Posts Tagged ‘trends’

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Morgan Stanley’s Mobile Internet Report Setup – pt. 1

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

The following screenshots are taken from a presentation deck of 92 slides. Some of the details are irrelevant to Web / mobile entrepreneurs & startups (e.g. carrier-side of things), and thus I save you the pain from having to read the whole thing. The Mobile Internet Report Setup is part 1 (of 3) of Morgan Stanley’s annual data dump covering the mobile + web industry.

(Click for larger image)

If you’re an entrepreneur in this space, now is the time to *not* fall asleep.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Smartphone market share is growing globally.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

It’s the era of co-creation, nobody succeeds at it alone. A thriving 3rd-party application market place is key in a platform-play.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Counterintuitively, Internet usage on smartphones does not grow linearly to shipments of handsets (it’s much greater).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

The Facebook + Apple combo = poster child for the future of mobile + web apps. Apple focuses on the handset superiority (hardware, app distribution), while Facebook focuses on the application software layer, user experience .. which in this case the mobile app strategically complements it’s core app (the actual Facebook desktop Web site). Facebook focuses on the viral network effects of its app, which itself is also a platform.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Facebook’s Web platform is also thriving.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Old news, but voice revenues are dropping and data is becoming more and more valuable for end users, and to carriers (to compensate for voice revenues).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Smartphones do make a difference in enabling users to really consume the mobile Web and apps. Feature-phones just can’t handle it.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Yet further proof that in this era, the democratized Internet will prevail. Iron-fisted dictatorships (*cough* Apple *cough*) will not win in the long run (my prediction anyways).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

The rest of the world (ROW)’s mobile market usually lag what we see in Japan by a few years. Japan’s social networking trends shows us that social networking apps are increasingly being accessed from mobile at the expense of desktop.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

8 years. ROW lags Japan by 8 years.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Stay tuned for my summary of the other two slide decks .. those are some 600+ and 400+ slides long.

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Posted in apps, mobile, technology, trends, web 2.0 | Comments

Can we contribute to a conversation without being present?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Update 12/16/2009 — My “minimum viable product” (or at least the first very rough iteration of it) is complete. Check it out here http://www.jaysernbot.com. See how my own Twitter account is own its own, chatting up people (screenshot of day 1) I have never discovered before. I would love to hear from you!

I’m a geek and I like to automate stuff, because it’s cool and I am lazy. Not that we aren’t already suffering from chronic email fatigue, but with the advent of social media / Web 2.0 – especially Twitter – the more you try to keep up, the more you actually fall behind.

This sucks.

Case in point: You have to be constantly checking Twitter about what’s someone’s saying about you, or saying to you, or what someone’s saying about something (perhaps a topic of your interest where you have some domain expertise) – if you want to participate in the conversation. If people are tweeting about the ice hockey game right now, and you chime in 3 days later, you’re already out of the conversation. It’s all real-time (or at least “near” real-time) now.

Does anyone else wish that you could participate in a conversation without having to be tethered to your Twitter client 24/7 ?

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Posted in problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | Comments

A Thriving App Economy Key To Telcos, Social Networks, and Handset Manufacturers Survival

Monday, June 8th, 2009
  • Amazon.com was started with the idea that they would make money by shipping physical products. Today’s Amazon makes money by building a market place where every link that take you to a product is in fact an ad (revenue share). They make more money, not by shipping goods, but by referring customers to other goods.
  • In 2008, 3 billions apps where downloaded on the Internet, most on social network and mobiles. That’s 40-50 million daily active users
  • Today < 5% are paid apps, but that's ok because numbers shows that paid apps are trending up
  • Average app price people pay for is the price of an iTunes song, $0.99 – $2.99. There may be a threshold where people won’t pay
  • Many people have call-waiting which cost them $3.99/month, but do they even use it once a month? But you don’t hesitate paying for it again because they want the convenience of having it. Users will pay for apps
  • An app economy is emerging, with lots of little companies. There probably won’t be a big winners, but if you look at the aggregate, this could be a 1 billion revenue stream opportunity, perhaps a $10 billion market cap business.
  • It’s opportunity is viable, real, out there, just won’t support a large company today. A real trend that will continue grow. As Facebook grows, as smartphone industry grows, there’s going to be a need for new revenue sources to support these companies & activities.
  • Telcos: as voice rates continues to drop for telcos, flat-rate data plans begin to fill in these revenue gaps
  • Facebooks of the world: ad won’t support the model, need app-based economy
  • Take off your US-centric lens. People in other countries may not have iPhones but they do consume a lot of data apps
  • AT&T’s of the world: walled-gardens are coming down, because they are seeing the revenue opportunity. They will build their own app stores and take their 30% margin on the apps
  • As iPhone prices come down, AAPL will not be able to make money from hardware, they will increasingly need to rely on revenue from apps

