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

Innovation, Kreativitaet und Ideenfindung (Helmut Schlicksupp)

This book is a must-read for everyone interested in obtaining an overview and practical guide to idea creation methodologies. The language is very precise and makes this book easy to read. The author shows with this book a lot of competency. Helmut Schlicksupp ceased away beginning of 2010, way too young. He seems to me one of the major contributors to this subject and being recognized also internationally as I could read about him in books published in the US e.g.

Innovationsmanagement, Die 6 Phasen von der Idee zur Umsetzung

This book is in German too. It is a good, brief summary of many other books that I have read but does a good job with it. It shows a six phase innovation management process in a simple and straight forward way. Its focus is on phase 3 “Grobkonzept” which has 60 pages alone of the 150 page total. Idea creation (phase 2) and market entry (phase 6) are quite short which is a bit surprising since these are the most challenging phases in my practical experience as a product and business development manager. You can also see that the book was written by innovation management consultants who give many tips on how to run innovation management workshops using these methodologies in companies.

The innovator’s toolkit - 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

Very nicely illustrated book that contains all the major techniques one would need in practical assignments and many more. The book is a US style textbook and as such a pleasure to read. Something I never understood why students in the US can enjoy so much better quality literature compared to their e.g. German student colleagues at German universities. I was once told that the reason for that is that in the US assistant professors have to also make money with book writing and selling since they are not as well paid as in Europe. That then means that they need to think about how to best present, explain and illustrate to attract many student buyers. I wish we would have had that system when I was a student long time ago…

[Photo by Clark Little]

Last night Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President Operations & Google Fellow, wrote in the official Google blog that they will stop the Google Wave project and the attempt to try to create a product out of it.

Some have foreseen this happening already in October 2009 such as Robert Scoble in his highly visible blog post “Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype“. He criticized the total overload of information that Google Wave creates making it unusuable as a practical work tool. Of course Google hoped that the developer community would fix this and come up with creative ways but that has not happened either.

Product development can be supported but not totally handled by the public community. What Google should have known and for sure learned from the Wave project now is that you need to set a clear direction still and have a strong product to start out, with a clear value.

What amazes me about this end is the fact that many got caught by total surprise with this announcement. I could still hear just a few weeks ago during a client meeting that also Google Wave would possibly be a candidate for a community platform solution and some folks predicted even the end of email and collaboration tools when Wave is in full swing. Nope, not so fast.

Failed innovations often make you learn much more than successful ones. That remains here now as a positive and of course some valuable public source code also that can be used in other projects to come.

Google keeps innovating and also stopping failed innovations such as this one or the NexusOne mobile phone business model. This approach is much better than sitting and waiting for others to make a first move and then copying it. Only with such a pro-active approach can one land the next big IT wave project and failures are a common part of active innovations not to be feared at all - in contrary.

Just came across this interesting - but not totally surprising  - survey result from a study undertaken by Kienbaum: of 524 valuable ideas that were created in the companies surveyed, 95 (18%) were so called breakthrough ideas. Of these 95 breakthrough ideas, only 5% originated within the companies. 10% were found in spare time while together with others and 85% (!) in spare time while alone.

The question that naturally arises is: how do companies encourage or enable employees to submit ideas like this when the vast majority come up in spare time? Or one could also ask if you can improve the ratio of breakthrough ideas found at work by offering better facilities or special incentives? What comes to mind here of course right away is Google who not only provide their employees with nice working environments but also grant them one day per week to work on their own ideas.

Another - also cheaper - way to solve this challenge would be to offer access to idea creation tools from remote and via mobiles as well.

While brainstorming sessions have not been scientifically proven to be superior its electronic form seems to offer improvements that make a difference. Incentives are an important part of it and so are other motivational elements. The ideal seems a combination of group work while still being able to work on ideas quietly on your own. Online forums with built-in incentives and motivational features are therefore worth exploring by companies. The use within businesses seems endless. E.g. in sales and marketing, strategy, product management, product development to name the obvious ones.

