when these industries will become more competitive, faster moving and overall less predictable? I think so.

“Nokia is the victim of its own success” is another tale people tell and you can read about in the FAZ article. I don’t think that describes either the situation. What really has happened is that Nokia like many Western European companies are trapped in a state somewhere in between a very hierarchical (Apple, yes, even if it does not appear from the outside), process-oriented and a very open (Google) environment. As it turns out this state is inferior to these two other setups leading to long decision-making and at the end not better but only soso products coming out late even. It is easier to focus on process optimization and live the illusion that this would be all that is needed to be successful. Process optimization is something anybody can do nowadays and is doing (also Chinese firms). Being able to move fast and use the input of many smart people to find new ideas and implement these ideas first in the market is more difficult to do though also because it requires management that understands this and supports such environments. Which company can truly say that they are in a position to quickly collect the accumulated ideas from employees, customers and partners? Most companies still have the idea box based on false principles that originated from 1880. Putting an idea box into a web portal does not make it a more effective though and changes anything. It remains an unused “tool”.

I tried to sell to NOKIA a few times technology and visited them in Espoo. What I experienced there was an environment where people were scared to take new approaches and rather did not pursue new ideas at all. Also I always had the feeling there is a Finnish group of guys that hardly communicate with each other and even have a harder time to communicate to outsiders - like myself.

To me the Nokia case should be a last warning for many many complacent other companies showing them that things will turn bad for them quickly too if they only focus on process optimization and don’t think in idea and inovation management.

What happens to Nokia will now be determined in the next 2 years or so. I think they have a chance even if this first step was maybe not something the majority of bloggers and pundits consider as a smart move. Once again a few people were asked in Nokia (the new CEO and his peers) and made a decision. When is Nokia starting to ask its employees, customers and partners what it would take to change and be successful again? I hope for them they do that finally NOW.

BTW, I think also the FAZ should change their attitudes and let people voice their thoughts freely and comment on their site even if these thoughts are not in line with their content. This would help them write better articles that more people read, can take serious and probably more people are willing to pay for too.

StreamWork tries to combine different things in one business collaboration solution. The way I started using it right away was by starting a team project where I invited a few people in to discuss and work on a new sales and marketing approach for a product we market. After I launched a Decision box entering what we need to discuss and decide on in this team exercise I added some more work items such as an Evernote note which contained to do’s for a freelancer, a Stakeholder Analysis to show how we need to treat each of the target customers key people during the sales process, a PPT presentation with some sales pitches and attention grabbers.

Shown below is the Stakeholder Analysis work item I picked and quickly set up. Also available would have been a SWOT Analysis, Product Portfolio or Cost Analysis among others.

The integration with Evernote works very well. All fonts and elements were imported and displayed absolutely correctly. This was impressive.

Once you have your project started you can Add work items, Upload files or Evernote notes, Add Action Items, Add Participants and select tools from a Tools Catalog:

You can Add these work/project related items shown on the left to your collaboration group.

Next to Evernote there are also Box.net and Got Decisions partner tools in the Tools Catalog available. If you decide to use them then your data will be automatically also uploaded to these companies clouds and stored there as well.  A better integrated version would be great but is not a must have, at least not for smaller companies. I think larger corporations would certainly have an issue though with this.

A vertical feedback button on the right hand side leads to either contacting SAP support OR, and that is very well done, an idea collection forum. This I really like.

One problem I faced too. After uploading a larger PPT file I caused this issue here.

“ This file is being processed for slide extraction.” Contacting support did not help yet resolve it.

Still at first sight this looks like a very useful software. The ideas within are of course not SAP’s but copied from lots of other software solutions out there already. Even the tagline sounds like I heard it before :-). And what I like the most the vertical Feedback button I am quite sure is not even from SAP itself but they use a support community service. Also one can expect that they either acquire some of the partners that they work with in this software or, and there SAP has a not a favorable reputation, simply copy all they do and then terminate the partnerships. Unless they change also their business ethics which would be nice but is maybe not realistic to assume. Could well be that this is the reason why they only have four partners so far with Evernote, WebEx, Box.net and Auguri.

It works very well and fast here at 39k feet. I paid $12.95 during this 5h flight with US Airways from the east to the west coast in the US. They have big ads about this service on all the seat tables so that you cannot miss it. And it looks like a few people are using it on this late afternoon flight. Great service.

