Sony Ericsson, the London-based mobile handset maker, is shutting its Seattle-area office, as first reported by Engadget and Triangle Business Journal. Sony Ericsson is cutting about 2,000 out of 9,900 jobs globally, including closing offices in Research Triangle Park, San Diego, Miami, Kista, Sweden, and Chennai, India. The moves are part of a company-wide restructuring that includes moving its North American headquarters from Research Triangle Park to Atlanta, GA.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Corrected 9/28/09: Chase Jarvis is based in Seattle, not San Francisco. I regret the error and apologize to our Seattle readers!] Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis is known for his arresting, color-saturated images of people in motion—skiing, swimming, somersaulting. He’s also known for (literally) trademarking the phrase “the best camera is the one you have with you.” His point is that you don’t an expensive SLR to take great pictures. You can do a lot with the camera in your pocket or purse—which more likely than not is a camera phone.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

Original

Jewel

Paris

Slate

Candy

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

In addition to introducing you to a bunch of other creative souls, Best Camera will let you play with your own images and perhaps invent your own new styles. That’s thanks to a surprisingly flexible interface for applying various filters to your raw images and changing the order in which the filters are “stacked.” The filters themselves go well beyond the typical gray-scaling, contrast-enhancing, or redeye-reducing algorithms you’ll see in other iPhone image editing apps: working with Übermind, a Seattle software development firm that specializes in photography-related applications for desktops and mobile phones, Jarvis dreamed up a dozen effects altogether, including four “signature filters” inspired by his own photographic styles.

It’s hard to describe the signature effects in words, but one filter, called “Jewel,” gives photos a warm, rich, almost antique look, while another called “Candy” creates an intense, high-contrast, caffeinated feeling reminiscent of Jarvis’s advertising photography. At left, I’ve lined up examples of the same photo from my own iPhone album, altered using the “Jewel,” “Paris,” “Slate,” and “Candy” filters, respectively.

As someone who loves to spend time looking at other people’s photos and trying to understand their styles—I could spend hours using the “Explore” feature at Flickr—I think the community feature of Best Camera is especially fun. It’s a nice feeling to upload a picture and then see it appear in the public gallery, which is accessible right from the app. You can browse the gallery from a desktop browser, too, at www.thebestcamera.com; the bonus, if you go there, is that the “recipe” used for each photo—that is, the combination and order of digital effects the photographer chose—shows up right alongside the image. (You can see all of my Best Camera photos here.)

Jarvis certainly isn’t the only professional photographer singing the praises of camera phones. Shawn Rocco, a staff photojournalist at the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC, shoots with a long-since-obsolete Motorola E815 mobile phone. In fact, the American art world seems to be developing a bit of a fetish for …Next Page »

Comments (10) | Reprints | Share:        

After just a couple of weeks, Ryan Morel was hooked on Bumper Stars, a free game on Facebook. He and his co-workers were but a few of the tens of thousands of people playing the game, a mixture of ping-pong, pool, and shufflepuck, every month. Morel only wished someone would make a mobile version of the game so he could play it even more. Then he remembered that, as vice president of business development at PressOK Entertainment, based in Seattle, he could make that happen. After a few months of negotiation and six months of development, PressOK and Large Animal Games, the game’s original developer, rolled out Bumper Stars Mobile for the iPhone last week.

Translating games from one format to another is not new, but in the rapidly changing world of smartphone applications, it is an emerging trend. PressOK is one of the first mobile gaming companies to import a game in this manner, although it is rapidly becoming popular among game developers. “Developing a new game is much more difficult than translating a game,” Morel explained.

PressOK was born last September in a merger between mobile game makers Mobliss and Reaxion. Reaxion still exists as a development company based mainly in Russia and Belarus. PressOK is a publishing unit, with the combined game catalog and intellectual property of both companies before the merger, Morel said. Bumper Stars was created by New York-based Large Animal in 2007.

Bumper Stars, which is available for $2.99 in the Apple app store, “is the first real PressOK release,” Morel said. Mobliss had focused on games distributed by AT&T and Verizon to traditional cellphones. The new focus of PressOK is on games for smartphones like the iPhone and the Android, which will be getting its own version of Bumper Stars Mobile soon. Some of the games will be original, and some will be new versions of games in the PressOK catalog. About 80 percent of PressOK’s focus will be on smartphone games from now on, Morel said, including ports, original games, and translations of games in other formats. Morel said there is a revenue-sharing plan with Large Animal, although he could not provide any details.