The traditional well-known brainstorming rules still need to be followed of course, these are:

• No critique is allowed during the brainstorming exercise. This needs to be deferred to a later phase.
• Ideas of others need to be further worked on by everybody and tried to improve. It is key to work on the positive aspects only. That way good ideas can be further improved by the group.
• Free wheeling is desired, anything goes. Cross-functional input and input from non-experts is desired here as they might see things from a totally different and possibly interesting new way than the so called experts.
• Try to find as many ideas as possible, so focus is on quantity first and only in another phase then also work on the quality. This part requires some training and getting used to in particular process oriented employees might have a problem here.

Many companies realize now that creative people are in fact the future of their operations. To do business processes highly optimized is something that reaches at some point its end and of course can be copied also relatively easily. In fact large Chinese companies have already many years ago used western companies like IBM to optimize their business processes. So what does that mean for global competitiveness? Only the innovative and marketing-savvy companies will have a chance. Both requires creative people, and with that not people with arts skills are meant but people who can come up with new and better ideas and constantly question the status quo.

I came across this list below that shows empirically proven attributes of creative people. But one warning upfront: While this list can serve as a first measure, human beings are too complex and different and also a creative person does not have to have all these attributes of course. What creativeness means for each business is different too and cannot be judged generically. Lastly, don’t try to immitate these attributes to look creative, that of course does not work either. Creativity can be learned and trained though and like everything else the easiest during childhood.

• open and critical attitude towards the business environment
• independence from conventional and traditional views
• preference for new things
• ability to see things under different aspects
• ability to cope with conflicts from what is being observed  vs. what is currently being done
• preference for complex situations and varied stimuli
• ability to work persistently on a solution
• concentration on the solution of a task and not on obtaining recognition and fame
• energetic, initiative, success-oriented
• courageous, independent
• socially introverted, focused on its own
• emotionally stable
• dominant, could also be aggressive
• high sense for responsibility
• asthetic
• less developed social and religious values
• sensitive and differentiated reaction to the business environment
• humorous

[from Gisela Ulmann]

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

I think that this is an entirely correct statement and also in my experience the most common reason why initiatives such as in marketing, sales or product design, product development fail is that the wrong questions have been asked to formulate the challenge or problem and then all efforts are targeted at solving the wrong problem.

Tim Hurson writes that the ultimate question - a truly Catalytic Question - must be figured out first and unless you don’t do that it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your work is.

Idea management software solutions such as the one we represent - Kindling - are excellent tools to not only find ideas but also find the right questions to start with before all efforts are made to try to solve the wrong or not core issue.

This last week I received an email response from a large Swiss company’s head of administration and secretary of the CEO saying:

Innovationsideen werden bei xyz in klar definierten Prozessen aufgenommen, beurteilt und je nach Einschätzung in Projekten weiter verfolgt. Die Projekte werden in IT-Systemen dokumentiert und kontrolliert. (Innovation ideas at xyz company will be entered into clearly defined processes, evaluated and depending on the overall judgement followed up in projects. The projects will be documented and controlled with IT.)

This sounds reasonable at first sight but is actually a very common attitude to believe that a well oiled process and quality control system would be enough to generate ideas and innovations in an enterprise. But as e.g. Nicolas Negroponte said: ” Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

The reason is that all these process methodologies are on one hand the most useful form of reproductive thinking in that it focuses on continually monitoring and refining processes, products and procedures but also the most dangerous in that it provides the illusion of innovation under the guise of incremental change. All these methodologies may be good for producing zero defects, but they will never produce breakthrough change. For that it requires productive thinking.

• Are established rules, assumptions, and structures questioned?
• Does the person become frustrated or annoyed with details?
• Does the person create lots of ideas without asking too much about how these can be implemented?

If all three questions are answered with a “yes” then the person is - obviously - more an innovator than adaptor.

To more quantify the degree of innovative vs. adaptive personality you can use the Kirton-Innovation (KAI) Inventory instrument. There are 33 statements that one has to respond to which will lead to a score between 32 (most adaptive) and 160 (most innovative) on a normally distributed numerical scale. More details on the subject you can also find on their website and in this video.

