deal architect

Mobile: The mother of all wars?

PayPal’s lawsuit against Google is bringing into focus the massive stakes in mobile markets. More on that in a minute.

I was thinking about all kinds of scenarios from Blackberry World last month. There were Adobe and Facebook executives showing support. With Android binaries, Google’s ecosystem gets involved, even if Google wants to stay out of the fray. So do amazon and Verizon with their own Android app stores. And there was Microsoft, ostensibly only pushing Bing, not trying a Nokia-type coup. And Apple was watching amused from a distance.

Now onto mobile payments. To start with given parent eBay’s somewhat sluggish decade, people seem to have forgotten that PayPal has quietly become a major player when it comes to on-line payments. $ 90 billion processed last year with users in 190 countries. They have forgotten more about obscure regulatory compliance in many of those countries, fraud detection and money laundering in the last decade than most tech companies have learned.

While Google and Apple and amazon and others want a piece of mobile payments, even more so do the banks and the card companies. And they have the global reach and the regulatory savvy. And then there is the telcos, who definitely have the regulatory savvy if not the global reach.

Talking of telcos, Microsoft could use its Skype acquisition to gain plenty of leverage with them – or to compete with them for the obscene margins in mobile roaming.

And then there is SAP. While the positioning at the recent Sapphire event was on mobile apps for enterprises, its Sybase unit with its Mobile 365 acquisition has a relationship with most major telcos around the world.

Banks, telcos, enterprise software vendors, oh my! Consumers shouldn’t worry about Google Wallet, but more their own!

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

NYC’s digital future

A century of Indy 500

Travel & leisure’s Coolest new Travel Adventures

NetSuite’s SuiteWorld in 3 minutes

Outsourcing: Gulliver’s Travels

I was struck by two lists I saw this past week. One was in an advertising section in the back of the Fortune 500 issue from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) with its list of 100 outsourcing leaders (appears primarily sized based though IBM, TCS the largest Indian firm, Cognizant and others were missing). ISS, the firm ranked second on the list, which does facilities management, catering, security services etc had an ad which thanked its 522,835 employees. Yes, 522,835!

In contrast, I saw the Thiel Foundation (related to Peter Thiel the investor in PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn and a few other not-too shabby companies) list of 20 under 20 – young entrepreneurs who qualified for fellowships of $100,000 each (the list added 4 more after the initial 20 were announced). Peruse the list - amazing what these young folks have already accomplished so early in life. What’s interesting, even controversial, about the fellowship is it requires winners to drop out of school for 2 years. Indeed, the mother of one of the winners who will leave Harvard is quoted as saying  “This is a different paradigm from what I grew up with”

Two weeks ago, at Sapphire Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO of SAP hosted a group of bloggers and unsolicited, made the comment he wanted to meet with us because in the last few months he had become even more impressed with the power of individuals (as the Arab spring has shown forcefully).

The Sapphire expo floor was full of large, gargantuan booths of many of the firms in the IAOP list above. Yet, over and over again I heard questions about whether SAP would stick with its traditional larger partner firms as it rolls out its mobile ecosystem or whether it would emulate more of the Apple/Google model of entrepreneur created apps.

Outsourcing in many ways is at the crossroads. While some firms like Cognizant have been innovating and growing nicely (and this year cracked the Fortune 500 list), way too many have just become enamored with size in a world where individuals do seem to matter – and frankly have plenty of choices beyond becoming the 522,836th employee of a firm.

Welcome to a different paradigm than we all grew up with.

Imagine if Google and Apple were into consulting

Last week in Zurich at a data center event,  Google “spent the day laying out the best practices that any IT manager can do on a reasonable budget, such as maintaining hot and cool aisles, managing airflow, measuring the energy consumption in the facility, using outside air whenever available, running the data center at a higher temperature like 80 degrees, and optimizing power distribution.”

Fortune (subscription required) writes about Apple University where a group  of senior professors from Yale and Harvard “is writing a series of internal case studies about significant decisions in Apple's recent history. It's exactly the sort of thing the major business schools do, except Apple's case studies are for an Apple-only audience. Top  executives, including Tim Cook and Ron Johnson, teach the cases, which have covered subjects including the decision to consolidate iPhone manufacturing around a single factory in China and the establishment of Apple's stores. The goal is to expose the next layer of management to the executive team's thought process.”

Imagine if Google could come in and assess your data center. Imagine if innovation teams from anywhere were allowed to enroll in Apple U.

Now imagine if Google could charge you a percent of savings from your CSC or Accenture’s data center outsourcing fees. And if Apple could charge you based on the savings of not having to hire an IBM or McKinsey innovation strategy team.

Would that qualify as living on a Smarter Planet? :)

More New Florence

on the innovation blog

Google: From Paper mill to efficient data center

Under Armour’s Smart Shirt

The event technology at SAP’s Sapphire

Toyota “Friend”

2011 Space Odyssey – the Immersive Cocoon

Does IT matter?

Nick Carr raised a firestorm when he asked that question almost a decade ago. The world has moved on considerably since but Larry Dignan’s post this morning begs the question again:

“Peter Thiel, an investor in such technology hits as PayPal, Facebook and LinkedIn, launched his first class of fellows—young entrepreneurs looking to change the world. What surprised me most from looking at the list is how the information technology projects looked promising, but didn’t inspire much in the way of world-changing items.”

Yes, in our New Polymath world cleantech, healthtech, biotech and other tech just seem so much more promising than infotech.

The other thing my next book research is showing and this interview goes into  it in more detail is how much tech innovation is coming from outside of IT – broadly defined to also include not just the CIO but also the IT vendor ecosystem. It’s happening in smart products and services just about every industry is developing in their R&D/product engineering labs, and it is coming from well run consumer tech companies.

The really sad thing is these days is asking “does IT matter?” does not even raise a firestorm.

Two innovation conversations

Two great interviewers/moderators – Dennis Howlett and David Vellante - bring out plenty of banter in these interviews about innovation and where it is coming from. Both were conducted at the SAP event, Sapphire last week but the conversations are much, much broader than SAP.

Enjoy – with caveat they are longish about 20 and 30 minutes respectively

Dennis on JD-OD

David on SiliconAngle

More innovation

On the New Florence blog

The Pope’s call to astronauts in space

Tandoor 2.0 – reinventing 5,000 year old Indian oven

The new “railroad” flows through places like Prineville and Quincy

A decade of Apple stores

SAP – credit where it is due

As I read SapphireNow updates from fellow bloggers, analysts, journalists, it is clear I am one of the more cynical ones in the bunch. To twist a Frank Scavo quote my attitude is “Just because you talk about the future, you don’t get a pass from your past”

Having said that, in meetings with both SAP  co-CEOs this week, I complimented Mike Prosceno, Stacey Fish and team for how well they have pioneered and matured now for years their “blogger relations” program.

Actually to call us “bloggers” is understating the multiple dimensions we reflect and expect to hear about at events like Sapphire. Jason Busch wants to hear about sourcing, Bob Ferrari about supply chains, Frank Scavo about  topics of interest to SMEs, Brian Sommer about events based computing, Tom Raftery about Sustainability, Maggie Fox about social computing, Jon Reed about topics the SAP Mentors are particularly interested in. Dennis Howlett wants video opportunities, Michael Krigsman wants photo ops to use his masterful camera work. I want innovation fodder for New Florence and for my books. And on and on.

They do their best to accommodate most of our requests on the fly – even as they would rather us focus on the messages their executives would rather us focus on. 

An opportunity for Bose or Plantronics?

The lady in video below had to be taken off the Amtrak train because she refused to quit  on her phone in a designated “quiet car”

As wi-fly expands on planes, I am sure we will see more attempts to make Skype or Google Voice calls. Various surveys show air passengers want quiet on flights also.

So, why is there is no noise canceling technology which channels a person’s voice to a headset microphone but kills it from spreading to the people around?

Bose? Plantronics?