Morel isn’t concerned that people might hesitate to buy a game that can be played for free online. The company plans on doing advertising and marketing for the next few months, at least, to boost the popularity and sales of the game even as they start working on the next one.

PressOK is one of many companies that sees new opportunities in smartphone games, where possibilities are not available to more old-fashioned mobile games. “In traditional mobile games, there’s a little bit of a sink or swim mentality,” Morel said. If a game does not succeed immediately, it tends to disappear from easily accessible options for games to play on the phone. In contrast, he said, there’s a lot that can be done to boost the profile and sales of iPhone and other smartphone games.

Success would be to get Bumper Stars into the top 25 of paid apps, but it doesn’t have to happen overnight. “The good news is that your success can be built over time,” Morel said. “Once it’s developed, it costs us really nothing to keep it in the app stores.” An existing Facebook version of the game helps, as there are only a few phone games with online versions. “It already has a substantial user base. We can tap into the existing group of people who enjoy the game,” Morel said.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Internet retailer Amazon today announced the launch of a new website focused on selling mobile phones and phone plans. AmazonWireless is limited to AT&T and Verizon plans but will expand as beta testing goes on. Currently, over 120 types of phone are available for sale. The main purpose of the site, according to the announcement, is to ease the process of buying or upgrading a phone or plan by getting rid of the paperwork and rebate mailing that an in-store purchase engenders.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says San Diego plays a key role in the Finnish mobile phone giant’s plans to stage a comeback in the U.S. market. Kallasvuo was questioned by Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg at the All Things Digital D7 conference in Carlsbad, CA, about Nokia’s (NYSE: NOK) decline with U.S. carriers. Nokia operates a handset engineering facility in San Diego specifically for the U.S. market and Kallasvuo said, “I’ve been working on this for a long time. And it’s kind of interesting, the idea that we’re in San Diego now; we have about 2 or 2.5 years ago started to make U.S.-market-specific products right here in San Diego.”

Back home in Finland, Kallasvuo famously said in 2006 he wouldn’t sleep until Nokia had improved its position in the United States. Nokia lost its No. 1 rank in the U.S. after missing the trend for clamshell phones and thinner designs. The Finnish company now has approximately 9 percent of the U.S. market, while globally the company’s market share is 35-40 percent. This week Nokia took flak after the debut of its Ovi application store flopped. (Ovi is Finnish for ‘door’)

Nokia cut its workforce in San Diego from 1,100 to 500 in late 2006 when the company retreated from its CDMA operations. Nokia’s San Diego operation focuses only on North America, so there would be handsets designed for the U.S. that exist nowhere else. That is an exception in the company’s global strategy. Last year, Nokia and San Diego’s CDMA giant Qualcomm settled their legal disputes, and in January the two former rivals announced they were cooperating in the development of U.S. mobile devices.

Kallasvuo was showing Nokia’s new flagship phone, the N97, at the D7 conference yesterday. But the N97 does not have a U.S. carrier, and it costs $699.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Dashwire, a mobile-Web software startup, has closed a $1.6 million round of financing (out of a $2.3 million offering), according to a regulatory filing. The round was led by Seattle-area investor Geoff Entress, who has previously backed the company and serves on its board, and Best Buy Capital, who has added Ying Zeng to the board. Best Buy looks to bring some important expertise and insight into consumer preferences to what this startup is doing.

Dashwire makes software that runs on your cell phone and automatically uploads content like pictures, videos, contacts, phone records, and text messages to its servers, which you can access through a Web dashboard. The service lets you do things like share photos to Facebook or Flickr, manage your cell phone minutes online, send mobile text messages from your desktop, and migrate content from one phone to the next.

Ford Davidson, Dashwire’s founder and chief executive, says he’s excited by the new funding and the market opportunities it will open up. “We’re growing our business right now,” Davidson says. “We will hire a few more developers. We’ll have some new things released later in the year, and we’re cranking away on it.”

Dashwire currently runs on Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems—and on handsets ranging from Nokia, Samsung, and LG to Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and HTC. A BlackBerry product is slated to come this fall, followed by a product for the Google Android platform. Davidson succinctly describes his company’s offering, which is actually pretty complex, as a way to “synchronize your mobile content, synthesize your data on a private website, and socialize it with your friends.”