Yesterday Samsung showcased its new iPad contender, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. As this comparison chart shows the product is a serious - albeit currently only - real competitor. It has also things that the Apple iPad does not have, notably:

• front and rear facing cameras
• Adobe flash support
• expandable storage
• GPS built in (iPad only in UMTS model)
• full multitasking support

ich habe ihn vor allem damit ich auf dem klo nicht tausend zeitschrifen und bücher herumliegen habe. (ganz im sinne meiner frau)
(I use it mainly in the bathroom to get rid of all the magazines and books there so also my wife likes that now)

Click here to view the embedded video.

>> CollegeHumor gets excited about the great, endless possibilities to make fun about the iPad and Apple now:

>> List of 10 funny iPad cartoons.

>> John Klossner’s Apple cartoons.

• German - French friendship seems more for political show than something Europe could rely on in a crisis.
• In contrast, the Swiss showed where their real interests lie and supported the Euro heavily with their national bank which already holds two thirds of its reserves in Euros.
• Deutsche Bank and others are actually more interested in making tons of money in such a situation than stabilizing the markets. Total trading transparency and control are inevitable in the near future meaning NOW to show who follows what interests.
• Even though the UK has just had a change of government it also became clear that Europe is somewhat a club without them. If one looks at the fall in the British pound in the last few years the Euro is a safe currency in comparison. I think the UK needs to decide if they want to really become part of a European system or stay isolated on their island somewhere in no man’s land between Europe and the US. It is their call.
• Without strict fiscal control of Euro countries and punishments when needed this will not work; it looks like Germany is taking on the role of watchdog, which might be a good thing for all in the end.
• Countries can become bankrupt and the financial institutions who lend them money can’t hope anymore so that the taxpayers pay for eventual losses; the same will be true for big banks.
• update: This here is a good contribution in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. The author suggests that the EURO countries include into their constitutions a maximum debt threshold. That way - assuming the countries respect their constitutions -  each country can separate the discussion from politics since it becomes a law. Germany followed last year Switzerland doing exactly that.

What a mess for the exhibition organizers, the companies who brought their booths and also the speakers who prepared themselves and all booked flights and hotels and set up business meetings.

I think there is one clear solution now that also will not cost too much:

1. Provide a web presentation event

2. Offer a virtual exhibition event using a social community platform, where the vendors can showcase their products still

This would be totally independent of any airport and flight closures and also would be relatively inexpensive still. The other alternatives would be to cancel the event entirely and reimburse the people. Or reschedule with the risk that it will again not happen and of course I assume that the costs would be way too high as well to make this a viable option.

Update: the event could - fortunately - happen afterall when Schiphol airport reopened on Monday afternoon. Still, virtual events are an alternative, a backup and most importantly extend an event to an all year around meeting place increasing the number of people attending. Real example: VMWorld Virtual Pavilion

I had asked not long ago in a blog post here “SAP - Quo Vadis?”, raising the question why they don’t get a database and also invest more into mobile enterprise software suggesting they should do acquisitions. And voila, SAP will buy database and mobile application specialist Sybase for about $6 billion.

Competition is heating up in the tech sector where the big ones need to offer most solutions that enterprise customers might need. This is also triggered and accelerated by e.g. Google who is increasingly becoming a software application player making its web-based Google Docs more robust and adding missing features to catch up with Microsoft. Microsoft itself needs to look for other software opportunities such as enterprise resource planning interfering with e.g. SAP. The list goes on and on and one can expect that Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Google and IBM will continue their acquisition strategy and become increasingly more competitors.

Compared with other pure social collaboration offers Microsoft is quite late, lacks key features, will be expensive to implement, make you vendor dependent and will still be bought by most corporations IT departments who don’t care much and just want to add a check mark at their users’ requests for better collaboration tools.

Forrester commented in a similar way:

At the end of the day, Forrester clients seem to be falling into one of three buckets:

• Those that are committed to SharePoint and are planning to take the native social capabilities, even if it means being a bit behind the cutting edge.
• Those that want the latest and greatest in social technology in their enterprise and will pursue a pure social technology offering.
• Those that want both and will look for a pure social offering with deep integration with SharePoint.

What American football, basketball or baseball is for the Americans soccer is for pretty much the rest of the world: the number one - most watched - sport. A professor in Germany now predicts that Germany will become the next World Soccer champion in the world cup starting in a few weeks in South Africa. The formula is actually quite simple to understand if you still remember just a little maths from university. Of course, the professor also predicted that Germany would win 4 years ago and as we know they finished an honorable third “only”. So practically this means that they all still have to play.

• e-government, allows you to do more and more simply online
• e-signature, allowing you to sign a contract online (need an additional software for that such as SwissSigner10 and is also supported by Adobe 9)
• as a login/authentication mechanism to use web applications that support SuisseID

The Swiss Post is the official distribution partner for the SuisseID. You need to fill out a form online and then go to a post office to verify with your current ID such as a passport to obtain the chip card with your ID. There are then three ways to use it: simple USB reader that holds the chip, USB stick that holds the chip and also contains more software such as a secure browser and the SwissSigner10 software to do online signatures, or a plastic card (the size of a credit card) that works with a card reader.

