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Steve Wozniak to Keynote ITEXPO Las Vegas

2013-02-22T20:16:51Z

We are extremely proud to announce Steve Wozniak is a keynoter at ITEXPO in Las Vegas, Thursday, August 29 at 10am. After the amazing keynote of John Sculley, past Apple CEO weeks back at this event* in Miami (video below), we thought the only way to even come close to finding someone of a similar caliber was to present the cofounder of Apple to our beloved ITEXPO community!

After all, how often do you get to hear from the person who helped revolutionize the personal computer industry by inventing the Apple I and Apple II computers?

The Woz has intricate knowledge of both communications and computing and as today’s mobility solutions have brought these markets together, his presence as a featured speaker means attendees at the show will hear from one of the most-focused visionaries available anywhere. Moreover, his topic which is the past, present and future of technology and entrepreneurship are sure to resonate

Registration is open now.

*John Sculley’s keynote was part of StartupCamp 7 Comms edition collocated with ITEXPO

How Steve Jobs Even Transformed Our Views on Management

2013-02-09T19:23:24Z

Steve Jobs was such an amazing entrepreneur - even calling him the ultimate visionary doesn't seem to describe accurately how amazing he was at reinventing numerous business categories. Like so many creative visionaries, early in his career he lacked the political and people skills which many people believed were necessary to run a company effectively.

When he was "pushed out" of Apple it was seen as a normal incident - CEOs were pushed out of companies all the time as past Apple CEO John Sculley has said. In fact Scully spoke just over a week ago at StartUp Camp7 collocated with ITEXPO Miami 2013 and gave the inside scoop on many important events which transpired between him and Jobs over the years.

What is interesting though is how Sculley defends Jobs and says it was a mistake to push him out. It seems John's view on management and entrepreneurship has changed over the years and others are beginning to agree with him. In fact, changing the view of the founder-CEO is just one other massive accomplishment Steve Jobs should get credit for. As if his list of accomplishments was somehow lacking until now.

Throughout my career the common knowledge has always been entrepreneurs can't run companies - at some point you need to bring in a real manager who can run operations.

Common knowledge seems to have changed recently and Jessi Hempel writes a compelling article for Fortune which makes the case for having the founder run the company.

The article does lead with a statistic which seems to make the opposite case though:

Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman has spent the past decade studying the impact a founder has on a company. In a study of 460 American startups, he found that on average those in which founding CEOs remained the top decision-makers were less valuable than those managed by outside CEOs. Simply put, the skills needed to invent a new product or service are different from those needed to manage a business, and few people possess both.

The interesting twist however is while the outside manager is better at running a company on a day-to-day basis, they are far less creative than a founder and in-fact almost every company which has become uber-successful has been run by a founder.

Reid Hoffman the co-founder of Linked In explains in-part why there has been a shift in thinking:

20 years ago, you could count on product cycles lasting years, which meant that constantly developing new products and refining the vision was relatively less important than aggressive execution. The “professional” CEO back then just had to be a superb executor for the founder’s vision. The rise of internet time has reduced product cycles to months and weeks. As such, a CEO can’t focus solely on scaling concerns—today, the CEO has to be involved in the product.

Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz details his thoughts on the matter in a piece titled Why We Prefer Founding CEOs and it describes how today [constant] innovation = [the best chance of] success. If we take it as a given that entrepreneurs are best able to innovate then it becomes a given that a "professional CEO" isn't the right person to guide a company forward.

This part of the post sums it up best:

The reason is that innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.

Moreover he says these are the three ingredients to being a great innovator:

Comprehensive knowledge
Moral authority
Total commitment to the long-term

Here is another great point he makes:

Founding CEOs naturally take a long view of their companies. The company is their life’s work. Their emotional commitment exceeds their equity stake. Their goal from the start is to build something significant. They instinctively know that big product cycles come from investment and that even the biggest product cycles will eventually fade. Professional CEOs, on the other hand, tend to be driven by relatively shorter-term goals. They are paid in terms of stock options that vest over 4 years and cash bonuses for quarterly and yearly performance.