Davidson started the company in 2006 with the goal of integrating mobile phones with personal computers and the Web. Before that, he was a Windows Mobile product manager at Microsoft for three and a half years, and says he was frustrated that Microsoft wasn’t focusing on the consumer market. “People were asking me questions. I sat through meetings with [wireless] operators and device manufacturers complaining to Microsoft about how hard it was to set up their phones. They were saying, ‘Listen guys, we’re seeing device returns larger than we’d expect, and trouble with users getting up and running with their devices.’ These phones have amazing capabilities, and I knew corporate customers were set, but consumers were going to hit problems.”

Indeed, those problems have driven the growth of a whole new mobile sector. In the past year, big companies like Google, Microsoft, Nokia, and Apple have been investing heavily in “connected services,” Davidson says, which is shorthand for software to help make mobile devices more user-friendly with the Web. “Look at those giant software companies investing in services for their particular phone platform. The space has gotten way more exciting for our business. We are cross-platform. I’m even more bullish about the market to support what we’re doing.”

Dashwire currently employs six full-time staff and five contractors, and Davidson says he’s looking to hire three or four more people. In terms of the competition, Microsoft bought the Portuguese software firm MobiComp last year, and has released a mobile Web service called MyPhone that’s in early days. Locally, Dashwire also sees some overlap with Seattle-based Ontela, a mobile photo uploading and sharing service, and Ovi Share, the Nokia-run service based on the former startup Twango’s technology (though the latter is closing its Kirkland office).

But the crowded space doesn’t seem to faze Dashwire. “We’ve learned quite a bit from usage,” says Davidson, a Bellevue native and Harvard University alum (who says he’s going to a Red Sox-Mariners game this weekend). “We hope to keep being nimble and stay ahead of the pack.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

One of the great pleasures of being a journalist is listening to influential leaders discuss where they come from and how it affects their strategy. Luke and I recently sat down with Tom Alberg, co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. In addition to sharing his thoughts on the future of newspapers and online media, Alberg spoke extensively about his career and how he has witnessed, and participated in, the rise of the technology industry in Seattle.

Let’s take a big step back here. At Xconomy, we’re about delivering the most important breaking news and in-depth analysis of tech and life sciences innovation. But it’s hard to fully appreciate all the latest trends unless you understand the perspectives of the top players. In our interview, Alberg touched on the early days of his career as a lawyer at Perkins Coie in the late ’60s, his later stints as president of LIN Broadcasting and executive vice president of McCaw Cellular, and the birth of Madrona in the mid ’90s. Along the way, he built notable relationships with leaders in wireless, medical devices, and e-commerce—people like Craig McCaw, Jeff Bezos, and Gordon Kuenster of ATL (and more recently, Asemblon).

Maybe you know all the history already, maybe you don’t. Certainly the story of Madrona’s involvement with Amazon has been told many times. But I bet the broader story of Alberg’s career and his observations from the local scene will give people a deeper understanding of Seattle-area innovation and Madrona’s role in the business community.

Here is an edited account of our conversation:

Xconomy: So tell us about your early days in Seattle.

Tom Alberg: My career has paralleled, a little bit, the growth of the technology industry. I started off as a young lawyer in 1967. In those days, there were a few high-tech companies. There was Fluke Manufacturing, and Physio-Control was about to start. There wasn’t much. Seattle had Boeing, and it would go through phases of being less about airplanes, more about computer services and other things. But there were little companies, and there was starting to be more entrepreneurship. When I joined Perkins, I’d been in New York a couple of years, so I was an expert, I thought, in securities law and raising money. But I’d been dealing with hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar deals, not startups. For some reason, I always had a technology interest.

One of the early things that happened was a guy came in named Gordon Kuenster. He’d been a Boeing executive and had been hired to run this startup called ATL [Advanced Technology Laboratories], an ultrasound company out of the University of Washington. He comes into Perkins because Perkins handles The Boeing Company. I’m the low man on the totem pole, so the partner in charge of Boeing has me come and meet with this guy. The partner said, ‘I don’t know, we don’t really do startups.’ I had to plead, ‘Let’s try it!’

X: How did ATL play a role in the rise of the Seattle tech scene?