I looked into it as a way to do online signatures for us but then decided that we actually don’t need it right now or the 238 CHF for this option is not worth it. Probably for a company who does many contracts this is a small worthwhile investment though. The option with USB reader only is quite cheap with 39 CHF. For doing e-government this is worth paying I think and once I am officially Swiss will probably get one to be able to vote online and use other e-government services conveniently.

As mentioned in a GigaOm post Skype is growing by leaps and bounds with no slowing in sight. 12% of all international long distance call minutes are made with Skype now. They also rolled out recently a few new features nearly quietly such as public Wifi access (I was surprised to suddenly get the option in a public Wifi hotspot to pay through Skype, but that made lots of sense as it speeds up the sign on process), screen sharing (this feature is not made very public either and I only heard about it today, you need to enable it in the menu bar under Call/Share Screen) and then they seem to have further improved the call quality (the call quality is simply excellent and I practically hear no difference if I talk to someone in the country, in China or the US, maybe initial delays but that goes away too quickly).

And then they have currently big efforts under way to bring Skype onto mobile phones working over wireless networks.

Today I could test drive for the first time ever an electrical car from Mitsubishi, the MiEV. (see also the UK page) The car had a great acceleration - as expected - also uphill and was also much faster than my gasoline-driven Mazda 3 1.6.

Assuming you can recharge the car at work the daily radius will be doubled and the majority of the commuters here in Zurich could use one easily I think.

For a video look here and for pictures that I took look here.

- Q: Any change in Apple position on Flash and Java?

Steve: No.

- I asked whether Apple will enable unsigned applications like Android and Palm OS.

Steve: There’s a porn store for Android… you can download it, your kids can download it. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to.

Update: Apple boots Google off iPhone 4.0, as reported in this article in Business Insider, it could well be that Apple takes off Google Search with iPhone 4.0. This could mean a range of things. One of them that Apple enters the search market itself (would go well with its iAd launch) or that it uses Bing from Microsoft.

Apple’s impact on Amazon’s Kindle can be seen clearly with Amazon sending out email ads talking about Kindle apps but not Kindle anymore:

]]> http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/04/08/apple-to-rush-out-os-40-fearing-competition/feed/ http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/04/04/on-the-mobile-speed-is-more-important-than-relevant-content/ http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/04/04/on-the-mobile-speed-is-more-important-than-relevant-content/#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:41:06 +0000 Ralf Haller http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/?p=5972

Now that everyone expects a huge rise in mobile data traffic (e.g. 40x in 5 years according to Coda Research Consultancy) it is even more important to know that user experience and speed are valued higher by the mobile users than relevant content. This is different than in desktop use and must be taken into consideration when you develop products for the mobile space.

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Now that everyone expects a huge rise in mobile data traffic (e.g. 40x in 5 years according to Coda Research Consultancy) it is even more important to know that user experience and speed are valued higher by the mobile users than relevant content. This is different than in desktop use and must be taken into consideration when you develop products for the mobile space.

]]> http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/04/04/on-the-mobile-speed-is-more-important-than-relevant-content/feed/ http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/03/29/book-recommendation-the-social-factor-shows-the-success-of-social-computing-at-ibm/ http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/03/29/book-recommendation-the-social-factor-shows-the-success-of-social-computing-at-ibm/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:57:54 +0000 Ralf Haller http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/?p=5952 Maria Azura’s new book The Social Factor writes about IBM’s very own experiences using social networking and describes the tremendous success that Wikis, Blogs, and other social tools have. The numbers are mind-boggling and were also for IBM beyond their highest expectations. This lead Maria to ask in her book:

Is there a correlation between the success of IBM and the social tools now used extensively by IBMers?

• within a year more than 150,000 IBMers were creating, accessing, or updating wikis, this represents about 40% of the total workforce
• after six months the active blogs topped out at approximately 5,000; the traffic continued to grow, however

Maria Azura’s new book The Social Factor writes about IBM’s very own experiences using social networking and describes the tremendous success that Wikis, Blogs, and other social tools have. The numbers are mind-boggling and were also for IBM beyond their highest expectations. This lead Maria to ask in her book:

Is there a correlation between the success of IBM and the social tools now used extensively by IBMers?

• within a year more than 150,000 IBMers were creating, accessing, or updating wikis, this represents about 40% of the total workforce
• after six months the active blogs topped out at approximately 5,000; the traffic continued to grow, however

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Click here to view the embedded video.