One other idea he brings up worth discussing is that Eric Schmidt is an important exception to the rule as a "professional CEO" he came to Google and launched Apps and Android. He did so by, "teaming with the founders and gaining the benefits of their knowledge, moral authority, and long-term vision." He continues to say this is an obvious strategy, but shared leadership and control are incredibly difficult to achieve." he further describes what is needed to make it work: "Intense communication, deep humility, and some hard compromises." Of course he conludes by reminding us that almost nobody ever pulls it off, making Eric Schmidt a very important exception.

What we learn from the above is professional CEOs need to be humble and able to communicate well to be successful in business today. My personal experience has shown me many entrepreneur CEOs while very creative are pretty bad at the "business side" of the job. This is in-part why most of them fail - something we should keep in mind. Yes, the great companies are run by their founders but remember, most new companies do fail.

This tells us that CEOs who aren't very effective at doing the non-creative part of the CEO job - running meetings, managing, etc should bring in someone to assist. That is if they want to maximize the value of their company. When interviewing such a person they should be sure to look for someone who is able to admit past mistakes and who learned from them. I would go so far as asking them to list their top three mistakes and ask what was learned from each.

Another thought which comes to mind is this change in "founder philosophy" sums up why in-part Amazon's shares trade at an exponentially-higher multiple than those of Apple. Something I have discussed before.

We know that finding another Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos is rare and we also know if we can team more professional CEOs who don't think they know it all with some creative founders, we can unlock tons of value in a slew of companies. Of course the founders would need to realize their shortcomings in order to allow such a "partnership." Hopefully this will happen as word gets out about how Jobs and Sculley worked side-by-side and moreover how much of Apple's success today (especially in product design and marketing) came from that initial collaboration between a founder and solid "professional CEO."

To me it is fascinating to see how "common knowledge" about the ongoing ability of a founder to run the company has changed because we are in an age of acceleration. In other words, the shortcomings of the CEO from a management perspective have become less important because a well-managed company without innovation will get eaten alive by its competitors. The situation with John Sculley of course is an extreme example and shows how their relationship and poor decisions made by the board at the time have helped lead to a change in thinking about the importance in keeping a founder at the helm. Moreover as we can see from Amazon's P/E multiple, the investment community definitely agrees.

Verizon MiFi and Boingo Indispensable

2013-02-08T23:36:05Z

Some time back Verizon Wireless sent me a MiFi device to test and I have used it as a long-term review unit and am blown away at how useful it has become. Recently at ITEXPO in Miami I was able to use it instead of hotel WiFi which often can cost $15/day. Moreover, there was one hotel I stayed at this past month where the position of the hotel meant 4G didn't work from any provider - and it turns out I paid through the nose for hotel WiFi. I happened to use three devices and I got charged for each one (almost daily) for seven days. I didn't notice that there was a per-device charge as typically this isn't the case at the hotels I use.

Although I didn't get charged $315, that is what I would have paid had I used each device each day and the hotel didn't take some of the charges off my bill. The point is, your workers could save a bundle over the hotel WiFi charge with a single MiFi device.

Moreover, at the Gym at ITEXPO in Miami there was poor connectivity and no WiFi. What I ended up doing was placing the MiFi device on top of the hand sanitizer dispenser which was about six feet high or so. Up there it was able to receive a 4G signal.

This allowed me to have great connectivity through my workouts - I could tweet, stream music and keep in touch with my team the entire time I was down there.

In fact whenever I am in a location where connectivity is poor I look for a high place to put the MiFi device to maximize broadband supplied to my devices.

I also have to give a hats off to Boingo Wireless - thanks to them I was able to stay connected in the convention center, at airports and on my flight home from the show. Even better - their new iOS app makes it far easier to find networks which work with the service. It's worth pointing out that devices using WiFi use far less battery power than on a 3G or 4G network meaning when you are a conference you want to use WiFi as much as possible to conserve the battery on your devices.

