January 2009 Archives

Congratulations to RIM... A very special company responsible for helping transform the way the world works. I give the company tremendous credit for improving global productivity on a scale never seen before.

RIM's creation of the email on the go market shows how technology can change the world for the better. Concepts like the fax machine, voicemail, IVR, ACDs, IP PBXs, etc have made the world a more productive place and in the process increased the standard of living of the entire world.

The Canadian company recently sent me some milestones they have reached. What is not on the list is they helped start a mobile device race which is now responsible for billions of dollars of mobile data use. RIM along with a slew of other companies have changed the way we look at mobile devices.

There is a downside to all this technology of course. Many of us have lost our down time and our personal lives are now full of technology and some of email in bed, the bathroom (not me) and just about everywhere else.

But such are the downsides of technological innovation... Dogs come with fleas but in the end we should thank companies like RIM for allowing us to all have a better standard of living and making us more productive.

• In January, RIM shipped its 50 millionth BlackBerry smartphone.

 

• Verizon Wireless announced earlier this week that it has already sold 1 million BlackBerry Storm smartphones.

 

• It was 10 years ago this month that RIM first launched the BlackBerry solution.  Today, BlackBerry is available in over 150 countries from over 425 carriers and national distribution partners. 

 

• RIM continues to grow.  RIM hired approx. 4,000 employees globally last year and surpassed the 12,000 employee mark in January. 

 

• RIM's BlackBerry Infrastructure routes over three Petabytes (that's 3,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of traffic each month.

I have discussed the need to keep your image as strong as possible in the face of a down market. Invariably the companies who do not waver from PR and marketing as the economy softens do better than those who reduce or cease these activities.

The ones who increase marketing in a slowdown do even better because most CEOs and CFOs do not understand how important brand perception is and moreover how it can be measured and correlated directly to increased and decreased sales.

You have heard my thoughts on the matter... Another excellent article on the topic by Peter A. Prestipino can be found here.

Red Herring was a high-flying dotcom era pub which many execs in telecom used to read in the late nineties. I used to hear about it all the time from those people starting companies during the booming VoIP years.

It stopped publishing after the bubble burst -- not the housing/financial bubble but the dotcom/telecom bubble. Then it started up again and is now reportedly gone again.

Sad news but far from surprising.

If you are in Miami tomorrow, feel free to stop by our Super Bowl party and visit. We have a suite reserved.

The food and drink will start around 6:00 P.M. on Sunday February 1st, 2009 in room 1510 at the Royal Palm Hotel.

The news flow regarding WiMAX these past months has been like a Rocky movie with Rocky getting pummeled and not fighting back until the last round. Rocky never even bothered to put up his hands to block in the first four movies. I never understood how Mickey could teach the guy to catch a chicken but forgot to tell him to raise his hands to protect his face. But digressions aside (and just don't get me started about Rocky movies - I can recite many of them by heart - well except for the last one... What are we on Rocky XXIV now?)

Sometimes I feel like the ringside announcer in the fight between WiMAX and LTE. It seems every time there is negative WiMAX news it is a round which goes to LTE.

First there were the body blows which consisted of my article detailing how LTE is coming on strong. Then there was the comment from the Clearwire CEO mentioning his company can transition to LTE from WiMAX if needed.

Then Intel wrote down its Clearwire investment and Nokia stopped making WiMAX devices and Nortel dropped its WiMAX line.

After a string of lost rounds, WiMAX is bloody, has an eye the size of a grapefruit and is a few jabs away from being down for the count.

But don't count WiMAX out just yet (cue the electric-guitar driven music backed by the sound of trumpets) it is fighting back hard.

First there was the rebuttal on the Nortel relationship from Alvarion. Then there are the positive comments from Carl Ford who says "While many want me to point to LTE as the clear winner, I don't think this would be a sign of WiMAX's apocalypse." Ouch... That hurt. What's a matter LTE, you don't know how to block either?

But wait, there was a tag... What is this boxing or the WWE? And with that tag, Carl Ford leaves the ring and bruiser Scenna Tabesh, director of marketing communications for the WiMAX Forum, (From her picture she looks like a lovely woman and I hope she doesn't mind playing along) steps into the ring and says, "Conversely, LTE currently has zero deployments. While marketed as an "evolution," LTE networks are a completely new upgrade." Smack! What's a matter LTE, did Mickey train you too?