After it now became official that Google decided to redirect its China Google.cn search site to its Hong Kong site Google.com.hk and with that step effectively leaving the China mainland Search market, the question coming up is what will that mean for the future?

Firstly, I think that the decision to leave China had mostly also to do with the fact that Google was unable to gain market leadership in China. It trailed its local rival Baidu. This IMHO had from a pure business point of view nothing to do with being censored or not but simply with the fact that Google like many other US Internet companies face fierce local competition and never gained the market share that they were able to gain elsewhere in the world. That is frustrating for them no doubt and certainly played a major role in its current decision to “pull out”. In fact they did not fully pull out but left all other businesses untouched - so far.

It has to be seen now how the Chinese authorities react and if they block the Hong Kong site entirely which they of course could easily do. That they filter the content that Google Hong Kong’s search finds is clear.

Now what will this mean for the future of China’s Internet business? One will see more and more local Chinese companies gaining more market share and dominating the Chinese market. Those companies will remain local and will enjoy healthy growth not needing any expansion outside of China. While it is a bit too early to say for sure but what could well happen is that the Internet will be divided into two. A Chinese one and a non-Chinese one. This of course will isolate China from the rest of the world something that is not good one would think. Cynics might also say a Google and a non-Google dominated Internet world. The other scenario could be that ways to circumvent censorship will become dominant and that grassroots movements will eventually practically open the Chinese Internet. That I doubt though. People assuming that - like Sergey Brin in the NYT - don’t take the huge effort into account that is being exercised by the Chinese government to control the Internet and censor website content and access. I once heard that there are more than 10,000 people employed in Beijing who search and then filter the Internet for unwanted website content. What happened now though with Google’s announcement is that the world is shown and talks about this Great Firewall of China and as a side effect “China is evil” rather than “Google is evil” is being spread.

Mr. Brin added that efforts by China, Iran and other governments to control online speech — a “half an Internet” approach, he said – will likely fail eventually. “I think that in the long term, they are going to have to open,” he said.

So how to deal with this is what every company needs to decide for itself. I for my part see this all a bit different. Having actually lived two years in the region (China and HK) I think one needs to be pragmatic and you cannot judge China with the rules that count in the US or Europe. We all know that also democracy in the Western world has its strong limitations, just looking at the heavy lobbying work that is so typical in Washington (I am sure also Google has its folks there as well). This shows that money has a huge influence on political decisions, something that people too often simply forget also because they depend on it.

The Google decision to redirect its search was at the end more of a face saving act for them than anything that reflects understanding of the Chinese circumstances and dealing with it in a smarter way. Pressure came up to finally do something after they noticed - and published - a sophisticated hacker attack and assumed it was Chinese government-sponsored. Now one needs to know that practically all business in China is in some way controlled by the government and large Chinese corporations are to a good part government-owned (e.g. Huawei). So I am sure that Google’s remaining business will also do business with the Chinese government or they will do no business. Of course that’s not in Google’s hands but the Chinese. Practically I think they won’t do much business there anymore and could as well simply entirely leave.

One reason in high-tech b2b markets why it takes so long to adopt new things is that there is an existing working infrastructure that is good enough and does mostly the job. New things need to be substantially better (10x in price and features) to make a quick impact. Problem here is of course that what is better cannot easily measured and quantified often so it is not even obvious even if companies sales and marketing will find all kinds of use cases showing ROI in a short amount of time.

One other reason are the human beings themselves. Used to do it one way or the other for a long time make them feel comfortable, they enjoy a certain amount of security and the feeling that they can deal with it well. New things are for most people - in particular conservative ones and the older generations - seen more as a threat than an opportunity. Also there is not so much desire to really try out something new, “why change anything?” they ask themselves, “we are doing very well”, so there is no reason really to change anything. We have just seen such thinking with the old boy group at the world soccer organization FIFA (its president Sepp Blattner is 73 and enjoys half the voting rights, whow, how is that possible?) where they ruled out any technical aids such as goal cameras or sensors in soccer balls. This despite the public, practically all coaches and players in favor of using new technologies to reduce the amount of mistakes when it comes to goals and also it is used in other sports (ice hockey, tennis) already. The arguments that the FIFA published are some that could be easily applied to the nay sayers in technology, here an extraction:

Fussball muss, erstens, weltweit nach den gleichen Regeln gespielt werden. Für Teenager in einem kleinen Ort etwa sollen die gleichen Regeln gelten wie für die Profis. Zweitens bringt es nichts, die Verantwortung für einen Entscheid vom Schiedsrichter der Technologie zu übertragen. Selbst Zeitlupen würden keine Klarheit bringen, und zehn Experten hätten zehn Meinungen, wie eine Situation zu beurteilen sei. Drittens kann die Anwendung von Technologie wie zum Beispiel zur Überwachung der Torlinie (mit Kamera oder Chip im Ball) sehr teuer sein. Viertens schliesslich ist Fussball ein dynamisches Spiel und kann zur Überprüfung eines Entscheides nicht einfach unterbrochen werden.

