The Importance of “Convergence” In Market and Industry Analysis

If You Get Technology “Convergence” Wrong, Nothing Else Matters

I came across this book during my most recent visit to the UBC Vancouver campus. As good as I think this book is at focusing attention, in workbook style, on the importance of market and industry analysis in new venture due diligence, there is an issue that I think is not adequately addressed by any model or theory: not Porter, not STEEP or SWAT. Convergence is the issue.

We can imagine and even potentially envision a very cool business idea, but if the technology to achieve it is not ready, not sufficiently mature, the idea is Dead on Arrival (DOA). I do not mean to pick on young entrepreneurs, but I reviewed a business concept last week that was a superb and compelling idea, but the technology necessary to achieve it simply was not there, either in terms of its capability or its price point. I am confident that it will be there in time, but it is not now. As if to make my point, Apple announced that it was acquiring a company for $20 Million in the exact same technology area: indoor location tracking (no small feat). At this point it is not clear that the acquired company has any extraordinary intellectual property or expertise, and the article primarily focused on the point that this “location identification” technology was “heating up.” It looks like it may be a simple “aquihire.” Global Positioning and geo tagging as in smart mobile phones, radio frequency identification technology (RFID), and inertial guidance are all currently used in various combinations by a host of competitors (too many) to achieve required levels of accuracy, immediacy and cost. A local industrial RFID company has just closed its doors because it simply could not compete and make money. The simple problem was that this company’s idea, as compelling as it was, could not achieve the necessary price point, or possibly would not even work.

So we have the problem of “convergence.” Great idea but the technology simply is not ready….yet.

I have three personal case study examples of the problem of “convergence,” that every potential entrepreneur should study. I have to admit that I was a senior executive at all three of these Silicon Valley companies, one of which actually made it to the NASDAQ exchange. All of them had the “convergence” problem.. Too early for the available technology.

1. Silicon Graphics. Silicon Graphics was founded in the late 1980’s by a pre-eminent Stanford professor, Jim Clark, on the idea that 3D visualization of complex problems would become the next big wave in technology. As a minor side business, it also excelled at computer animation, a growing new market of interest to Steve Jobs and others. It is now obvious that Clark was onto something that has now finally become the Next Big Thing, but at that time, the available technology simply made it too difficult and too expensive. Silicon Graphics no longer exists. Silicon Graphics crown jewel was its enabling software code, the SGI Graphics Library. It does still exist in open form.

2. iBEAM Broadcasting. iBEAM was the precursor of YouTube, but too far ahead of its time. the founder, Mike Bowles, a former MIT professor, envisioned streaming media across the Internet, but this was in 1999. Intel, Fox Entertainment, Reuters, Bloomberg, Microsoft were all involved, some investing significant sums in the company. We tried mightily to make it happen for Mike, but there were technology convergence problems. The Internet at that time simply did not have sufficient reliable broadband capability. In 1999 the vast majority of Internet users still used a dial-up connection. The company, with help from Microsoft and its other big pockets investors turned to satellite transmission, which is immensely expensive. I did learn a lot about the satellite business. Great idea, way too early, and the company failed early.

3. P-Cube. In 2001, I was approached by prominent friends at two downtown Palo Alto venture capital firms to consider joining an Israeli startup in which they had invested. The idea was wildly popular at the time….traffic policy management and so-called Internet traffic shaping. I enthusiastically joined the new company and became its first U.S. based employee. The compelling idea was simple, make money by charging for bandwidth. The background idea was to enable deep IP packet payload snooping to prioritize traffic, but also for its political potential. This is the technology that Dick Cheney employed after 9/11 to snoop all Internet traffic. The only problem was that the technology was simply not yet ready. The P-Cube Internet traffic switch was a 24 layer printed circuit board (hideously difficult to fabricate), with 5 IBM PowerPC chips, 1 Gig of onboard memory (at the time bleeding edge, but today laptops have more memory), a host of “application specific integrated circuits” (ASIC), and to top it off a proprietary software language to program the box. In the end, P-Cube burned up $100 Million in venture capital, and I had great fun traveling the World selling it, but the box never worked, largely because the technology simply was not there.. P-Cube’s assets were bought by Cisco Systems and t0day such capability is built into the boxes of Cisco System, Juniper Networks and others.

The key takeaway lesson from this: do not underestimate the importance of technology convergence with a great idea.