In innovation projects a good common sense approach is to let the innovative people lead the opportunity-identification and ideation phases while those who are more adaptive ones can lead the design and implementation phases. That way you also keep them separated since these two personality extremes are also hard to integrate and have work together unless there is a so called “bridger” who manages the ideation exercise. That person should lie in between adaptors and innovators and as such can help to overcome communication and other barriers to progress.

I just read an article in the German newspaper FAZ saying that Silicon Valley is back. The article talks about Apple mainly, also mentioning a few well-known others such as Oracle, Intel, EA and - at least one that is not that well-known to the public - NetApps. This article is one more proof of how little people in Europe understand the high-tech center around San Jose, now spreading further north into San Francisco as well.

Why is it so difficult for Europeans to understand the Valley?

From my own experience having lived and worked there for a few years there are many reasons why authors like the above one have a hard time understanding it.

• Opportunities come and go — and many more go. One has to accept that and be willing to move on. No harm to try things out many times. It is simply not possible to foresee where the route will lead when you start. This is difficult for many Europeans to accept as they tend to be more long-term in thinking and planning, and accepting a lot of uncertainty as normal is hard for them.
• Total focus. When you work for a startup that needs to create value and reach milestones quickly there is no time to do anything else really. I had to work on weekends to reach a set beta milestone and we even introduced shift work in R&D. We also needed to use the -then limited - office space effectively. Now imagine what would happen if you did that in Europe? You might easily be sued for exploiting your knowledge workers. In Silicon Valley each employee in a startup has stock options, so is part-owner in the company, and reaching an exit (trade sale or IPO) will mean lots of money for everybody. So no-one would be bothered about working even harder when necessary.
• Stock options. This is partly a funny one. I have seen many European startups where only the management has stock options and the other employees, regardless of how important they might be for the company, did not receive any, but also did not get bothered about it at all. Unthinkable in the Valley. A startup would not be able to hire any good people without stock options, in fact probably no-one even slightly qualified would join them. Now how’s that for a difference?
• Infrastructure. This is one of the historically strong points of the Valley. You have the ideal setup for a startup industry: venture capital/angel investors, startup experienced lawyers, top universities (Stanford, Berkeley plus other very practical industry-focused educational facilities), real estate owners providing lots of office space, local airports (San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco), networking events and associations, established high-tech firms (Oracle, Intel,  HP, Apple, Cisco, EMC, EA, eBay, Google, Applied Materials, LSI Logic, Symantec), government facilities (NASA Ames, Moffett Field)
• Talent. Due to its worldwide reputation, Silicon Valley attracts some of the smartest and most qualified engineers and marketing experts. One has to also mention here the huge amount of Indians and Chinese who build the engineering human resources backbone. Smart immigration politics have enabled Silicon Valley to build links to China and India like no other area. Europe cannot compete here at all.
• Attitude. These immigrants show a totally different risk-taking mentality, being used to working hard and to constantly trying new things. Something that I also experienced and highly appreciated was the great weather (practically always sunshine and blue sky all year around), which has a very positive mental effect on you: I think people are simply more positive thinking and willing to take more risk due to that mental state. I bet this could be proven as well if someone would investigate it.

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)

>> 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.

What this Top 50 list though is simply doing is taking the biggest companies by revenues and/or market cap and then seem to look who is mentioned the most in the public (Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.) and  - voila - here’s the list.

As I said above mostly PR and not worth to pay too much attention to. The media should IMHO not even look at such lists unless they do a bit more research on how these lists were created as they otherwise are misused as PR vehicles by consulting firms.

To sum it up: if you are not mentioned on this list but really would like to be, then you have to increase your PR and marketing budget and most likely don’t have to do anything more in product/service innovation at all. Or you hire that consulting firm. But that was not my idea.

The EU is right now collecting lots of money for Greece to reestablish some confidence in the markets and with that avoid having to pay even more. There are also fears that the other PIGS countries Spain, Portugal and Ireland may call for help.

Now Ireland being a nation that has been through lots of economic hardship in its history but also enjoyed an EU-wide unmatched boom not too long ago, is currently hit hard as well. Being a proud nation that likes to take its fate into its own hands, its President Mary Mac Aleese is calling its citizen to submit ideas in eight categories on how the country can direct its policies. The event is called quite appropriately “Your country your call”.