Quite funny some of these arguments. They basically have only one goal: don’t touch our nice world and confront us possibly with challenges that we don’t understand.

Despite this NO, I am convinced that in only a few years, when some of these people are retired (finally) technology will come where it makes sense and where it clearly helps to make better decisions. Grassroot movements and opinions cannot be stopped, only delayed. New ways in discussing opinions in blogs, communities, news portals will help to keep the pressure up. Below an online survey done in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. 72% say about the FIFA decision “total nonsense”.

“Europe has become the ‘flyover states’ of the mobile industry,” says a ­senior European executive, referring to the disparaging term used to describe middle America by high-powered business travellers shuttling between California and New York.

“All the service innovation is being done on the west coast of the US, and all the manufacturing and technical innovation is being done in the Far East. All we’re doing is selling other people’s products.”

Quite frankly, it is not even a flyover state anymore since the traffic goes from the US west coast westwards to Asia. No need to fly across Europe. Rick Wray’s article is worth reading and I concur with his views but would like to add a bit more depth to it and look at some of the reasons, as well as what could be done.

The key reason is that IT, Internet and software innovations, a domain of the US for a long time now, is becoming the ruling power in the mobile landscape. The pure infrastructure business has been targeted by the Chinese government for more than 10 years now, supporting first Huawei and then ZTE, among a few others not yet widely known outside of China such as Datang. These companies profit heavily from government support and the enormous market growth in China, but are now also entering international markets everywhere.

Entirely busy with fighting these Chinese vendors, European infrastructure vendors focused on keeping their customers - the mobile operators - happy by providing more and more services to them (up to outsourcing the whole operation) but ignored the most powerful force, the end users. And that is what Google and Apple are after, the masses of end users, who will in the end decide what is successful. Some of the players have already dropped the ball, such as Siemens, first selling off its mobile phone business and then getting rid of its infrastructure business as well by forming a NOKIA-led joint venture. Now it seems they are trying to become a Chinese-style company shutting down one location after the other. But while cost cutting is inevitable for them, the real thing they should be doing is focusing on cloud computing, and getting extensively into innovative mobile service offerings that they then run for the operators.

They have one advantage that they could play nicely and that is the good long-term relationships with the mobile operators, who are facing similar pressures from the same US companies. The operators also own the networks - hundreds of billions $ worth of assets - and the clients using them. Something a company like Google would love to own, and use to augment their service offering. One note here: Google has the backend infrastructure already (data centers) but not the access networks - yet (for background info on Google’s latest FTTH project read here). I think there is also one other asset that I would play out: Google is seen as a threat by governments and increasingly individuals who simply don’t trust them. Operators - with their local ties to end users might have had customer support issues here and there, but at the least no-one thinks of them as a privacy threat; so this trust base could be used offering cloud computing services.

Mobile operators and the infrastructure vendors need to explore new business models and they also need to find a way to handle advertisements. The biggest threat I see for them though is the speed with which this transformation is happening. And speed has not been something they have been able to handle so far, mostly because their management do not understand the new challenges, threats and opportunities and what to do about them. Most importantly, they need to hire people for these positions who understand the IT and internet business and are not simply large company operational experts.

Now the world is growing together and even if the US president says in his speeches that America has to lead, I think big companies should not be seen as US-, Europe- or Asia-based organizations but as worldwide operating companies since none can survive by only serving parts of the world.

As expected there were fewer companies and also people attending but that turned out to be a plus for the event which seemed for once more manageable and under control than in the last few years.

There were a few other observations that I’d like to share:

Software is on the rise – no big news of course – for the very first time it became very visible or in fact hardware was hidden and not shown at all by the major vendors. I did not see one booth where boring racks filled with hardware and blinking LEDs was all there was. All vendors even if they sell hardware presented services, use of applications or high level benefits for the end users.