TA: ATL became a major success at the same time as Physio-Control. Physio went public, and ATL got bought by Squibb for $60 million—big money in those days [1979]. And then what happened was, Hunter Simpson at Physio-Control and Gordon Kuenster at ATL, they invested in some other companies. People who made money in those companies invested in some companies. And then the biotech thing started. I represented Immunex when it first started [in 1981]. It went public, the stock crashed, it survived all those years somehow. So on the biotech side, a bunch of stuff started happening. There was quite a bit of activity, but nothing like it is today.

And then, of course, there was Microsoft. So in 1990, I was still at Perkins. It was a good technology practice. I went over to McCaw Cellular, partly because I was interested in technology. McCaw was sort of a secret company in Seattle. It was in the cell phone business; nobody had cell phones. There was that phone in some people’s cars, sort of like a radio phone or something. Nobody knew much …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Audience, a Mountain View, CA-based company that makes voice-processing software to reduce noise in cell phones, announced it has closed a $15 million Series D round of financing from existing investors, including Seattle-based Vulcan Capital. Other investors in the round were New Enterprise Associates, Tallwood Venture Capital, and VentureTech Alliance.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat …Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle mobile startup Ontela is announcing today that its photo-sending service for camera phones is now available through T-Mobile, via a partnership with the photo-sharing website Photobucket. The news comes on the heels of Ontela’s software going live on Verizon Wireless phones in November (also through Photobucket), as well as being pre-installed on four of the top five handset manufacturers—Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and LG—as of last month.

Together, these deals could represent a tipping point for Ontela, which in the past year has been signing up wireless carriers and social websites en masse in an effort to become a mainstream service for sending and uploading pictures from mobile devices. Its software automatically sends photos from your camera phone to your e-mail inbox, computer, or photo-sharing site. Ontela sells its software to wireless carriers, who in turn bundle and sell the service to subscribers as part of a monthly package. The company was formed in 2005 and is backed by some $15 million in venture funding from Steamboat Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Eastven Venture Partners.

To get the story behind the T-Mobile deal, I visited Ontela CEO Dan Shapiro at his company’s digs in the historic Smith Tower in Pioneer Square. We strolled up to the famed “Chinese Room” on the 35th floor, which is filled with intricately carved decorations and wood furniture, a gift from the Empress of China to tycoon L.C. Smith. The outdoor deck gave us a great view of downtown Seattle, Elliott Bay, and the surrounding mountains (that day was a bit drizzly, though). Back in the office, Shapiro gave me a demo in which he installed the photo-uploading software on a random phone in about a minute, took a picture, and e-mailed it to me. Most other mobile applications are “freaking impossible to install,” he pointed out.

The T-Mobile deal brings the total number of carriers offering Ontela’s software to 30, Shapiro said. All the top handset manufacturers except for Apple now offer the service, and this is the first time it’s available on smartphones and BlackBerries. No Android G1 yet, though—and apparently the iPhone is not a very good fit for Ontela. Nevertheless, Shapiro said, “We’re really excited. About half of U.S. subscribers can get our service now.” He added that T-Mobile’s subscriber demographics are a really good match with Ontela. “T-Mobile users take a lot of pictures,” he said. “With the launch of their new applications store, they’re poised to do amazing things with this product.”

Shapiro also told me about how the latest deal came about. “It took two and a half years of having thoughtful conversations with carriers about what’s important to them,” he said. “‘Here’s what we think you’re doing, and here’s how we think we can help move the needle on your business.’” Whether it’s reducing costs or providing a service that customers really want, Shapiro said, a deep understanding of the carriers’ needs is crucial. “Listening as well as telling—that’s important. ‘Here’s how we can help you build your business.’ That takes a long time.”

Lastly, I asked Shapiro whether the close proximity of T-Mobile’s headquarters (Bellevue, WA) played any role in the deal-making. He replied that the key meetings actually took place outside the Seattle area—typically at big wireless conferences in places like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Barcelona.