Thoughts on Alcatel-Lucent

2013-02-08T19:42:16Z

One of the greatest challenges incumbent companies face is the ambivalence and corporate politics incumbency breeds and it only gets worse in what we call the age of acceleration where competitors arise faster and technologies shift more quickly than ever. Nortel, NSN and Alcatel-Lucent are all companies who enjoyed decades of leadership in the carrier market and in the process decided to provide generous benefits for their workers which would eventually help make them uncompetitive.

There is more to it - in the late nineties, Lucent acquired companies so quickly that its workers didn't know exactly who did what. Nortel too made a great deal of acquisitions. The challenge for both companies was they didn't integrate their new assets into their companies effectively.

Cisco on the other hand was a master of buying companies with good technology and rapidly rolling the products out to its global salesforce allowing sales of the acquired companys' products to accelerate rapidly. To some degree they play an arbitrage game of taking a good local technology and providing it globally with a solid salesforce.

Few other companies have mastered the art of the acquisition like Cisco.

When Alcatel decided to Merge with Lucent Technologies the competition told me privately that the merger would take a few years to integrate well and then the new entity would be a force to reckon with. There was certainly much to look forward to - the merger of the best of US and french technology. In reality - the way things have been going lately, some have said the Franco-American company with power bases in New Jersey and France resembles the offspring of Snooki and Pepe Le Pew.

Of course this is why Alcatel-Lucent recently announced that CEO Ben Verwaayen will be stepping down.

On the financial front, ALU just reported a net loss of $1.85 billion for 2012. The explanation was that it has been suffering from lower than expected sales in Europe and China and it took a write-down in its wireless and optics businesses.

Highlights from the earnings release:

Sales fell 5.7 percent to $19.3 billion in 2012.
Adjusted operating profit was $156.6 million.
Margin of 2.9 percent was below the 5-9 percent Verwaayen had promised.
Cash was depleted $908.6 million in 2012.
Fourth quarter sales fell 1.3 percent from a year earlier as only the U.S. market was strong

The net loss stemmed largely from a write-down of $1.9 billion, which the company said was "related to the depreciation of goodwill and fixed assets, and the corresponding impact on deferred tax," which CFO Paul Tufano said was linked to the lower value of ALU's wireless and optical assets.

Like Nortel, Lucent had a number of problems this past decade and also had to deal with numerous acquisitions made at inflated telecom and dotcom bubble valuations. Moreover, Asian competitors have been ferocious and are taking the company on in ways it frankly can't compete with.

Last week at ITEXPO in Miami I had a chance to speak with Payam Maveddat of Taqua about telecom competition from Asia - this is before the Alcatel-Lucent news even broke. I reached out to him to get his precise words:

As I travel internationally to promote our US-based technology overseas, it has become evident to me that the holistic approach of the Chinese government of combining infrastructure financing and development, including roads, railroads, refineries, power generation, farming, and telecom does not allow for other companies to be able to compete on the same playing field in these developing markets and I am not surprised that Alcatel-Lucent is struggling to survive in this environment.

Of course there is more to it - Alcatel-Lucent is losing business in its own backyard as it hasn't innovated fast enough, some say it didn't cut deeply enough and its R&D investments are smaller than those of Huawei, a company with a smaller product line and access to cheaper labor.

Moreover, the company has (or had anyway) a strong enterprise PBX line of products but they are hardly heard about anymore - at least in the US. Of course the spin-off of Genesys makes little sense if you truly value your enterprise business. But the company has decided the carrier space will get the majority of its attention based on its outbound comunications with media and analysts.

Another area for expansion is the cloud where the company could have come up with many more services for resale by carriers, VARs and MSPs.

Having said that - the company's expansive line of business is bewildering and Oracle's acquisition of Acme Packet could signal yet another ferocius competitor - Oracle knows how to integrate and grow acquired businesses and if they pick up GENBAND things get a lot more interesting in the market as they can compete across a much broader product line.