For the first time in 15 years, the award ceremony was open to all attendees and did not require attending the special – to be paid - evening event. 19 awards were handed out by Stephen Frey, who did an outstanding job moderating the vent. Interesting to see that the GSMA members awarded Steve Jobs with the Mobile Industry Personality of the Year award. This is remarkable not only because Apple does not even have a booth nor hospitality suite so completely ignored the event, but more so because the iPhone put many of the traditional mobile phone vendors under lots of pressure. Also mobile operators for sure see Apple with mixed feelings. Apple – together with Google - are forcing them to change their business models which means they have to think about how to monetize complete services and applications rather than reselling mobile phone connectivity only.

There were still some not purely data-focused but based on the good old voice service innovations that even won awards:

· Orange France high-definition voice

· Addafix GmbH with yellix – caller ID

Orange improved the voice quality in Moldavia by introducing an AMR-WB codec and plans to roll it out across Europe in 2010. They say that the quality of the sound is like having the other party in the same room. Of course only if that other party is on the same Orange network as well.

The startup company addafix Gmbh from Austria solves a problem that seems even more obvious but – astonishingly – has not been properly addressed at all by the mobile operators to date.

When one does not reach a called party the phone will display three or so alternatives that are closest to the current caller location. A service that seems quite obvious and something all mobile operators should have offered for a long time since at least triangulation as a means for determining the location of the caller is well known for about a decade and does not require GPS receiver chipsets in the mobiles. Such a service should immediately increase the revenue of the operators one would think. The free service is called YELLIX and can be downloaded onto your phone. Most smartphone platforms are supported.

Addafix was also the only company that won two awards this week in Barcelona. They were also a winner in the startup Mobile Premier Award on Monday, which was partly organized by MobileMonday who invited winners from different country organizations.

The prestigious mobile handset award was btw won by the Google Android phone from HTC: the HTC Hero with the Sense user interface.

For the very same reason that software is becoming the driving force, you can also see more software developer guys walking around with Jeans who attend sessions such as the Google Android Developer presentations. Once the news spread that Google again gives away a Nexus One to everyone attending, the lines at least quadrupled. Good freebees still attract the crowd. No change here.

Two companies that decided to not participate with a huge and expensive booth anymore were LG and interestingly NOKIA. NOKIA reportedly invited VIPs to a nearby hotel that they rented. Research in Motion (RIM) stayed at the premises and took lots of the LG space increasing its presence substantially.

A first attending the event was Skype who has also just announced a partnership with Verizon where thetwo will offer cheaper VoIP calls over the 3G EV-DO network. More such deals will be coming I think.

The discussion mostly heating up between the old telco mobile world and the PC/Internet players was who is going to pay for the to be expected all time record US$ 200 billion investments that will be required to install and rollout high speed mobile IP networks which is double what was spent on 3G infrastructure in the late 1990. Mobile operators seem to want to make sure that this time around they get a cut from the big new pie and not leave it to the Googles’ of the world alone.

Interesting times for sure are ahead also because of Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech where he announced a new Google mantra called “Mobile First”. Google’s top programmers are now concentrating on mobile as their primary focus. He said:

“The mobile phone is where computing power, interconnectivity, and the cloud converge and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win.”

The navigation software market seemed to have been under heavy commodity pressure recently. With Google providing free navigation now for all Android phones, NOKIA felt they had to pull out something too also in light of Apple’s iPhone success. Of course the $8.1 billion they spent on Navteq needed to also put to work quickly. Unfortunately they did once more not get the end user requirements and decided to confuse people by offering free maps (for some of their handsets) and free turn-by-turn voice-directed navigation (again for only some of their handsets and confusingly different ones than the few who have free maps).

So where is this all leading and what can we expect in this market to happen?

In my opinion NOKIA will once more not be able to profit from this new development. They did not only enter this opportunity too late, spending also way to much money on Navteq but also screwed it then up with confusing licensing terms and announcing FREE in the headlines when in fact the small print shows that this is only true for a few handsets. Google will go its path and probably soon offer the best location based and real world viewing experience and that for free. With that move they will put a huge amount of pressure on the other navigation companies to innovate even more and faster. Navigon and TomTom have clearly seen this pressure and reacted with price cuts and many new developments such as 3D map views, voice activation, alternative route suggestions based on driving habits or real-time traffic situations. Both offer their products now on the iPhone with nice mounting cradles to use it in the car. TomTom even has one with a built-in GPS receiver chip to improve the navigation for the iPhone and enable the iPod Touch as well. But both vendors face a dilemma that is hard to fight: pricing drops drastically while at the same time more and more devices and features seem to be required to be able to offset this trend with more unit sales. They need to streamline their production costs and reduce hardware to very few platforms while putting all efforts into software development. Location based services is the way to go as well as combining it with social networking but while this is easy to say it requires a totally new approach and most importantly new business models where also online and mobile ads should be looked at. Both companies need new talent that are experts in online ads and social networking. I doubt though that they will be able to pull that off quickly enough which will make them acquisition targets maybe for other mobile phone vendors. Of course currently their navigation devices are still better than Google’s since they can clearly profit from years of experience in the car navigation market, but that gap will shrink quickly in the next 2-3 years if not even faster.