It reminded him of how he originally met venture capitalist Tom Huseby, the mobile guru who is chairman of Ontela’s board. It was February 2006, and they were all in Barcelona for a 3GSM World Congress meeting. Just milling around, Shapiro happened to spot Huseby’s nametag on his shirt and introduced himself. The two hit it off, and Shapiro ended up giving Huseby a photo-uploading demo. Having their first meeting in Barcelona was kind of funny, seeing as Huseby’s office was just a couple blocks away from Ontela. But it fits with the notion that in the mobile world, it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you have a connection.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

At a moment when it seemed like the San Diego Chargers still had a chance to win Sunday’s NFL playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, my daughter’s cell phone issued a high-pitched “beep-beep-beep.” Some guy named “Rio” in Pittsburgh sent a photo of a black Steelers helmet to her cell phone. The image was accompanied by an audio clip from a key scene in the movie “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” in which Will Ferrell’s anchorman concludes a newscast by reading aloud an epithet addressed to San Diego. The “f” word epithet.

This vignette came to mind while I was driving to the Del Mar office of Martin Cooper, who started the long march of innovation that has made such mobile wizardry possible.

Cooper is the inventor named on U.S. patent 3906166 for a “Radio telephone system.” He is known as the father of the cell phone, the inventor of the first portable wireless handset, and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone—on April 3, 1973, from a street in New York City. At the time, he was working as a general manager in the communications systems division of a company called Motorola.

“They made car radios, that’s where the name came from,” Cooper told me after we sat down to talk. “The company was founded in Chicago in 1928. I remember that particular date because that’s the same year I was born.”

Cooper, who turned 80 last week, says journalists always ask about that first cell phone call. Their fascination with the call puzzles him a bit; he finds the technology and the corporate strategy more compelling. Yet he concedes the call was almost as significant a milestone as …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Mumbai-Delhi, Tuesday, December 23—I boarded the overnight train to Delhi at Bombay Central Terminal (the mixed use of old and new city names for Bombay is a metaphor for old and new India—the old structures retain the original Bombay, and everything new is named Mumbai). I had forgotten to print out my e-ticket and was prepared to battle/sweet talk my way onto the train. My last train ride in India was over 20 years ago, and I have a lasting memory of patiently standing in a queue that never moved to purchase a ticket, as people kept muscling their way to the front of the line. Getting on the train required sharp elbows and more than likely the conductor had sold your seat to the highest bidder. The contrast this time was stark. I had to pay Rs.50 ($1) to get a ticket printed out on the train. The familiar red-clad coolies/porters were still around, but there was no need for their help; the boarding of the train was orderly, seats were assigned, and the conductor was Amtrak-like amiable.

The train departed Mumbai on time, the orderlies prepared my bed in the four-bed compartment with spartan but crisply laundered sheets, and I promptly went to sleep. A couple of hours later I was joined in my compartment by two gentlemen who had boarded at an unknown station. I was on the Rajdhani express, a series of overnight trains between the metropolitan cities in India. My ticket had cost about $65, a flight would have been $110. I wanted to experience train travel and get a sense of the geography of India’s industrial corridor running between Mumbai and Delhi, encompassing the modern states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, the central state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), the tourist state of Rajasthan, and the largest and one of the poorest states in India, Uttar Pradesh (UP). I was traveling on the most expensive ticket on the Rajdhani; the least expensive was about $1.50.

I woke up at the crack of dawn when the porter entered the compartment to offer tea. I watched the sun rise over a misty, flat landscape. Everywhere I have been in India the sky is hazy. I cannot ascertain if it is industrial pollution, winter mist, or smoke from wood fires, or perhaps a mix of all three. Even here in the countryside the sky is hazy. It is as if the entire country is an incense-filled temple. The passing landscape is a dusty brown and is dotted with patches of green marking small farms, stunted trees, and an occasional herd of cows. Every 30 minutes or so we pass through a small town with a train station. Garbage is strewn everywhere on the tracks, and occasionally there is a garbage dump alongside the tracks at the edge of a town, with foraging pigs and cows.

One of my companions is a Sikh gentleman (see photo) whose cell phone jingles a bhangra ringtone every few minutes. He appears to be a little under the weather and sleeps in between calls and occasional visits from people on the train: “Papa-ji kaisay ho!” (How are you, pops?). Just passed a larger town called Ratlam. We must be in MP, since this where my wife used to get off to go to Indore, the capital of MP, and onto the hill station of Mau to visit her aunt.