But with LTE stunned, Tabesh takes the opportunity to land an uppercut which LTE was just not expecting. She says, "While WiMAX is already in deployment, new spectrum or the re-farming of wide swaths of 2G spectrum will be necessary to free up spectrum to deploy LTE and take advantage of the wider channel bandwidths that are supported. LTE will also take time to roll out, with deployments forecast to reach limited adoption by 2012. LTE networks will require new client devices and service providers will need to purchase new radio access network (RAN) equipment in addition to upgrading their core networks to handle additional IP-based traffic."

Are you kidding me? What a fight! And to think I almost skipped this to watch the Super Bowl.

And it's just getting started. If you are a service provider, you need to be up on the play by play. Ignoring it could cost your job or future competitiveness. The 4G space is changing faster than any other technology I have ever seen. Momentum is shifting in Titanic-sized amounts to each camp and the battle will only get more interesting as time goes on.

But how will it end? Will it be a draw? Will WiMAX lose? The only thing we know for sure is after five Rocky movies; I still have no idea what he said in any of them.

The latest and most important round in this fight will be held next week at the 4GWE conference in Miami - conveniently collocated with ITEXPO. We are going to need a really tough referee for this one. Hope to see you there.

I just had a great conversation about ITEXPO with Bill Frogameni at the South Florida Business Journal. To me it is always amazing to see how various reporters find different parts of the same news important.

For example, in the article there is a big focus on the thousands of hotel rooms ITEXPO attendees, speakers and memebers of the media occupy. There is also some discussion of the technology and productivity benefits of VoIP and IP communications.

I hope you enjoy the article.

Was I too quick to dismiss the WiMAX market yesterday because Nortel decided to discontinue a JV with Alvarion? Perhaps. Alvarion came out swinging today explaining that the company is still financially sound, beating competitors of all sizes, has a sizable amount of cash on its balance sheet and a positive outlook for the future.

While WiMAX may not currently be a big enough market for multibillion dollar Nortel to make money from today, for a smaller player like Alvarion it can still be a huge growth engine. Moreover, since some companies are pulling out of the market, Alvarion could emerge stronger when all is said and done.

And when the market picks up again, perhaps we will look back at this time as a pivotal moment when Alvarion became a major WiMAX player.

I just can't help thinking about 2001-2003 when companies like Yahoo! and many others left the search engine space because they decided it wasn't important. Then a few years later they realized - whoops, search is where the opportunity is. By then it was too late and Google had such a lead you just couldn't catch them.

Do I think this will happen with WiMAX? Not with the information I have at hand today. But I do think there are niche markets where WiMAX can/will excel and I can safely say the desire for broadband wireless access should never let up and society will eventually get to a point where we expect every device to be connected via broadband so you can change the heater settings in your kitchen from work or see how many cartons of eggs are in the fridge when you are at the supermarket.

For more, see Greg Galitzine's thoughts on the matter and be sure to come to 4GWE (4G Wireless Evolution) next week in Miami to discuss with industry movers and shakers in person.

Eight years ago I was the chairman of a conference titled Planet PDA where I got to see the early innovation in the market which later became widely deployed in a slew of consumer electronics devices. Back then, Palm and Treo were separate companies and Microsoft was coming on strong with what became Windows Mobile.

My gadget of choice at the time was a Palm 7, a wonder of a PDA which allowed data access via an integrated wireless chipset. A number of websites designed Palm 7 versions and the device was very useful and far ahead of its time.

Later the iPaq was launched by Compaq and a slew of other devices were made from companies like Toshiba and NEC.

A confluence of events took place to severely injure the PDA market. The first was the emergence of smartphones which did what the PDA did but even more. A PDA suddenly became a device which wasn't as necessary. When HP acquired COMPAQ it seemed the emphasis shifted away from PDAs as well.

The straw which really broke the camel's back however was when Dell partnered with HTC the company behind the iPaq and came out with the Axim, a PDA priced far less than the competition.

At this point, my contacts at the hardware companies saw the writing on the wall. You see, prior to this time, the fat margins on these devices allowed the companies to have partner programs where they worked with software developers to come out with new and innovative applications which in turn would drive the high-margin devices.

When this abruptly ended, so did the push to get new application developers for handheld devices.

I was reminded of this story for a few days as I have heard the rumors of Dell coming into the smartphone space. I believe Dell is doing the right thing but the company is not as influential as it once was and doesn't have the market power it used to. In addition, it is obvious that Apple, HTC and RIM are the companies to watch in the smartphone space.

If you are a smartphone manufacturer, pay close attention to what Dell does, as history does have a habit of repeating itself.