Garmin needs to be mentioned as well. The company did a smart move understanding the danger of commodity markets obviously very well and was branching out into all kinds of vertical markets with specialized products (flying, boating, trucking, hunting, hiking and all kinds of sports). It will be much harder to compete against them by Google and since they are established now in many of these vertical markets TomTom and Navigon are simply too late to copy that business model and most likely also don’t have the cash to do so. So I think Garmin looks fine while the rest will face tough times ahead.

During these smartphone times it was very very difficult to find anything even close to my beloved Samsung and I nearly decided to continue with it. But then NOKIA announced free turn-by-turn navigation and I decided to go for a NOKIA 6700 hoping to use it as a GPS and phone. Here now my first few hours of partly OK and partly frustrating experience that show how far away NOKIA is from becoming a software company and from Apple:

• it becomes very quickly obvious that NOKIA is trying to tie in their app and music store with over the air downloads. While this is certainly in the interest of mobile operators for the end user it means long download times and higher costs. For me as I already have the iPod Touch with many great apps I won’t use the OVI store at all also due to this annoying setup. nice try guys but this is amateurish.
• since navigation is now for free I was eager of course to try it out. After installing a bunch of software applications such as the one for synchronizing the phone with a PC (Mac is not supported - aeh!?), a SW update program and then a Map uploader program. In between things were hanging when Microsoft’s framework had to be installed. Overall I did not understand why it is not possible to simply have it all in one package. The average user will be struggling with all these software installs. So now eager to finally get it going I realized that I needed to activate the navigation service first for then it said I could try it out for 30 days. I am a bit confused now and not sure if that is indeed a trial only or a wrong info and I can use it for free as long as I wish. If I cannot I will give the phone back for sure as it would be a complete rip off…
• Now OVI has not only apps (that I won’t use as mentioned) but also  offers online file storage, Contact, Calendar, Mail and a Music store. File storage I won’t need as I will do that with my iPod Touch and a nice app, Contact I am using and sync worked well (unfortunately over the air so I will watch my bill because paying for Contact syncing is again BS and so far I have not found a way to sync with my MacBook), Calendar I won’t use but would have loved to, unfortunately it does not seem to support any other calendars right now, so entirely worthless since I for sure won’t start keeping a second calendar just for the phone, Mail I don’t need either since it only supports ovi.com mail extensions and I hate to have to joggle between different emails. The music store offers one year free music downloads, whow I thought, but then I realized only three mobile phones are supported and of course mine is not.

Summary:

While NOKIA is obviously trying to catch up with Apple at the current state they are hopelessly far behind them that makes it often not only frustrating but gets funny or if you are sentimental makes you feel sorry for them. The software remains a patchwork with way too many different applications that at the end don’t even do what people want to do. If you are a Mac user then you simply cannot work with a NOKIA phone properly. And even if you have a PC (which I do and used here) frustration is big. Now remember though that I only wanted a phone for making calls and a free GPS built in. Assuming the navigation is indeed for free then the phone is a high quality audio machine that works very well with a BT headset, stores a bunch of contacts even in the OVI application so does the job I wanted it to do. So while I am fine with this phone, NOKIA is in trouble and if they want to remain a significant player then they have to fully focus on end-to-end total user experience and usability.

Update: as it turns out the NOKIA 6700 has no free navigation included. Only free map downloads. NOKIA is not clearly stating this on their website and therefore one better checks exactly if your model has free spoken navigation as well or if you need to buy a 90 USD license to do that.

Wenn ein Unternehmer Jahre nach der Unternehmensgründung wieder ins operative Geschäft eingreift, ist etwas schief gelaufen. (free translation: when an entrepreneur after the successful founding and developing of a company again enters operational activities something must have gone wrong.)

They also mention that Shai Agassi - who is now trying to overcome the limitations of car battery technology with country-wide battery replacement stations - would have been a Silicon Valley like entrepreneur. Now SAP picked a double heading the company. A Danish and American with long-time experience working for SAP have been selected to run SAP- as it appears - by Hasso Plattner who will oversee it all again.

I must admit that I never warmed up to SAP. When I had to pick a ERP solution while with Bertelsmann (BMG) in Asia I felt that Oracle would be a better solution that is less dependent on experts and as such offers a better deal. Of course the company’s IT department already purchased many licenses forcing them to “convince” the rest of the company to use SAP so that they could apply the already purchased licenses. While this model has worked extremely well for SAP it seems to also be its limitations and the now replaced Theo Apotheker was a guy from having excelled with that business model.