The landscape is greener now, dotted with yellow fields of mustard, irrigation-fed no doubt as the last rainfall was likely during monsoons in July/August. The train passes over largely dry riverbeds. Power lines and telecom towers are everywhere. Motorcycles and trucks wait at level crossings. Kachrod station passes by in a flash of yellow walls and red bougainvillea. A field of cotton with a dozen men and women hand picking. A southbound flatbed freight train passes by, our train slows down with jerky braking, dwarf palms dot the sides of the tracks. I recall Yasheng Huang of MIT mentioning that India is a tropical country while China is a temperate country and life is more difficult in tropical climates. Two days before Christmas I am sitting in an air-conditioned train looking out at laborers working in what appears to be hot sun. In the bathroom I poke my hand out the open window and the air feels cool. We fly by Nagda, a larger town in MP. I have a conversation with a porter in the hallway. Apparently this is a special Rajdhani that runs during holiday periods. He says that it is not as luxurious as the daily Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi.

I don a long-sleeved t-shirt as the AC is slightly chilly. I have managed to avoid …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The world might not be completely flat, but a bulldozer has been working overtime on leveling the global innovation playing field—and many previously emerging nations are establishing themselves as serious competitors to the U.S. India is near the top of the list. Previously known in the technology world as a place for cheap outsourcing of IT talent, it is now a hotbed of hypercompetition and entrepreneurial activity, even as it struggles with core issues of health, corruption, and an unfair legal system dogging emerging nations.

For those of you who would like a personal, close-to-the-scene snapshot of India’s innovation landscape, I’d like to draw your attention to the still-unfolding series in our Forum penned by Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan, who is touring the country right now. In five short, easy-to-digest installments, Nijhawan takes readers on a fascinating journey, from New Delhi’s teeming cell phone (and cell phone unlocking) marketplace to Chandigarh, home to a great engineering college and a “nascent life sciences industry forming…around agricultural products” to his most-recent installment from Mumbai and the TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Entrepreneurial Summit.

It isn’t all a pretty tour. Along the way, Nijhawan provides a view of India’s murky property situation, which he contrasts to its much more effective system of intellectual property protection; government corruption and ineptitude; and India’s problems with clean water, which he thinks might lead to a possible collaboration with Boston University, where he is a lecturer and executive-in-resident at the School of Management.

There’s a lot more I haven’t mentioned, but you get the idea. You can take the tour below:

Dispatch from India’s Innovation Front Lines

India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 2: Of Industry-Targeted Degrees, Water, and Spinoffs

India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 3: Of Property Markets, Both Physical and Intellectual

India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 4: Of Hyper-Competition and Corruption

India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 5: The Emerging Entrepreneurial Class

India’s Innovation Front Lines, Part 6: Return to Pune, the Boston of India

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Bangalore, December 15—For 45 after independence, Indian companies for all practical purposes operated without competition. Monopolies were granted by the government for extended periods. Many fortunes were made, both by industrialists and corrupt politicians. Consumers had to wait years for “luxury” goods such as cars and telephones. This began to change in 1992, when in the face of an economic collapse the Indian economy began to reform. Slowly, industrial sector after sector was opened up to multiple competitors, even foreign ones. The IT industry evolved slightly differently, as the government babus (bureaucrats) were so used to regulating physical goods that the industry was able to export its bits and bytes via satellite links without intervention.

Today India has hyper-competition in many industries and consumers are the net beneficiaries. There are five major wireless carriers with about equal market share (contrast this with the U.S., which is rapidly moving to a duopoly of Verizon and AT&T). As a result, cell phone voice calls in India are the cheapest in the world. My monthly cell phone bill in Boston averages $120 or about $4 per day. I am spending about 50 cents a day in India. (But cell phone conversations in India still tend to be quick and short, which I can only attribute to how costly phone calls used to be just a few years ago.)

There are a multitude of startup companies offering value-added services in this vibrant ecosystem. I met a young engineer who had bootstrapped a company to offer mobile Internet advertising services to brands. He was saying that the growth of mobile Internet usage in rural cities was exploding as small scale businessmen had no other way to access the Internet for relevant content such as local weather, crop prices, etc.

Similarly there is significant competition amongst domestic airlines. The customer service on these airlines reminds me of flying in the 1980s in the U.S. Call centers that respond within seconds, ground staff that is friendly and efficient and best of all, in-flight service that astounds (I just had a flight attendant service a bathroom after a particularly long-winded customer!). My sister-in-law just flew from Delhi to Toronto on a Jet Airways flight and said it was the best business class experience she had ever had, and she is a frequent and demanding flier. I was conversing with an executive at the biggest training school for airline staff and she said that they train about 2,000 customer service reps annually. Only the crème de ala crème make it on to planes as flight attendants, and yes, looks are an important criteria.

