While away for a week on family vacation I seemed to have missed quite a lot of shake-ups within the wireless industry. First of all Ericsson's wiping out 25% of its market capitalization within just one day with an unexpected profit warning. But that remained pretty much the only negative news. On the positive or encouraging side the news were:

• Europe will see mobile phones on planes while other territories are more skeptical in opening the skies to GSM and GPRS. So once above 3000 m it will be possible to check for e-mails with your mobile phone unless you are flying across a country - such as the US - where they don't allow this service.
• That mobile phones can, despite cut-throat price competition, be a highly profitable business was demonstrated once more by Nokia. No other phone manufacturer is able to increase net profits when the average phone price is going down. That will make them a strong number one in the industry for quite some time to come and enable them to fight off strong newcomers like Apple.
• With its founders pretty much out now, Skype seems to be looking for ways to generate more revenues and to have found mobile phones. End of October they are supposed to be launching the service with 3 Mobile (owned by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa) in Britain, Italy, Hong Kong and Australia and other markets later. No plans for the US though. Now pessimistic people might think that 3 Mobile is probably desperate, since its 3G efforts so far have been largely unprofitable and cost them billions. The Skype phone is supposed to work with iSkoot software, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, which is backed by Khosla Ventures among others. Bold strategy it seems, but who knows, maybe the right move for both Skype and 3 Mobile.
• And finally a big not only political win for WiMAX was achieved in the ITU in Geneva where WiMAX got the same status as other 3G wireless technologies which practically means access to precious frequency spectrum. Maybe Ericsson's demonstrated WiMAX absence was not the right strategy after all? Also Cisco is rumored to move into the WiMAX space with an acquisition. Possible candidates named are Alvarion and Redline Communications. The latter seems a more likely candidate since they already work with Cisco for quite some time.
  

Techcrunch has a good article today on the threat represented by Adobe's new upcoming Flash 9 H.264 (a beta is here) video streaming capability. It is indeed true that, with the H.264 video codec, centralized web video streaming becomes much more economical, since the quality will about double with the current download bandwidth. Or downloads of the same quality video will be much faster.

Joost's advantage of having higher quality video will disappear. The economics of P2P will not work to their advantage any longer (was anyway only one advantage for Joost) and interactivity and customization are equally good on any video portal. In short, the over-ambitious plans of Joost to become a video and web TV portal and make money with customized ads will be history before it has even started to create any sizable revenues. We were always very skeptical on Joost, now it looks like the Skype founders may be about to have their first flop after having landed two slam-dunks with Kazaa and Skype. As a VP Marketing once said to me when I decided to leave a startup in Silicon Valley for another one, "See you in the next venture."

Today cellular news published a list of the 16 fastest growing mobile operators in Asia. Nor surprisingly, China Mobile is the clear number one, adding nearly 60million new subscribers in the first 6 months of 2007, more than the next three combined. In China there is then only China Unicom, albeit much smaller than China Mobile. The other major growth market is India, and there you can see not just two players but six in that ranking. Then there is Pakistan, whose presence in the list surprised me, unlike Indonesia whose fourth place is natural, given a population of 230million.

Cisco announced a strategic win today. EADS, which is Europe's number one defence and security concern and also runs Airbus, is now officially working with Cisco in data network projects. The EADS Defence & Communications group is the IT system integrator that has won not only European military projects but also public service communication projects such as the new upcoming digital wireless network in Germany. Quite a deal for Cisco. What surprises me though is the fact that the Europeans don't seem to have any concern that a US company is building their military and public safety data networks. I doubt the same would be possible in North America, but maybe it is possible, and if the US military hires e.g. Ericsson or Nokia Siemens next, then we can have true transatlantic data exchange.

We won the business of a 50+ employee startup recently. When I met them last time they told me a story about a London based PR agency that they had hired which was mind-boggling.

Our client, a young and highly successful company in their business, went to the IBC event in Amsterdam just recently. Being on the exhibitor list, they got approached by this PR agency from London who claimed to also serve the ICT markets and have detailed technical and market know-how. They suggested doing a PR campaign in search engines and to the media, and maybe other sources.

Our (now) client hired them, and the PR firm indeed managed to achieve a huge spike in their website hit rate, and also when someone searches for certain keywords they will pop up in the search results in the top ten. Now you would think the PR guys had done a good job, right? Yes and no.

Certainly they managed to get the website traffic and visibility that they were supposed to get, but, as we could see right away, this if anything was likely to harm rather than help our client. Their website is not yet at a level (neither in look and feel and even less so content-wise) where they need to be in order to create the right first impression. On the contrary, there is a lot of work still to be done before they would be ready for any PR campaign.

Back to this London PR company. The guys there did what they were supposed to do, but - as I am sure you will agree - still entirely failed to do a good job overall, actually hurting rather than helping their client. The question that I have now for them is: a) Did they see that this company was not ready for such a campaign yet, but simply wanted to make a quick buck; or b) Did they fail to see that this company was not ready. In the first case they are crooks, in my opinion; in case two, they are incompetent to work in this industry since they don't even understand the basics.

SAP seems to have changed its growth strategy. In contrast to what we mentioned only three weeks ago, they are now acquiring the French-American business intelligence software provider Business Objects SA for 4.3bln EUR, which is a 20% share price premium. This acquisition seems to be the result of the heated battle with Oracle for the enterprise software market.
Whatever you hear from both companies in press releases or public statements is likely to be quite irrelevant from now on, since PR has become part of their psychological warfare toolkit. Analysts BTW don't seem to think that this acquisition will help SAP in the future against Oracle. It is merely a catch up since, with Hyperion, Oracle has already acquired a Business Objects competitor. Time to market and speed in general are crucial in the business software markets - not necessarily a strength of Germans, but at least they seem already to be pretty good at changing their strategy when it is required.