“Culture of arrogance” felled Nortel, anti-climactic Ottawa U study concludes. Was RIM any different?

This is another on my series on industry analysis. The recent University of Ottawa study on the demise of Nortel Networks, tells us what many of us already knew. The most important constructive criticism of this study is that it should have been done years ago. The Nortel collapse was followed by a surprisingly similar scenario at RIM, now Blackberry. Mike Lazaridis, who served as RIM’s co-CEO along with Jim Balsillie until January, 2012, are generally considered to have failed to respond adequately to the market encroachments of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones, as Blackberry’s market share plummeted. I recently showed my undergrad and graduate strategy students a video of a Charlie Rose interview with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. Chambers emphasized the acceleration of the Adizes corporate life cycle, in many cases to less than ten years, and the need for constant reinvention to survive in this challenging and rapidly changingnew world.

Former Nortel CEO John Roth

Former RIM CEO, Jim Balsillie

This is another on my series on industry analysis. The recent University of Ottawa study on the demise of Nortel Networks, tells us what many of us already knew. The researchers should be congratulated for their work and their conclusions, in what is an important case study of Canadian corporate mismanagement, which will help Canadian business avoid a deja vu. But many of us in the high tech industry already knew the answer in our guts. The most important constructive criticism of this study is that it should have been done years ago. The Nortel collapse was followed by a surprisingly similar scenario at RIM, now Blackberry. Mike Lazaridis, who served as RIM’s co-CEO along with Jim Balsillie until January, 2012, are generally considered to have failed to respond adequately to the market encroachments of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones, as Blackberry’s market share plummeted. There seems to be a pattern here for students of Canadian innovation and management. I recently showed my undergrad and graduate strategy students a video of a very recent Charlie Rose interview with John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. In that interview Chambers emphasized the acceleration of the Adizes corporate life cycle, in many cases to less than ten years, and the need for constant reinvention to survive in this challenging and rapidly changingnew world. This is now also true about the teaching of Information Technology to management students and to all undergraduate students for that matter.

Cisco System’s CEO, John Chambers discusses the acceleration of the corporate life cycle: Chambers Interview

Read more: Management in the Brave New World

TECHNOLOGY

‘Culture of arrogance’ felled telecom giant Nortel, study finds

JANET MCFARLAND

The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Mar. 17 2014, 2:16 PM EDT

Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 18 2014, 7:16 AM EDT

The collapse of telecommunications giant Nortel Networks Corp. was caused by “a culture of arrogance and even hubris” that led to numerous management errors and weakened the firm’s ability to adapt to changing customer needs in a fast-paced industry, according to a new in-depth analysis of the company’s final decade of operations.

A University of Ottawa team of professors, led by lead researcher Jonathan Calof, released a detailed analysis Monday of Nortel’s failure, outlining a litany of complex factors that caused Nortel’s collapse in 2009, when the firm filed for bankruptcy protection and was disbanded.

The report is based on three years of research and dozens of interviews with former employees, executives and top customers to try to understand what went wrong at the company. The project was launched after former chief executive officer Jean Monty approached the research team and offered to contribute to the financing of the project.

The study concludes that Nortel lacked the internal “resilience” to cope with a changing external marketplace, and missed key opportunities between 2002 and 2006 to retrench as it struggled to survive. In the end, customers said they could not stick with Nortel as a “black cloud” formed over the company, raising doubts about its long-term future.

Prof. Calof said in a release Monday that the findings are “more than a Nortel story” and present broader lessons about preventing further failures of large companies in Canada.

“It’s our hope that this research will aid in educating tomorrow’s leaders,” he said.

The report says Nortel in its early days was a model of deep technological expertise through its Bell Northern Research (BNR) laboratories and its strong connection to customers, enabling the company to maintain a “first-mover” advantage in many markets. At its peak in 2000, Nortel was Canada’s largest public company, accounting for a third for the value of the S&P/TSX composite index, and employed more than 93,000 people worldwide.

But the authors concluded that Nortel’s growing dominance in its markets in the 1990s “led to a culture of arrogance and even hubris combined with lax financial discipline. Nortel’s rigid culture played a defining role in the company’s inability to react to industry changes.”