I think what we see here is only the beginning of something that many other countries should and will do as well at some point. Calling for the combined knowledge of a whole country will certainly lead to new and better ideas. I consider it as a true democratic way and this even seems an improvement over what we have enjoyed in Switzerland for quite a long time already: letting people decide about their matters and not some professional politicians only with lots of self-interest, who are also quite limited in their judgements and overall understanding of most of the subjects that they have to decide about. Online Social Communities seem ideal for governments enabling them to run such calls effectively. Something Switzerland, which is otherwise probably the most advanced country in applying democracy, should also make use of. Not to mention practically all other so-called democratic countries. The eight categories plus “Other” where Ireland is asking its people for ideas are:

• COMMUNICATIONS & TECHNOLOGY
• DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
• EDUCATION & THE ARTS
• ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
• FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
• HEALTH, SPORT, & NUTRITION
• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
• TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY
• OTHER

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/2010/04/08/first-solar-powered-plane-takes-off/ http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/2010/04/08/first-solar-powered-plane-takes-off/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:36:20 +0000 Ralf Haller http://bizdev.blog.extendance.com/?p=5987 Only a week after CERN in Geneva could successfully create electron collisions that could lead to new understanding of how the cosmos started, another French Swiss (in the French speaking area of Switzerland) world first was achieved. The first solar-powered plane took off with a test pilot setting an important milestone for this ambitious project called SolarImpulse trying to fly around the world with a purely solar-powered plane.

I asked myself why it is that the Romands (as the French speaking Swiss are called) seem to be so much into world’s first recently.  Is it coincidence or has it to do with a certain attitude and entrepreneurial spirit that they have in their genes? I was also quite amazed to see how openly both events were celebrated which was so much different than the cool banker style that one otherwise gets to see on TV (and in movies like James Bond)…

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

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.

While Switzerland is used to come out on top of this EU market report one should not forget that in high-tech product and service exports Switzerland is only average. I don’t want to spoil the soup now since otherwise it looks - statistically speaking - relatively good. Still one other remark is needed: what would really count is to compare yourself with the US and Japan. And also here Switzerland has a hard time playing in the top league and unfortunately the high-tech product and service category compared with the worldwide leaders will become in my opinion the most important aspect in the near future. Something has to be done one would think.

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.

The success of any company largely depends on how much better they can bring new or improved things to the market. This is not a sole function of product management and R&D in product and service innovation though but actually of everybody in a company since there are so many touch points with employees, clients, partners, products, services etc. that can be improved and lead to competitive advantages.

In fact I am convinced that the future in about just any industry in light of the strong competition from Asia and here of course in particular China is how well one can motivate and leverage each employees know-how and skill towards a joint goal: innovating better and faster. Innovation has to be seen in a broader sense here encompassing all company functions but of course products and service innovation are key since they pay the bills.

But as it turns out in day-to-day business these improvements, ideas or innovations are difficult to collect and often even difficult to create in many in particular big companies. So how could one revive or jump start an internal process that leads to a culture where people love to come up with new ideas? Before being able to answer such a question I collected some of the reasons why it is difficult for so many companies to innovate, here are some:

• there is simply no time set aside for employees to collect ideas or even communicate them
• there are no or only hardly achievable incentives defined in case someone has a nice idea
• how decisions and new products/services are created is a non-transparent process and only clear to a few
• hierarchical barriers make it difficult for lower ranked employees or departments with less visibility to communicate ideas up, one might simply not listen to them
• innovation is in the hands of a few so called experts and not a grassroots motivated approach
• being wrong with an idea does not mean that was bad, in contrary it needs to be made clear that it is much better to be wrong many times trying than not proposing anything at all, unfortunately too many companies are still not encouraging to try out something new
• there are no software tools available on companies and made part of every employee’s work tool that foster an innovation culture

This is a very small list. A bigger (50) and more comprehensive, also with a positive angle, list you can find here: 50 WAYS TO FOSTER A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

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.