In contrast, almost any government-run service is horrendous. Delhi’s domestic airport was mobbed at 5:30 a.m. for early morning flights. Security was overwhelmed and chaotic. I witnessed a shouting match between a patiently queuing customer and someone jumping to the head of the line because they were late for a flight.

There are exceptions, of course. The entire city of Delhi appears to be under construction, with an extensive expansion to their 4-year old metro (subway) underway to be ready for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Crews are literally working 24×7 with minor disruption to traffic. I contrast this to the Winter Street exit off Rte 95 in Waltham, MA, where the repairs on a single bridge have been going for over three years with no end in sight.

Interestingly, elections are hard fought in India because politicians end up in personally lucrative monopolies. Since they may be in power only for a single term, they try to extract as much graft as they can. Government-led corruption is the bane of emerging economies from democratic India to autocratic China. Fortunately, India has a highly competitive press corps that is valiantly trying to inform the public about government’s misdeeds. In the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attack, some politicians’ heads rolled as a result of press coverage of their ineptitude. In the U.S. no leader lost their job as a result of the security lapses in advance of 9/11.

Nevertheless, the Indian public would gladly trade the U.S. public sector for India’s. Perhaps our multitude of outsourced government contractors should set up in India and begin lobbying for outsourced services from the Indian government, a win-win situation for both countries!

[Editor’s note: This is Part 4 of a travelogue by Xconomist Vinit Nijhawan, who is in India visiting venture capitalists and startups with an eye to bridging the Boston and Indian startup ecosystems. We published Part 1 on December 5, Part 2 on December 8, and Part 3 on December 10.]

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

There’s a reason why the excitement in the mobile application development world has shifted to new platforms such as the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android operating system. It’s because it’s relatively easy to write and disseminate cool software for these systems, which offer a) lots of support for powerful graphics and communications, b) access to hardware features like the phones’ built-in cameras, accelerometers, and GPS chips, and c) popular, accessible marketplaces for selling or distributing new apps to users.

But the fact remains that more than 80 percent of the cell phones sold every year are not smartphones with PC-like interactivity, like the iPhone or T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone—they’re “feature phones” with smaller screens, no keyboards, and operating systems based (for the most part) on the Java programming language. The carriers who sell these phones usually control which programs come pre-loaded on the phones’ “decks” or top-level menus, and they don’t make it easy for consumers to locate or download new programs. So it’s no wonder developers are deserting the feature phone market.

But a venture-funded Boston startup that emerged from stealth mode today—Everypoint—wants to reverse that trend. “No one is talking about all these Java devices, but they are shipping in great quantity,” says Alan MacKinnon, Everypoint’s founder, president, and CTO. “They are still the de facto standard. The problem is that the features for developers are non-existent. They are very powerful devices, but to build an application for them is very hard.”

To fix that problem, MacKinnon and his colleagues at Everypoint have spent the last three years creating a system called “Nemo” that’s designed to give feature phones smartphone-like capabilities. In a nutshell, Nemo provides a unified software environment for inexpensively developing, delivering, and running Java-based mobile applications, ranging from information services like stock tickers and weather and sports reports to instant messaging, social networking, photo sharing, and mobile games. Judging from the demos MacKinnon showed me, phone owners who open Nemo-based apps will enjoy the same slick graphics, attractive fonts, and fast access to real-time data that originally attracted many consumers to smartphones.

Everypoint is a 16-person company that has quietly raised two venture rounds totaling $14 million from local investors Venrock, Prism VentureWorks, and Fairhaven Capital (whose theme-driven investment philosophy we recently profiled). For its coming-out today, the company is releasing a full software development kit that programmers can use to start building applications that run in the Nemo environment, as well as a free beta download of the environment itself, which runs on Java phones and includes both a common graphics engine and a communications infrastructure that “pushes” data to Nemo-enabled phones, similar to the way Blackberry users get their new e-mail. The company has also developed some two dozen sample applications that run in the Nemo environment, such as a weather app and a real-time stock price display. It’s sharing the source code for these programs to give third-party developers a head start on building their own apps.

