Extendance: High-Tech Business Experts Blog

Entries from June 2006

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Friday, June 30. 2006

Kista - The Wireless Silicon Valley in Sweden

While on a business trip this week in Sweden for one of our customers, I was also able to stop by in Kista (pronounced: Schista), which is labeled as the Wireless Silicon Valley. Not long ago Guy Kawasaki provoked the non Silicon Valley tech startup community with a post titled "How to kick Silicon Valley's Butt".

Now I only by chance heard - just before the trip to Sweden - that Kista is giving itself this name. Probably European VCs know it well (I assume) but I doubt many VCs in the US have ever heard of it.

I was told Kista started with two blue chip companies who had set up their manufacturing facilities here: IBM and Ericsson. The latter still has an R&D group in Kista where they continue to develop the company's biggest cash cow, a BTS. Kista's tallest building is - after the bubble burst - fully occupied again, thanks to some Chinese company. ZTE moved into this highriser. I would think that this place will continue to grow and maybe one day be able to make a name by itself - even in the US.

Posted by Ralf Haller at 05:50 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: Kista, Sweden, wireless Silicon Valley

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Thursday, June 29. 2006

Keeping artists happy on community websites

Panjea has created an interesting variant on the media sharing capabilities of MySpace and YouTube, trying to attract aspiring artists to post video and music - or any other downloadable content - by sharing revenue with them based on the amount of their material downloaded. It might not by itself draw the masses, but if it attracts artists then presumably the audience will follow on the basis of the quality and quantity of original material hosted. If they can keep the content interesting, I think the potentially positive image and experience offered by the transparent business model may help them keep hold of users longer term.

This might be a good time to appeal to budding artists given MySpace's recent problem with UK singer Billy Bragg, who withdrew lyrics from the site this month when he realised that MySpace reserved the right to change, distribute, and claim royalties on them. As a result of the widespread negative publicity that followed, MySpace has now changed the rules, saying that they'd had no intention of using the material in that way. But this was definitely a strike against them, given that trust is likely to be a key issue in retaining users.

A little aside on the issue of trust: many people are watching MySpace's to see if it's owner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, will be able to keep its hands off or risk alienating MySpace users. But MySpace could also create problems for NewsCorp's traditional media interests. Ken Auletto of the New Yorker, in an interview with Andy Plesser, suggests that negative publicity generated by adult-rated content on the site could also hurt NewsCorp's traditional businesses.

Posted by Adrian McDermott at 15:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Feedback & Results

Along with countless other blog sites we are getting bombarded with spam and hence have been forced to disable our comments. This is a pity because as a result we find it hard to tell whether our blog posts are interesting or not.

Fortunately one of our readers (maybe the only reader?) figured out that he could email a comment. So it is with great pleasure that I draw our other reader's attention to the comment placed in the extended entry of this Wifi related post.

We also got feedback and concrete action from the Inquirer who helpfully pointed out that (now) English articles are at http://uk.theinquirer.net/ and who have somewhat of an apology up as well. They may still have some work to do for us RSS junkies but it's a start

Posted by Francis Turner in ICT Tech/Market News at 13:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Winning business from community websites

A small illustration of the way social networks can generate business for other sites: PhotoBucket, number 1 photo hosting site of the week ending 17 June 06 (mentioned a few days ago) was way ahead of the propularly presumed leader, Flickr.

But they're really two different kinds of business - PhotoBucket hosts images - so many of its users host images there and link to them from other sites - and not a community website. But the community sites have been generating a lot of new business for them - they quote figures of 75,000 new users a day and 5 million new images and 30,000 videos uploaded daily, which must mean a very healthy advertising revenue stream.

Posted by Adrian McDermott at 06:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Wednesday, June 28. 2006

Au revoir to theInquirer

Someone in VNU seems to have decided that everyone in France can only read French and that none of us are capable of reading English. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the fact that (for me) http://www.theinquirer.net/ now redirects to http://fr.theinquirer.net/

I assume that something similar happens for people in Germany and so on.

This would be just about acceptable if links to individual stories still worked but they don't - not only do they not show the story but they don't show the equivalent story in French and just redirect to the French home page, and there seems to be no way to correct this. Amusingly, I can read the Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish and Belgian editions of the site by clicking on the appropriate flag (incidentally it looks like the Walloons, though, are forced to be part of France since the Belgian version only speaks Vlaams), but I cannot read the English version.

It looks like this is a classic sign of someone not thinking things
through, since it means that not only can I not read stories in the
Inquirer but also that I can no longer blog about or email a link to a
story either because the chances are that the peson I email it to will
be in a different country and find it hard or impossible to read the link. I am fairly sure that this is an accident, and it is one that I hope to correct by means of a rude email to VNU/the Inquirer, but if not I shall be forced to stop reading the journal.

Posted by Francis Turner in ICT Tech/Market News at 21:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Tuesday, June 27. 2006

Intel partially disARMs

Intel has announced, as predicted by various analysts and hinted at by Intel itself, that it is to divest itself of its Communications Processor division - the part that develops its Xscale processor range. The purchaser is Marvell who paid $600M for it, although precisely what they have purchased is somewhat unclear.

They have clearly purchased the chips that power handheld devices from RIM and Handspring (Treo) and seem to have inherited some 1400 employees, but there are details that need a closer look.

The register notes that this seems to be confirmation that Intel is going for an x86 only strategy for handheld devices:

In August 2005, Intel CEO Paul Otellini forecast for the 2010 timeframe the availability of a 0.5W CPU capable of running Windows Vista. As we noted at the time, that announcement effectively pulled the rug from under the feet of the XScale operation. The schedule Otellini mentioned provides plenty of time for interested parties to stick with ARM chips for a few years then migrate over to x86. Intel will no doubt be dangling the carrots of its chips' energy efficiency, processing power and multimedia friendliness to encourage them to do so.

However while this makes some sort of sense it is clear that Intel is hedging its bets to some extent, since the press release states:

This planned sale does not impact the ability of other Intel businesses in the networking and storage market segments to continue to use ARM*-based, Intel XScale processors. Those Intel businesses will be able to continue licensing chip designs directly from ARM Holdings PLC and modifying the designs for their needs.

This is fascinating once you look at the background: Intel inherited from its pruchase of the StrongARM business of DEC an ARM architecture license and this is what Intel has used in the development its newer Xscale processors. If Intel is moving to an x86 only world why is it still retaining the rights to ARM processors? Perhaps more interestingly, who now owns the ARM architecture license? is it Intel or Marvell? If it is Intel then surely Marvell is going to have to pay ARM a significant chunk of money because I don't think it is currently an architecture licensee.

The related oddity is that Marvell is better known for its networking chips, so it would have made more sense for Marvell to have bought Intel's Network Processor chip business, but the implication is that Intel still retains a network chip business so what exactly did Marvell buy?

Posted by Francis Turner at 21:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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