TMC's Peter Bernstein had this to say about this news:

I’m on record as saying that the next 12-18 months will be a tipping point in the ICT industries, and what happens in this time period will dictate industry structure for years to come. This includes the telecom equipment sector, service provider as well as enterprise, where the accommodation of change and moving quickly are not historic attributes. In that respect, Verwaayen may turn out to be prescient about his successor needing to be focused like a laser on execution.

And he is right. So much can happen over the course of the next few years which will determine the future for years to come in the telecom and datacom markets.

Finally, we can't expect European and American leaders to get their act together in a manner which allows them to compete with China Inc. in developing markets. This means players like Alcatel-Lucent will have to have better products at better prices to become more competitive than Huawei, ZTE and a host of ther new entrants. Sadly this isn't likely but the positive news is the company is still a leader in advanced technologies like optical and wireless as evidenced by its announcement of a 400G/s optical connection spanning 275 miles in France.

See Payam Maveddat of Taqua's keynote from ITEXPO Miami last week - "Federation as a Service"

See GENBAND President and CEO Charlie Vogt be interviewed by me at ITEXPO Miami last week

Dell+Microsoft=Apple?

2013-02-05T15:17:19Z

Dell is in a mind-bogglingly large long-rumored deal to go private worth $24 billion and of note is business partner Microsoft has decided to invest in the company which has struggled for many years. The company still has strength in the data center market but the PC space is facing a major challenge from the smartphones, the iPad and other tablets.

Dell tried to go upmarket with its Adamo line realizing Apple was a threat due in-part to its superior computer designs but the strategy fizzled. In the past, Dell also tried to come out with a device in the PDA space only to see the market erode as it launched because smartphones became more desirrable. It also launched a smartphone line hardly anyone knows about.

The Texas-based company also made a string of acquisitions from the cloud to consulting - but still Dell has struggled.

The answer it seems according to the board is to go private.

The question is why? If there hidden value in Dell? Perhaps the acquisitions could have been managed better? In that case, having Michael Dell at the helm - still, doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem. Moreover, at least one respected analyst I spoke with at ITEXPO last week in Miami believes much of the value in the acquired companies has been destroyed by now - making this deal questionable.

This leaves us with the Microsoft connection. It seems Redmond is taking baby steps towards towards replicating Apple or what Google has done with Motorola Mobility. All of a sudden it seems software companies need more hardware. Witness yesterday's acquisition of Acme Packet by Oracle.

In the end this deal only makes sense if Microsoft takes a bigger and bigger stake in Dell and tries to "re-Surface" the hardware maker with new and innovative designs.

John Sculley Takes Stage at ITEXPO, Startup Camp7

2013-01-31T22:54:26Z

Live Blog

John Sculley has taken the stage and the audience is riveted so far. He was the first MBA the company hired. He became the biggest advocate of creating a relationship with the consumer and the brand. Talk about lifestyle and experience and how the company focused on the "Pepsi Experience" through the newer color TVs was unique. They called it "Experience Marketing."

Also discussed Pepsi Challenge - they set up challenge booths where people took blind taste tests. They did research ahead of time and realized Pepsi was slightly preferred 54% to 46%. They wanted to get the expression of people when they realized they preferred Pepsi over Coke. He said it drove Coke crazy. Was in his mid-30s and was CEO off Pepsi when he got a call from a recruiter. He was not the first person to be selected - he didn't have computer experience. The board thought Steve Jobs was too young to be CEO but was given veto rights.

The first meeting with Steve Jobs took place shortly thereafter - in 1982. No one had gone from corporate America to Silicon Valley and people running high-tech companies were engineers at that time.

Eventually John told Steve no and Jobs asked if he wanted to sell sugar-water for the rest of his life or changee the world. A week later he had joined Apple.

At the time Commodore and Atari were the market leaders by far and IBM was up and coming. Apple had just launched Lisa at $10,000 which was a fortune at the time. Macintosh was more than a year away. The company needed cash for development and the only cash flow came from Apple II which was five years old. Sculley was tasked with keeping the cash coming from the old computer line and making sure there was enough money for marketing.

Jobs was fascinated with experience marketing - Jobs said they needed "Experience Marketing" at Apple. Jobs said Apple would win with Macintosh in the same way. "Jobs was a fast learner" according to Sculley.

He then discussed the famous Apple Super Bowl ad and the IBM Jr. Launch which analysts said would kill Apple. They decided to ride a wave of something popular - they decided George Orwell 1984 and had to preempt other companies. They asked for something to stop the world. And the commercial was launched.

John and Steve had a disagreement and the board asked Steve to step down from running the Mac division. John says that it was the wrong decision - really innovative companies need to be run by product leaders. Even if you can do integrated marketing - it is the product which drives businesses. They should have focused on having them work more closely together.

Sculley grew the company over 1,000% and was taking the leadership position from IBM but he was against licencing the MAC OS and was subsequently pushed out. Sculley says he had an amazing friendship and relationship with Jobs - John just wanted to keep the culture Steve created, going.

Jobs used to say its all aboutt user experience, no compromises, elegant design. The NeXT technology Jobs made was put back into Apple when the company was purchased.

John mentioned the companies he invests in now and how the country's medical/healthcare problems can be solved with technology using the cloud. As long as you can get data from patients and use it to build relationships with patients, you can use the same ideas from Google and Amazon in healtchare. Due to regulatory issues you need domain experience. Misfit Wireless is one company he invests in is using wearable technology and the cloud to measure the health level of users.

There was a discussion of frugal engineering which is pushing companies to design products less expensively... Especially in places like India. He related this to Tim Cook's supply chain mastery and how he was able to go from one product refresh a year to two - which has to be done as a result of product commoditization. He also lauded Tim Cook as a great CEO.

Sculley said today he wouldn't work for a large company today because all the fun stuff happens in small companies. He said great entrepreneurs need to be good at recovery. He related a Tiger Woods story - being able to recover from a bad golf shot. "There is a very thin line between success and failure," he exclaimed. He said Intel and Sun almost went bankrupt. Almost everyone has had a near-death experience he continued. "How do you handle yourself in a near-death experience?" is the question. Great entrepreneurs have to be great at recovering from near-death.

John went on to say that great entrepreneurs need to have insatiable curiosity in any domain you want - but pick an industry sector where change is happening now. We were 20 years too early when we came out with Newton he said. The aha moment was when he got a Newton and discovered he didn't need to dial a number. The system pulled the number from the calendar and made the call. He was having lunch with Woz today discussing this actually.

Amazon has a higher multiple than Apple because Jeff Bezos is the closest Silicon Valley has to Steve Jobs. He then explained that Amazon is agreeing to pay sales tax in states as he builds fulfillment centers in the states for same-day delivery. He says the fight against Wal-Mart is coming.

Asked about a near-death experience he dealt with he said being kicked out of Apple was the worst thing that happened to him and it took him decades to recover.

All in all, this may have been the best keynote presentation I have ever heard. The audience questions were spot on and the answers were candid. We took a mutual walk down memory lane and the record was set straight in many areas. Steve Jobs is famous for revolutionizing so many markets such as computing, mobile, music and entertainment. It is fascinating to see how many ideas he actually got from John Sculley and how the products we use today like the iPad Mini embody design principles and marketing concepts John and Steve espoused in the eighties. One wonders what would have happened to Apple if things had turned out differently. If John didn't join - if the board had sided with Steve, etc.

John mentioned that when Steve came back a second time he was more humble and we know he developed an OS which the company needed - but he did it outside of Apple's offices. Point being, things seem to have turned out optimally the way they were. If you ever told someone things work out for the best when something bad happened and secretly thought to yourself they never really do... Here is an example of two people getting pushed out of a company and as a result both became exponentially more famous. Perhaps every cloud does indeed have a silver lining or better yet when the Apple board gives you rotten treatment, you make cider.

ITEXPO Miami 2013 and Startup Camp7, Waiting for Sculley

2013-01-31T22:16:15Z

It's the second day of ITEXPO - I am at StartUp Camp7 listening to startups pitch the audience and panel on why their applications are the best. The founder of ProtegGO is speaking right now - he seems to have the audience interested. The idea behind the app is tthat a few minutes can save lives in an emergency. the app alerts 15 people in the event of an emergency.

Here are some pictures of the room and the Show Daily from today which has news about Battle for the Cloud, Telefonica, NSN, SBCs, Genesys, Trufone and more. John Sculley takes the stage very soon - I can't wait. He is one of the most interesting people I can imagine meeting in the tech space and we are very fortunate he chose to speak here.

ITEXPO Future of Cloud Panel Pic

2013-01-31T20:23:04Z

The Future of Cloud Computing panel was a big hit at ITEXPO Miami 2013 - lots of great information. Thanks to all who attended - here is a picture. I am at Telefonica press conference right now they have huge news about their new US-based channel partner program which will break at any moment. I am looking forward to hearing John Sculley speak here at the show later today and later - at 8:00 pm I'll be at the ITEXPO conference party at the Loews Hotel.

As a reminder, John Sculley is famous for inventing the Pepsi Challenge and also was the man who fired Steve Jobs and was later fired by him. We are honored to have him here.

Win This Jeep Friday at ITEXPO Miami 2013

2013-01-31T18:52:04Z

We hope to see you at ITEXPO tomorrow at the Miami Beach Convention Center where one of you will win this Jeep at 1:45 pm. You must be there to win. Thanks to our sponsors for making this drawing possible: AireSpring, AudioCodes, Broadview Networks, Sagemcom and Taqua.

New Blackberry on Display at ITEXPO

2013-01-30T23:39:04Z

Blackberry is showing Blackberry 10 OS and the Z10 at ITEXPO Miami 2013. Lots of interest here at the show. What is great about the new operating system is you can watch video content and still access many features of the device with simple sliding motions. Also, the Blackberry Hub is a very useful central location to check for all your communications.

Telefonica Keynote at ITEXPO Miami 2013

2013-01-30T21:25:06Z

Here is a shot of the audience from the recent Telefonica keynote at ITEXPO Miami 2013. Standing-room only and lots of great info about broadband, telecom and cloud. Right now the future of cloud computing panel is taking place and then the exhibit hall opens. Its been a great day so far. Seems like there is lots of optimism about the future.

Telefonica Digital's Tim Marsden Keynote Begins

2013-01-30T21:04:05Z

Telefónica Digital's Tim Marsden just began his keynote presentation at ITEXPO Miami. He's talking a lot about mobility, high availability, disaster recovery, and cloud technologies. Here's a photo.

Some Shots From Related ITEXPO Events

2013-01-30T19:56:16Z

The collocated events at ITEXPO Miami 2013 are doing great - here are some shots from Super WiFi Summit (below) and M2M Evolution. Hopefully the attendance at these events is indicative of the growth these markets will experience this year.

Truphone Breaks Blackberry 10 News at ITEXPO

2013-01-30T19:42:31Z

Adam Linford of Trufone breaks exclusive news to Rich Tehrani (me :-) ) at ITEXPO that his company has a new VoIP app which works with the new Blackberry 10 OS which was launched today and is being shown here at ITEXPO Miami 2013. It also works with the company's global mobile SIM which allows many phones to utilize reduced calling rates around the world. Check out the video below for more.

ITEXPO Miami 2013 Day One Going Great

2013-01-30T17:26:11Z

ITEXPO Miami 2013 is going great we had 11 simultaneous sessions which were packed - these two are from the Enterprise Track at ITEXPO. Super WiFi, Asterisk, M2M and LatinComm and many others were standing room only as well. Thanks for being part of the ITEXPO and TMCnet community everyone!