With Nemo, “developers are going to be able to develop great-looking applications on these regular devices,” says MacKinnon, a veteran of Palm, D.E. Shaw, and American Airlines. “Everyone loves their smartphones, but there are so many devices out there that need a platform like this to unleash their capabilities.”

When users download the Nemo software package for their phones (technically, it’s a “runtime environment” similar to Java itself), they also get a catalog of all the applications available for Nemo. Over time, this catalog should fill up with offerings from third-party developers, who will be able to make money by …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Rave Wireless, a Framingham, MA, startup that makes security and emergency alert software for mobile phones, has closed a $7 million Series D financing round, according to a November 15 report in PE Hub that cited regulatory filings. The report said Rave has now raised about $42 million, with major contributions from Bain Capital Ventures, Sigma Partners, RRE Ventures, and Trilogy Equity Partners.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

As the CDG North America Regional Conference convenes in San Diego today, Perry LaForge, the trade association’s chief executive, says he has a lot to feel good about.

LaForge says he started working on behalf of CDMA, or code-division multiple access, after getting a preview of the wireless technology in 1988, when San Diego’s Qualcomm was barely three years old. It wasn’t until 1989 that Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs actually demonstrated his concept to the telecommunications industry.

“I pulled together the initial carrier consortium,” says LaForge. “I worked with the Japanese and Koreans… We convinced Samsung and LG to produce cell phones based on CDMA.”

LaForge’s has a bigger and more formal role now as head of the CDG, the CDMA Development Group. Looking back over the past 20 years, he says, “I think we have fundamentally changed the wireless landscape…We fundamentally changed an industry” that had already committed to a rival wireless technical standard. “It’s something that I take a great deal of pride in.”

The CDG represents roughly 100 leading CDMA operators and wireless equipment manufacturers. Yet as several hundred people gather for the two-day conference, industry questions about the viability of CDMA still seem to linger.

Even though Qualcomm ranks today as the world’s second-biggest maker of wireless chips, the rival GSM Association (for Global Systems Mobile communications) says 82 percent of the global market for mobile devices is based on its digital technology standard.

Despite GSM’s global dominance, and a broader migration to next-generation GSM technologies, LaForge maintains that CDMA operators continue to upgrade their networks to provide capacity for escalating voice and bandwidth-intensive data traffic

“There’s a lot of talk about 4G systems, but one thing I suspect is that when there are economic downturns that people tend to hunker down with the systems they have,” LaForge says. CDG members also have worked aggressively to reduce costs, getting the cost of CDMA handsets below $30 apiece, LaForge says.

The global economic downturn became apparent at Qualcomm earlier this month when the chip maker reported a 22 percent drop in profit in the quarter that ended in September.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told analysts last week that in the face of slowing demand, the company has stopped developing a next-generation wireless technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband, or UMB. Jacobs says the chip maker will put its resources into another high-speed technology called Long Term Evolution that Verizon Wirelss and other major customers have backed.

Jacobs indicated, though, that he expects the wireless industry to go through a pause, rather than a downturn, amid the broader financial crisis—a sentiment that LaForge echoed in our conversation yesterday.

“The macro-economic environment obviously impacts a lot of different sectors,” LaForge said. “But a lot of folks believe that the wireless industry in general will probably fare better than other sectors.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego-based Qualcomm, which is famous for its CDMA wireless communications chips but is also a leading maker of GPS chips for cell phones and other devices, has signed a deal with Boston’s Skyhook Wireless that will move it toward hybrid location-finding technologies.

Qualcomm will incorporate Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning System—a software system that determines a device’s location based on the identities of nearby Wi-Fi networks—into its gpsOne line of Assisted GPS chips, Skyhook announced today.

“Combining Skyhook’s technology with our gpsOne offering will enable users to obtain location fixes much more rapidly and provide for a more ubiquitous [location-based services] experience whether indoors, outside or in complex environments such as urban areas,” Jason Bremner, senior director of cellular products for Qualcomm, said in a statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Acton, MA-based Tatara Systems, a mobile communications software company, said last week that it has sold its broadband mobile product line to Smith Micro Software for an undisclosed sum. The company said the sale would allow it to focus on systems that let corporate users to access voice-over-Internet telephony services on their cell phones.

Comments | Reprints | Share: