I am sorry I don’t get the iPhone frenzy. People have gone ahead and declared this to be the “before iPhone” and “after iPhone” era. I think they are smoking pot. Let’s put things in perspective. Apple expects to sell about a million iPhones in 2008. That’s a good number. But then Nokia sold about half a million phones in just one day in India alone (see news item here). Well, you might say that this is not a fair comparison. Read on…
Archive for the 'mobile industry' Category
The recent report in The Economist on wireless machine-to-machine communications is disappointing because of inadequate treatment of adoption dynamics.
Bypass Mobile Operator, Focus on Handset Vendor
Published by February 20th, 2007 in entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 1465 CommentsMobile operators make poor market and distribution partners for startups creating new services. A better approach is to go after the handset vendors as they are trying to create use-based sub-brand and their ecosystems.
Hope Vodafone Has Learnt Its Lessons (about Globalization Models)
Published by February 12th, 2007 in offshoring, organizational design and mobile industry. 113 CommentsAlthough Vodafone was the first to recognize the potential of horizontal consolidation, it didn’t execute the integration very well. Telefonica did a better job. Getting the globalization model right is critically important. This requires striking the right balance between global integration and local responsiveness. Not only is this not easy, this is often ignored. Probably the least understood area today is R&D globalization…
Mobile Revolution Mired in Legacy Mindsets
Published by February 1st, 2007 in mobile industry. 3068 CommentsThe mobile revolution can’t be realized by thinking of it as just “mobile” internet. That mindset is too limiting much the same way as the horseless carriage mindset was too limiting a way to think about cars. Native content and applications for the mobile are booming in the consumer space. It’s perhaps now time for applications for micro-firms to also start coming up.
Looking at Orbit Change in Three Industries
Published by January 30th, 2007 in software industry, biotech/pharma industry and mobile industry. 1797 CommentsWhat happened with Lucent is relevant to the changes that Big Pharma and Enterprise Software industry are facing today. Firms like Pfizer seem to have finally embraced the orbit change that’s needed. But others need to get started as well. Time is ticking away. Is history about to repeat itself?
Bad News about TI’s LoCosto Chipset
Published by January 12th, 2007 in innovation, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 1959 CommentsTI’s Locosto chipset is having technical problems because of which it might lose the early mover advantage.
Don’t worry if you haven’t. It’s rather new. MoSoSo, or mobile social software, is software — generally on a mobile phone or on a laptop computer — that facilitates social encounters, or mobile social networking by associating geographical location and time with one’s own social network. Mike Butcher has a nice overview of the space here. He suggests that…
Mobile Business Model Success Scorecard v1
Published by January 9th, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 43 CommentsThere is no doubt that mobile is the new frontier, especially in Asia, for a host of applications. However if you are a startup, getting it right has been tough. Several conditions need to be met. I have pulled together a business model self-assessment scorecard that’s probably over-simplified, opinionated and incomplete. Take a look…
Growth Anatomy Series Roundup
Published by December 18th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, mobile industry, bottom-of-the-pyramid, entrepreneurship and roundups. 216 CommentsThis series started innocently enough as a follow-up to my SandHill.com article but somehow it quietly picked-up momentum. It covers a fair amount of ground about how to go about bottom-on-the-pyramid opportunities and why doing that is important to the software industry. Below are all the articles in this series. Check them out if you have missed any.
India’s Telecom Boom: Missing the Point
Published by December 10th, 2006 in innovation and mobile industry. 102 CommentsEconomist has an article on India’s booming mobile market. India is adding 6.6m new subscribers a month and is growing faster than China. The article says that this growth is unlikely to peter out soon. There are 136m subscribers today and the industry expects to get to 500m by 2010. But the Economist doesn’t do justice to the real story although it alludes to it when it says that “Bharti, in particular, is attracting attention from telecoms firms worldwide because of its innovative business model”.
Growth Anatomy: Taking Inspiration from Ultra Low Cost Cellphone
Published by December 6th, 2006 in innovation, organizational design, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 2526 CommentsWe saw from the OLPC example that radical value engineering requires confronting incumbent product architectures. This is one of the reasons why upstarts have an advantage. Another reason why this is so difficult for incumbents is because you have to confront the current way of doing things inside the firm. Occasionally market leaders succeed in doing an orbit shift in their way of doing things. Texas Instruments is an example of that in the cellphone chipset market.
Growth Anatomy: Another Reason to Not Ignore Emerging Markets
Published by November 29th, 2006 in innovation, software industry, mobile industry and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 103 CommentsThe enterprise software industry cost structure is deconstructing in front of our eyes. The traditional infrastructure side is under attack by open-source and data-center virtualization; the application space is dealing with SaaS; and the traditional services model has already crumbled under the onslaught of Infosys and Wipro’s global delivery model. Yet, and I hate to say that, there is complacency in the air.
Mobile Operators are Impediments to Innovation
Published by November 19th, 2006 in innovation, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 2208 CommentsI think mobile operators have become an impediment to innovation. They are reactive, risk averse, and unable to develop markets for new services. If things continue down the current path, mobile operators will be seen in the same unsympathetic light as the big music labels… need to shift gears from mass marketing to niche marketing; from servicing demand to creating demand; and, from doing it all yourself to building value chains with other services providers, content providers, handset vendors and the like. This is an orbit change.