The above is Ram Shriram‘s technology trend prediction, from the 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends at the Churchill Club. I couldn’t find the transcripts from that 2-hour long debate, so yours truly had to hit the YouTube replay a few hundred times over to capture the above. Too good to not capture!

You can watch the entire thing here:

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Posted in apps, mobile, problem-opportunity, silicon valley, social networking, technology, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

Tom Siebel on problems to focus on – if you’d like to change the world

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).

The big problems are .. *drumroll*:

  • food
  • water
  • healthcare
  • energy

Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population – with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.

Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):

  • He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.
  • The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.
  • IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”
  • “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”
  • The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.
  • It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)
  • These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.
  • Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.
  • He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.
  • He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.
  • He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.
  • The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.
  • C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)
  • C3′s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.
  • Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)

Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.

Tom Siebel – Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace

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Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, innovation, problem-opportunity, stanford, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

Oracle’s 20% price hike (rock) + Slumping economy (hard place) = where do you go?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

A snip from an interview with Red Hat’s new chief exec:

Q: What’s your biggest surprise since starting at Red Hat?

A: I think I finally get the joke. I was a senior exec and, like every other senior exec, I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as large as Red Hat’s revenues last year. You sit there and say: “Why are my IT costs going up, but I’m getting less and less functionality?”

Every IT professional says the same thing: “My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?” I get the joke now.

If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top 20 companies are tech and, other than Google, they’re not high-growth. But they’re just printing money because switching costs are so high. There’s this incredible amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we’re seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you’re pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can’t get off.

I chuckled as I read this. The switching cost problem sounds like the case between AT&T and Bell Atlantic in the 1980′s, which I coincidentally just recently blogged about recently.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana, in his book The Life of Reason.

I think the comment about Oracle’s 20+% price increase is certainly good news for on-demand SaaS/cloud computing players – to disrupt the market. As companies start tightening their belts, the pay-per-drink model would inevitably look a lot more enticing.

Even when placed between a rock and a hard place (between the US economic slump and technology behemoths’ Oracle-style price increases), the numbers show that companies still can’t afford to cut back on technology spending. Technology is a business competitive advantage.

According to research firm Gartner, “It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007.”

PC sales (especially laptops) are surprisingly stronger than expected, according to S&P’s Equity Research. “The latest evidence came from the Aug. 19 earnings report from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which said unit shipments of PCs rose 20% from a year ago”

The bottom line is that businesses can’t afford to be without technology. And with such pricing pressures, online business apps are just much easier on the wallet. $50 per user/year for Google Apps, or $350 user/year MS Office.

Granted, Enterprise Web 2.0 still has a long way to go to fill the shoes of traditional on-premise apps, but I am confident that more innovation will come (I certainly plan on being a part of that innovation!), and SaaS/cloud computing/Enterprise Web 2.0′s benefits will be too good to ignore – and eventually, its benefits would exceed those from the traditional legacy on-premise apps.

From CNNMoney/Fortune: Merrill Lynch estimates that online business applications will grow to a $95 billion market within five years. The market for online office software is “wide open,” said Guy Creese, an IT analyst with the Burton Group.

“My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?”

Yeah. It doesn’t make sense.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, problem-opportunity, regular reads, saas, technology, things to ponder about, trends, web 2.0 | Comments

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