Those Star Trek fans out there remember the Borg to be a species of humanoids who merged the best of the computational and organic worlds together allowing the perfect synergy between life, computing, artificial intelligence and networking.

If you are wondering how the real world compares to that of science fiction it may help to look at a simple experiment funded by DARPA which shows a microprocessor strapped to the back of a giant beetle can allow scientists to more or less control a beetle's flight the way any mini helicopter is controlled by your kids.

The beetle responds to simple messages to take off, land, turn left and right. Electrodes planted in wing muscles and optic lobes convert the electrical signals from the microprocessor implanted on the beetle's back to "commands" which the beetle follows.

Experiments such as this and others which have been done with mammals such as monkeys pave the way for the future of communications where some of us will likely connect our brains directly to computer systems. Early adopters will likely be the military.

And in my opinion there is certainly a need to connect brains directly to electronic systems so people can work even more efficiently. The downside of course is to make the connection happen today requires brain surgery which isn't something many of us would volunteer for.

But when you think about it, we live in a world where we shoot our bodies with lasers to correct our vision and remove our hair. Technology is augmenting and improving us. At some point in the future it seems inevitable that our brains will interconnect with computers and eventually it likely won't even require an operation to make it happen.

Amazon continues to perform and the company has shown it is dominant in the world of ecommerce. For the year, net sales grew 28 percent over 2007, to $19.17 billion. This includes a 9% increase  last quarter -- a quarter many thought would be poor because the company mentioned casually that it had a one-day sales surge which many interpreted to mean the rest of the quarter was in the toilet.

It seems the promise of ecommerce which many hoped would be distributed over thousands if not hundreds of thousands of companies is being realized in a massive way by Amazon.

Remember the ups and downs of the bubble and post-bubble dotcom days. Actually the internet bubble burst is something people probably long for when compared to the current banking debacle we live through on a daily basis. Remember those more innocent days? The sock puppet and Pets.com? Amazon did an incredible job of not only surviving this age but thriving. Most people thought it was dead in the water back then.

During those incredible dotcom days when we invented terms like "internet time," who would have expected eBay and Yahoo! to be laggards in 10 years. Who would have thought Lycos and AltaVista would be gone? All this while Amazon and Google become web darlings, growing in the face of a global spending slowdown. Truly staggering.

It makes one wonder what other companies are seeing investors flee today because they don't have the vision to see ten years into the future.

Nortel just announced it is discontinuing its WiMAX offering which was supplied by Israeli company Alvarion. The company says these moves will allow it to focus more effectively while better positioning itself in other areas where it is stronger.

This news comes as a further blow to WiMAX and follows up on earlier analysis today about the difficulty WiMAX is having in a slow global economy. The question worth asking is when will WiMAX make money for vendors/carriers if so many companies are pulling away from the standard?

After all, will new wireless carriers migrate to WiMAX while equipment providers are visibly pulling out? All the signs point to LTE becoming a strong standard with WiMAX becoming a niche play.

Moreover, in today's device-happy world with touch-screen devices allowing consumers and business people to surf on the go, who wants a fast network which doesn't have broad device support?

I don't think it over for WiMAX yet though... If RIM or Apple adds WiMAX support to a popular device, we could see the market momentum shift. But service providers can't turn on a dime when they are deploying equipment. There is a tremendous expense they need to absorb in switching between WiMAX and LTE.

Certainly this news just makes it more difficult for wireless providers to determine which standard to use and at next week's 4GWE show in Miami, I look forward to discussing these issues with you in detail.

I would obviously agree wholeheartedly with Alan Percy that face-to-face meetings are essential for business to get done. Yes, there are more tools than ever like blogs, twitter and social networking which allow people to keep in touch electronically and I have found these tools are great for keeping in touch when I am not meeting with my colleagues in a live environment.

They also help me in setting up efficient meetings at live events.

Moreover, I have found companies are much more receptive to becoming a customer after a face-to-face meeting.

So if your competition is not going to be at a show where your potential customers will be - take it as an opportunity to be there and outsell them.

I came across this overview of developer tools for the iPhone and it well written and informative. Some of these are very useful including FTP, shell access, telnet, file transfer, network troubleshooting and more.

Frankly, I don't program much or at all anymore so none of these are worth my time to try. I am sad that Backgrounder however only works with jailbroken phones. I really want my phone to multitask -- oh and cut and paste wouldn't be a bad addition either.

Ari Zoldan has an interesting perspective on the future of WiMAX and how it will hold up in a slowing economy.

Macro optimization test.