Europe would need successful IT companies since the future will be much more driven by such companies than by car manufacturers. But apart from SAP there is only one other good-sized company that is known on an international scale: Software AG. These guys I know even less but they seem to do quite well around the buzzword “XML”.

Back to SAP: In my opinion they need to be much more aggressive in innovation and also need to reach out to new areas. This could well be by acquiring promising technologies from startups. So far SAP has not applied acquisitions much but I think they should do much  more. Also I think SAP needs to expand into areas where Oracle and Microsoft are active. There is no reason why they should not be able to offer their own relational database or offer enterprise software office solutions. In what of the currently hotly debated IT subjects is SAP present? social private communities, mobile enterprise solutions, real-time communications, mobile advertisement, virtual software, cloud computing, unified communications. Hardly anywhere. This needs to change if they want to have a future.

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Also read the Skype blog post.

YouNoodle Score is a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startup’s progress and traction based on its traffic, funding, employees, buzz and other activity. The score is based on information pulled in from thousands of online sources: traffic sources, mainstream media, funding sources, the blogosphere, conversations on Twitter, and other key factors.

Personally I have a problem with such attempts to rank startups based on - as it seems - online buzz simply because it says practically nothing about how viable, close to a good exit etc. the startup is.

Any algorithm is highly subjective and open for BIG manipulation. I don’t want to suggest that Techcrunch or YouNoodle supportive startups are higher ranked than the ones who could care less about them but at the least questions remain and that should not be.

Therefore I call to either publish the algorithm and make it transparent or do no scoring at all. Better would be to rank the startups by simple metrics alone like funding, revenue (already tricky since this can be manipulated as well by private companies), number of employees. Or, what I would consider the best for a social media blog like Techcrunch, let the crowd do the ranking.

There are many voices out there that say that only a few mobile OSs would survive and among them Apple, Google (Android), RIM, and Microsoft (Windows Mobile). Nokia’s OSs are not mentioned. One of the major reasons brought up is that Nokia is not a SW company but a hardware manufacturer only. I am not sure though if that is correct. In particular if Nokia continue to make the right moves like this free SW GPS, and acquires SW companies, then they have their current market leadership behind them. Also, unlike both Google and Apple, Nokia have a very strong relationship with the mobile operators as their distribution partner. To change a working infrastructure is a tough thing to do and typically requires really big differentiation and benefits. Of course Apple is able to deliver them but also seems to be the only vendor out there with that capability. That would reduce the battle for Nokia to one company “only” which is Apple. And to do that they need to do more than provide SW. Nokia have known that for a while and that’s the reason why they launched their Ovi platform, offering free music downloads and now free GPS capability. Of course free is not a good business model for a CE vendor and that’s why they have to really integrate this all well so that they offer an alternative to the Apple platform (touch phones, iTunes store, music player, apps, ebook reader). Looking at their website that’s exactly what they are working on but you can also see their main deficiency: while maps are free, network download charges for synchronization are of course not, and depend on your operator and your mobile plan. Apple would have provided deals with the major operators offering a complete end-to-end user experience (and if it is only that you can conveniently buy/activate it through iTunes). So still some way to go for Nokia, but first steps look promising at least.

One additional question now is what will happen with GPS vendors when what they offer is essentially a freebee on mobile phones. Worth a new blog post I think…

While GoToMeeting still has no smartphone app, which I consider as pretty weak, Webex has that too. MightyMeeting’s approach is to upload your presentations (the limit is 20 MBytes per presentation) and then run it from there. So it is the SaaS version of these two other web presentation tools.

What are the advantages of doing that? The biggest advantage I see is in being able to run an online presentation simply from your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or other smartphone and not having to be at your laptop or PC. Of course you can run it from there, too. While it is also possible to run a presentation and advance the slides from your smartphone while your laptop is connected to an LCD beamer, I was not then able to select a full-screen view, which is not ideal of course as you always see the border of the program and the browser. The program is in beta so I hope they add full screen view as well in that operation. One can expect that they will add better usability and communication features such as VoIP (a basic chat function is already supported) over time too.

This tool is free right now. No idea how they plan to commercialize it. One approach could be to come out with an enterprise version that they charge for the same way the others do. MightyMeeting btw won the last event of Founders Showcase run by TheFunded in Silicon Valley where every 3 months about 200 entrepreneurs and VCs come together to listen to pitches from very early stage companies and then vote for the best one that evening.

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.

• 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.