While Nortel doubled its revenue between 1997 and 2000 through a spree of expensive acquisitions – and tripled its share price in the same period – the company lost focus on profitability and was in a “precarious position” when the market for technology companies crashed in 2001, the report says. The report says its acquisition spree was a “complete departure” from Nortel’s established skills base and from its tradition of developing its own products.

“This approach proved to be a failure because ill-chosen and poorly integrated acquisitions defocused and overcomplicated the organization,” it concludes. “The company’s high cost structure and lack of financial discipline eventually led to financial ratios that were among the worst in the industry.”

The company also made a series of poor product-related decisions in the same period, including deepening its focus on the declining market for land-line technology and in the increasingly competitive optical market, while missing opportunities in the exploding wireless technology market, where it once had an early lead.

The researchers also concluded that Nortel made operational mistakes, including dismantling the centralized research and development platform from BNR “that was culturally and structurally optimized to create, innovate and develop telecommunications products using co-operative teams.”

From the era of John Roth’s leadership as CEO in the late 1990s onward, “it was felt by many R&D staff that management rarely listened to the engineers and that, when they did, they did not appear to understand.”

In the same era, Nortel gave more power to individual business teams, “which resulted in increased internal politics and fruitless competition.”

The report also says Nortel could have solved its problems in 2002 by retrenching and selling business units, but missed the opportunity, and again missed an opportunity in 2005 and 2006 to sell units and retrench in key business sectors.

“As difficult as it is to consciously reduce the size of a business by selling units, this study concludes that, in the case of Nortel, this option may have been the best and only alternative.

Much Better Battery Technology As A Big Idea

Recently there have been a number of reports that Apple’s release of its new operating system, iO7, had caused unexpected problems for battery life in most older iPhones. Another way of saying this, is what a mobile phone salesman at The Waterfront, in downtown Vancouver said to me, “Everybody wants there phones to do too much stuff!” His comment came after I had bought one of the new external batter boosters for my smartphone. An entirely new accessory market has opened up, selling extended battery life for you phone, when you are not able to use your charger. This is not a real or long term solution. As many of my students know, battery life and heat dissipation on the microchips are among the most important areas of technology research today. It is also worth noting that this problem has also led to advances in the Universal Serial Bus (USB) architecture which are also likely to help address the problem of power and energy efficiency technology devices..

Batteries have become an intense area of research.

Going viral

Modified viruses help researchers boost battery performance

BUILDING a better battery has become an intense area of research. A device that could store more power in the same amount of weight as widely used lithium-ion cells could, for instance, allow smartphones to run for weeks on a single charge or an electric car to be driven non-stop for hundreds of kilometres. Among the alternatives being explored, lithium-air batteries are a favourite. But they can be tricky to make and unreliable. Now researchers have found a way to overcome some of those shortcomings with the help of genetically modified viruses.

Using viruses to make batteries is not new: Angela Belcher and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated in 2009 that it was possible by getting modified viruses to coat themselves with the necessary materials required for the anode and cathode in a small button-sized lithium-ion cell.

Lithium-air batteries oxidise lithium at the anode and reduce oxygen at the cathode to induce a current flow. Because the oxygen comes from the air there is no need for some of the relatively heavy internal materials used in other types of battery. That promises a greatly increased energy density (the amount of power that can be stored in a given weight of battery).

In a new paper in Nature Communications the MIT team describes using modified viruses to make a cathode for a lithium-air battery. A cathode is usually harder to produce than an anode because it needs to be highly conductive. The viruses were genetically engineered to capture molecules of manganese oxide—a popular material for building lithium-air cathodes—in a solution of water. They then bind the material into an array of manganese-oxide nanowires with rough, spiky surfaces. Unlike the smooth nanowires made with conventional chemical processes, the spikes increase the surface area available for electrochemical reactions when the battery is charged and discharged. A small quantity of metal, such as palladium, is added to boost conductivity.

Making things with viruses—in this case a common bacteriophage which infects bacteria but is harmless to humans—might seem unusual. But it is similar to the biosynthesis employed in nature. Indeed, Dr Belcher says her work was inspired by the way an abalone is genetically programmed to collect calcium from seawater in order to grow its shell. And because the process mimics a natural technique, production can be carried out at room temperature using water-based solutions, unlike conventional methods of making cathodes which are energy-intensive, and involve high temperatures and hazardous chemicals.

The researchers think they can produce a lithium-air battery with an energy density more than twice that of the best lithium-ion cells. That would make a lot of difference to portable electronic products. A typical lithium-ion battery can store some 150 watt-hours of electricity in one kilogram of battery—itself a huge advance over the 45-80 watt-hours of a nickel-cadmium battery, let alone an old-time lead-acid battery’s 30 watt-hours.

But there is some way to go. Lithium-air cells will have drawbacks too, such as a sensitivity to high temperature which can cause their lithium-ion cousins to burst into flames. So far, the researchers have successfully tested their viral material through 50 cycles of charging and recharging, which is encouraging but well short of the hundreds or thousands of cycles expected from a commercial battery. The MIT team could be on the right road, but more work is needed before lithium-air batteries can be used to drive an electric car two or three times farther on a single charge.

From the print edition: Science and technology

Teachers are earning millions of dollars selling their lesson plans on the “iTunes of education”

Real evidence of the “iTunes of education” already up and running

Teachers are earning millions of dollars selling their lesson plans on the “iTunes of education”

BY ERIN GRIFFITH
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013

TeacherspayTeachers has never raised a cent of outside venture capital. That’s fine — the 28-person company, launched from a New York apartment in 2006, has been profitably helping teachers sell their lesson plans to each other for some time now. This week, the company crossed the threshold of $60 million in teacher-to-teacher sales. That’s up from just $5 million a year ago. It’s just another positive milestone on the company’s quest to become the iTunes for digitally delivered educational content, according to founder Paul Edelman.

If, in this metaphor, textbook companies are the record labels and teachers are indie artists, it’s the teachers, not the labels, that are earning handsomely with this new platform.

One teacher, Deanna Jump, has sold $2 million worth of lesson plans. The sales have allowed her to buy a mansion in Florida and made her a celebrity in the teaching community — she’s taking a year-long sabbatical to speak at education conferences.

Jump’s resources became popular because they’re creative and well-designed, Edelman says. The secret sauce of TeacherspayTeachers’ platform is that it allows teachers to promote themselves within the community. Jump has more than 33,000 followers on the site, so each time she posts a new lesson plan or materials, her fans are alerted.

“Because she’s a real teacher, her resources are far more engaging and effective than what publishers put out there,” Edelman says.

I’d argue that TeacherspayTeachers is less like iTunes and more of a marketplace, like eBay, or a sharing economy startup, like Airbnb. Either way, Edelman’s bet that teachers are their own best resource was spot on: TeacherspayTeachers has accumulated 2.6 million registered users by word of mouth, half of which joined in the last year.

Of that group, 40,000 are active sellers on the platform and more than 800,000 have bought a lesson plan. Around 15 percent of the site’s content is free, but the average item on the site costs $4.44. After Jump, the next four-highest earning teachers have heard more than half a million dollars; 64 teachers have earned six figures and 384 have earned more than $20,000.

During the Fall, TeacherspayTeachers has been processing more than a million in sales every week.

But it’s about more than the money, Edelman assures me. Even teachers that only sell a few lesson plans get some gratification from sharing their work. “It feels great to know that other teachers and students around the country and world are benefiting from their teaching ideas,” he says.

The company takes a 30 percent cut of sales for free users. Once a teacher’s lesson plan becomes popular, Edelman says they often upgrade to a premium account, which costs $59.95 a year and gives teachers 85 percent of their sales. That nets TeacherspayTeachers’ cut out to an average of 198 to 19 percent.

TeacherspayTeachers’ sales are almost entirely in the US. That’s it’s next growth opportunity. Edelman is based in France and his tech teams are based in India and the Ukraine. His next mission will be to expand TeacherspayTeachers’ user base, too.

The Incredible CardMunch for Android Mystery: Market Stolen by CamCard

Over a year ago now someone on the UBC campus, who was thinking of developing an app, told me about this cool application for capturing cards into your contacts by photographing them on your smart phone. It was Cardmunch. It turned out that the application was only available on the iPhone at that time, but as luck would have it, the company had just been acquired by LinkedIn. Voila! It would obviously only be a few months at most before I could obtain it for my Samsung Android smart phone, right? Wrong. That was over a year ago.

UPDATE May 8, 2014: LinkedIn is Killing Cardmunch and wil partner with Evernote business card service

LinkedIn is making this announcement without much explanation. IMHO the amount of time LinkedIn frittered away on this left them no option but to kill the app. While LinkedIn may argue that Evernote provides its users with a superior solution as justification for their decision, if LinkedIn had moved promptly when they had the opportunity, partnering with Evernote would have been unnecessary. There is also the matter of the money wasted on Linkedin’s original acquisition of Cardmunch, though the Cardmunch founders may feel they dodged a bullet, and probably now own LinkedIn stock.

My original story from 2013:

I need to first explain that I have no particular special insight into this marketing mystery. I have no insider information whatsoever. I did post a question on Quora last week on this topic, but so far I have received no answers, to help me unravel this mystery. All I have is the observation of an informed technology marketing professional: me.

Over a year ago now someone on the UBC campus, who was thinking of developing an app, told me about this cool application for capturing cards into your contacts by photographing them on your smart phone. It was Cardmunch. It turned out that the application was only available on the iPhone at that time, but as luck would have it the company had just been acquired by LinkedIn. Voila! It would obviously only be a few months at most before I could obtain it for my Samsung Android smart phone, right? Wrong. That was over a year ago.

Common sense and the acquisition of Cardmunch by a major social media player, would say that addressing the Android market opportunity is not only an obvious huge potential revenue stream, but an imperative if Cardmunch is to survive as a major competitor in the card capture space. Not only that, being “agnostic” about OS platforms is the mantra of this market. The Android market is now dominant worldwide, and growing. Relinquishing the Android market to the competition, Cardmunch would lose literally millions of dollars. Surely Cardmunch and LinkedIn would not fail to act.

Over the year and a half since this issue first arose, questions have appeared on the Linkedin and Cardmunch support sites, and other websites as well. Where was Cardmunch for Android, and why is it taking so long? I did find one “mealy mouthed yada yada marketing speak” answer allegedly from one of the Cardmunch founders. The answer was boiler plate words about “serving our customers to the best of our ability,” wishing to “be responsive to our customers,” and most interestingly, something about needing to be able to provide sufficient servers to support the large increase in demand from Android users. Obviously, this all sounds like complete nonsense, considering the scale and big pockets of LinkedIn, and the amount of time that has been frittered away.

CamCard

Cardmunch internal politics and strategy no longer matter. Not surprisingly, after leaving open a window of competitive opportunity as big as an aircraft carrier for more than a year, the market has responded. A competitor, CamCard has appeared with a vengeance. A year ago there were no acceptable alternatives to Cardmunch. Today, if you go to Google Play, you will find perhaps a dozen Android card scan applications, in addition to CamCard. IMHO, and others, CamCard appears to be the best of the lot.

To me, a Silicon Valley veteran, this sounds like a story with much more to it than is being made public. Silicon Valley is legendary for feuds, fights and odd, eccentric personalities. No one seems to be talking publicly, but if someone does know the full true story of this marketing debacle, I invite them to come forward. I am only guessing, but this is one of those things that might make a good book.

The bizarre burning unanswered question is why did Cardmunch and LinkedIn allow this happen?

Latest IDC Mobile Market Report Underscores Importance of Industry Analysis

Students of Industry Analysis will note the importance of high technology industry analysis firms, like International Data Corporation (IDC), which this week issued its quarterly reports on the state of key technology markets. The report has been seized upon, sliced and diced by the Wall Street Journal, and a host of other media sources. The technology blogosphere is alive with comment, PandoDaily, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Gizmodo have all been furiously offering their own spins on the IDC Report. It is amazing to see so much of the industry talking about nothing else but IDC today. Similar firms like Forrester, Gartner and others offer similar industry analysis reports, but IDC is the big dog, and the mobile market is their dog food.

Android OS Was on Nearly 80% of Devices Shipped in the Second Quarter, IDC Says

Students of Industry Analysis will note the importance of high technology industry analysis firms, like International Data Corporation (IDC), which this week issued its quarterly reports on the state of key technology markets. The report has today been seized upon, sliced and diced by the Wall Street Journal, and a host of other media sources. The technology blogosphere is alive with comment, PandoDaily, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Gizmodo have all been furiously offering their own spins on the IDC Report. It is amazing to see so much of the industry talking about nothing else but IDC today. Similar firms like Forrester, Gartner and others offer similar industry analysis reports, but IDC is the big dog, and the mobile market is their dog food.

But There’s More…..

Some of the best industry trend information is not immediately obvious, buried in the depths of the report….My favorites

1. Microsoft’s Windows Phone is going nowhere fast at 3.7% market share. Microsoft shareholders are rumored to be agitating for change, and Steve Ballmer’s head may be on the block. Without Nokia’s support, Windows Phone would have an even smaller share of the market. Microsoft’s catastrophic blunder with Windows 8 has only added to their woes. IDC had previously correctly predicted this in 2012, which shows the reason for the immense interest in the IDC report.

2. Blackberry, despite doing an admirable job of turning things around, is still in freefall. Simply too little too late. This week’s latest resignations of key executives serves to underscore IDC’s analysis

3. The tablet market is a very different market from smart phones. It appears to be driven by the emotional devotion of iPad users, The entire tablet market seems to move on Apple’s moves, and the lack of any new iPad launches has depressed the entire market, This could suggest, as Blackberry’s CEO has said, that the tablet is not really a viable market. It may be squeezed between smart phones and the residual laptop market, and eventually disappear.

Read on….

Google Inc.’s Android software continues to steamroll the competition in smartphones, posing bigger problems for companies like Apple Inc., Microsoft and BlackBerry Ltd.

New data Wednesday from research firm IDC found that Apple’s share of the globalmarket slid to 13.2% in the second quarter from 16.6% in the year-earlier period. Handsets running Android, meanwhile, jumped to 79.3% from 69.1%.

The signs are particularly ominous for one-time market leader BlackBerry, despite some high-profile product announcements recently. Devices running its software accounted for just 2.9% of global smartphone shipments in the three months ended in June, compared with 4.9% for the same period in 2012.

Android is given away free to handset makers by Google, whose strategy is to make money on advertising associated with mobile devices. It has long powered smartphones offered by industry giantSamsung Electronics Co.,005930.SE +0.08% but has lately also benefited by Chinese companies such as Lenovo Group Ltd., 0992.HK -0.68%Huawei Technologies Inc. and ZTE Corp. that are grabbing a bigger chunk of the smartphone market.

“You are seeing tremendous growth in the developing world,” said Steve Mollenkopf, president and operating chief of mobile chip giant Qualcomm Inc. QCOM -0.58% Companies selling there are “picking up Android and driving that.”

Market share, of course, isn’t the same thing as making money. Apple earns more profit from its iPhones because it can charge more than rivals can. Its average sales price, excluding any carrier subsidies, was $710 in 2012, compared with an industry average for smartphones that year of $407, IDC estimates.

Smartphone Smackdown

Samsung, which is No. 1 by unit shipments, and No. 2 Apple account for essentially all the industry’s profit, Canaccord Genuity estimates. The firm puts Apple’s second-quarter smartphone operating profit at $5.99 billion, with an operating margin of 33%; it estimates Samsung’s profit at $5.63 billion, or 19%, including both smartphones and other handsets. Many others are losing money in the business, it estimates.

But high prices aren’t helping Apple’s share in some markets, said IDC analyst Ryan Reith, especially in some developing markets where most smartphones get sold for $390 to $450, he said.

Apple, which is expected to announce new products this fall, has also suffered from the lack of new handsets to drive demand now, Mr. Reith said. Apple’s shipments did grow 20% in the second period, IDC said, though lost share because the smartphone market grew more quickly. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

BlackBerry, which launched its new operating system in January, was overtaken as the No. 3 supplier of smartphone software in the second quarter by Microsoft Corp., whose share in smartphone software grew to 3.7% from 3.1% last year.

The Canadian company accounted for roughly a fifth of smartphone sales in 2009. But the impact of its new line of phones has been slight so far.

BlackBerry is “in a really tough spot right now,” Mr. Reith said. “They’ve shown their cards and the industry really hasn’t reacted the way they had hoped.”

A BlackBerry spokesman declined to comment.

Read more: following are my previous posts on the evolving Mobile Market Mega War:

Mobile OS Market Share: War of Titans Worth Following

Multidimensional Mobile Market War: Silicon Rust Belt

Mobile World Congress: Mega War Gets Even Weirder

Microsoft’s New End Game Strategy: Pray

Integrated Big Data, Cloud, Smart Mobile: Big Deal or Not?

The Task One iPhone Case: A Case Study of Mobile Market Excess?

Tonight I was channel surfing and stumbled on the Task One iPhone Case in a TV News feature story from an outfit called Task Labs.. Their website is up but not complete. It still has the Latin text of an incomplete webpage template, but you can buy it online if you wish. I want to emphasize that I wish to be completely fair here. I am a dedicated Swiss Army Knife aficionado and a dedicated smart mobile user. I have a simple version of a Swiss Army Knife with a corkscrew in my pocket as I write this. A corkscrew is one of my mandatory survival tools (smile). I have followed the Wall Street Journal coverage of the merger of the two Swiss companies that produce the knives. It is a great story and a great product. I have the full Boy Scout version in my tool drawer. The Task Labs people should also remember the tried and true publicity adage, “Any PR is good PR.”

The Task One iPhone Case with Swiss Army Knife Features

Tonight I was channel surfing and stumbled on the Task One iPhone Case in a TV News feature story from an outfit called Task Labs.. Their website is up but not complete. It still has the Latin text of an incomplete webpage template, but you can buy it online if you wish.

Read more: http://thetasklab.com/

I want to emphasize that I wish to be completely fair here. I am a dedicated Swiss Army Knife aficionado and a dedicated smart mobile user. I have a simple version of a Swiss Army Knife with a corkscrew in my pocket as I write this. A corkscrew is one of my mandatory survival tools (smile). I have followed the Wall Street Journal coverage of the merger of the two Swiss companies that produce the knives. It is a great story and a great product. I have the full Boy Scout version in my tool drawer. The Task Labs people should also remember the tried and true publicity adage, “Any PR is good PR.”

But I also have to admit that it took me a minute to realize that the TV story was not a Saturday Night Live parody skit, with Dan Akroyd trying get me to call and give him my credit card number. The Task One iPhone Case is a real product, though its website does not appear to be “ready for prime time.” Nor does the product concept appear to be ready for prime time, IMHO. I am certain that some of my readers will see this, and rush out to buy one, but other more discriminating consumers are more likely to start asking a lot of hard marketing questions about this new innovation. To me this product is an extreme example of everything that is wrong with innovation. Said another way, “Is that all there is?” Another great existential phrase many of us are now using says “Hey, it is what it is!”

The market positioning of this product according to the TV person, was simple. What do you do when you take your iPhone out into the woods with you on a hike, then realize that you have no cellular signal, no nothing. The Task One iPhone case is their answer. Let me know your opinion on the Task One iPhone Case.

I could probably go on for hours compiling a longer list of issues with this product, but here goes:

1. Kiss Your Phone Goodbye Going Through Airport Security: This one seems obvious. I cannot count the number of Swiss Army Knives i have personally lost at airport security. Then think about the number of Swiss Army Knives they have confiscated.

2. “Small” idea. The inspiration for this product is nothing new. It is simply trying to kludge together two things that work perfectly well on their own. So the real question is why bring your phone into the bush, when you need to leave the phone home, and bring your Swiss Army Knife? I know that some people will adamantly say that you should bring your mobile phone with you for GPS, etc. Perhaps, but no mobile phone GPS system was designed for use in the bush. Take your phone with you on a long hike, and try to use your GPS and you will see what I mean. Nor is a useful pocket knife designed to look like a phone. The Task One is a marginally useful appendage to a mobile phone, that will not fit comfortably in the palm as a knife does. It encourages a sense of complacency in the bush, when serious backcountry experts would probably laugh. Or is it for use to impress your friends, out on a Friday night at the local pub? The accessories appear to include all kinds of cool extra stuff, like a battery charger (Huh?). So as long we are brainstorming this product, it needs a compass. A mirror would be good. Remember all of the movies where the guy lost in the woods uses a mirror to signal rescuers? Any other suggestions?

3. Price. The price is $99. I can buy a comparable Swiss Army Knife for $30. Are you prepared to pay $99 for an iPhone case? Not sure about the price of the accessories.

4. The Market. The market may seem big, but wait a minute. Most smart mobile phones have different form factors, even the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5. So Task One and Task Labs must address a fragmented market with multiple products. This is starting to sound very complicated and expensive. Can I get one for my Samsung Nexus? No.

5. Marketing. I think that this company, like so many of these giddy mobile market companies, is so full of itself that it hasn’t thought through the distribution issues, including a half finished website.

The very fact that when I first saw the TV story, I assumed that it was a spoof, is a warning signal.

The knee jerk joke of “There’s an app for that!” isn’t really that funny. Many experienced Silicon Valley veterans have complained loudly about the current malaise of misplaced infatuation with mobile apps, as the apparent end all and be all of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreeson, Max Marmer and a laundry list of others have asked rhetorically how Silicon Valley could have lost its way so badly? Silicon Valley was founded on Big Ideas.

I published “Silicon Valley’s Misguided Love Affair With An App For Everything, ” and “App Development Boom’s Depressing Underbelly” after reading a New York Times story on the topic.

The Importance of “Convergence” In Market and Industry Analysis

I came across this book during my most recent visit to the UBC Vancouver campus. As good as I think this book is at focusing attention, in workbook style, on the importance of market and industry analysis, there is an issue that I think is not adequately addressed by any model or theory: not Porter, not STEEP or SWAT. Convergence is the issue.

If You Get Technology “Convergence” Wrong, Nothing Else Matters

So we have the problem of “convergence.” Great idea but the technology simply is not ready….yet.

The key takeaway lesson from this: do not underestimate the importance of technology convergence with a great idea.

Facebook Won’t Die. It Won’t Own The Web. It Will Just Be Mediocre

Kevin Kelleher has captured the conundrum Facebook finds itself in. A Catch 22 situation. I and some others I know, have felt this way for some time. The slow motion flash mob, or high velocity Adizes corporate life cycle of Facebook is reaching an obvious tipping point. I think people are tiring of the constant issues of abuse of privacy, and Kevin has also sensed the faddishness of it. Employers now scour Facebook before hiring anyone, so why go there anymore? Maybe another model will emerge to take Facebook’s place.

App Development Boom’s Depressing Underbelly: What Ever Happened To Big Ideas?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/business/as-boom-lures-app-creators-tough-part-is-making-a-living.html?ref=technology&_r=0

This morning’s New York Times published an article on the frothy boom in “app development” for Apple IOS and Google Android devices. The four page in-depth analysis of the “app industry,” paints a very depressing picture. For all of the hoopla about this area, the statistics suggest that it is little more than a bubble about to burst. More depressing it adds to the chorus of concern from leading thinkers on entrepreneurship, innovation and technology: ” Where Have All The Big Ideas Gone?” We have lost our way with innovation and the need to solve big problems. Angry Birds is not solving any big problem, and leading people like the couple in this article, to chase the ephemeral rainbow. This morning’s story will likely ignite a vigorous online debate, as it should.

The Washington Post published an article last year with the title, “Moral Decline and the End of Big Ideas.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/moral-decline-and-the-end-of-big-ideas/2011/09/14/gIQAQntJwK_story.html The author’s point is that it is a sense of moral duty to make the world a better place that drives someone to change the World. Or at least it should be..

Another opinion piece in the New York Times by Neal Gabler, also last year, asks where are the Big Ideas? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?pagewanted=all The Atlantic magazine had published a list of the ” 14 biggest ideas of the year,” the biggest of which, ironically was “The Rise of the Middle Class – Just Not Ours,” describing the rise of broad prosperity in the BRIC nations. The Atlantic list stimulated Gabler to predict a future of Big Data, but not Big Thought.. The implication I hear in Gabler’s editorial is that we are in a post Enlightenment time, a period of anti-intellectualism. I hope not, but I fear it may be true.

The list of luminaries who bemoan this situation keeps growing. It includes Max Marmer, founder of Startup Genome, whose Harvard Business Review blog post, “Reversing the Decline of Big Ideas,” has probably been reblogged and emailed around the World hundreds of times, and has stimulated millions of comments. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/reversing_the_decline_in_big_i.html. No less than Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape and now a venture capitalist himself, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, and John Doerr, my former Intel colleague, have also spoken out forcefully on the need for a deep rethink on the state of innovation in America. They are already on record that they aren’t interested in the next iPhone app.

We need more Big Thought on Big Ideas like the problem of heat dissipation and energy loss, being addressed by startups like Trajectory Design Automation, and water conservation technology, an area where Israel is the world leader. We need to regain our lead in the World of innovation by refusing to accept mediocrity and greed as the drivers of our economy.

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Batteries have become an intense area of research.

Going viral

Modified viruses help researchers boost battery performance

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Android OS Was on Nearly 80% of Devices Shipped in the Second Quarter, IDC Says

But There’s More…..

Read on….

Smartphone Smackdown

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