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Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

Sequoia Communications shutting down

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Gerbsman Partners, Market research, Mobile, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , on August 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an excellent article from the VC dispatch at Wall Street Journal.

“Though demand for mobile phones is at an all-time high, Sequoia Communications Inc., a developer of components for the devices, has found itself unable to raise additional venture capital and is closing its doors, according to an investor.

The San Diego company had raised about $64 million from nine venture firms over several rounds beginning in 2001, VentureWire records show.

Luis Arzubi, a general partner with Tallwood Venture Capital, which participated in three funding rounds for Sequoia, said the company felt the pinch from the world’s economic slowdown, competition from name-brand tech companies and the difficulty of keeping the company’s components in compliance with the rules and protocols of numerous overseas markets.

“The company was running behind its original schedule,” Arzubi said. “Venture capitalists are very cautious, and afraid of throwing good money after bad.”

The company developed a transceiver for mobile phones that worked well, he said, and had signed up customers. Sequoia was about a year away from breaking even when investors pulled the plug, he said.

Transceivers are one of many electronic components that enable wireless communication. They are capable of tuning in, modulating and broadcasting standard cell signals. Transceivers also exist in other electronics and are used to pick up and broadcast other types of signals.

Semiconductor giants such as Qualcomm Inc. and Infineon Technologies AG also build transceivers, and they have more resources to bring to bear on the process, Arzubi said. They also have a diversified line of products, which Sequoia did not.”

Read the fulla article here.

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Apple Hits 1 Billion App Store Downloads

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Mobile, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 24, 2009| 4 Comments »

Since its inception in July last year, Appstore has become a steady and viable business model for Apple. With over 1 Billion downloads, its fair to say that the rest of the mobile industry needs to take a very close look at the model.

As a result, Apple can now show some very significant numbers towards the mobile content market.

“There are over 37 million devices running Apple’s mobile operating system: over 21 million iPhones and over 15 million iPod touches (with 35,000+ apps available in the store) according to the company. Besides driving the success of the App Store, these devices also helped Apple control 50 percent of the mobile ad market and drive the most mobile OS Internet traffic in the U.S., according to the latest market reports.”

In relation to mobile advertising, the PC World story continues;

“AdMob’s research shows that the iPhone and iPod touch serve around 50 percent of the mobile ad requests in the U.S., followed by Research In Motion with 22 percent and Windows Mobile with 11 percent. Worldwide, Apple’s handsets go neck-to-neck with Nokia‘s when it comes to traffic generated by smartphones. AdMob’s data shows that Apple’s devices drive the most traffic world wide, counting in at 38 percent.”

Mashable, which mainly covers Web 2.0 news, made an interesting comparrison.

“The milestones comes just over three months after the company surpassed 500 million downloads, and about nine months since launching.

While it’s certainly an enormous milestone, how does it compare to some other massive numbers that various Web companies have reached recently? Here’s a look at a few huge stats:

While impressive in its own, and somewhat unrelated to eachother – web.20 have proven to produce some gigantic numbers that are serving as benchmarks for success.

Comprehensive blog coverage can be found here:  IntoMobile, MediaMemo, TechCrunch, SciTechBlog

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Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Intellectual capital, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Technology, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.

I recently finished a iPhone project with a company out of Sweden, Resolution Interactive. My task was to reshape the business model from traditional PC- online to something fruitful. Coming into to the company early last spring, the finances was well below bad, the team was in dissaray, and the revenues where nill. When iPhone developer program then came available in mid april, we saw the chance and made a jump for it. Although pretty messy to begin with, Apple continued to publish supporting materials, reached out with a network of visionaries and helped us go through the ups and downs of discovering a new market, new business model and new way of marketing.

When we in mid October release the first game – Clusterball Arcade – we received som good reviews and quickly went for title nr. two – AquaMoto Racing. Succesful in my mission, I was able to create a new businessmodel and find a new market for a struggling game company – this with the help of Apple and iPhone.

So, the release of Android from Google, the OVI initiatives from Nokia etc. are all good, but I wonder if they really will be able to provide the multitude of support that Apple was able to provide to me. Also, the unified developer environment (Xcode), the one device, clean business model and pre-existing audience to market too makes it very hard to understand how anyone will be able to compete with Apple on this market segment.

Mark Sigal just posted a excellent article at GigaOm. His analysis below summed this up very clear to me:

“The reality is that openness is just an attribute -– it’s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It’s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective.”

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BoIC member featured in New York Times

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Mobile, Open Garden, Social Networks, Technology, Web 2.0, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 23, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Tony Fish, a member of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Partners was featured in NY Times on April 14th. The article, “Getting your business ready for Mobile 2.0”, is an excellent example on Mobile 2.0 issues that arise in with the technology.

“To better understand the coming of Mobile 2.0, indeed it is important to first understand the arrival of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a new generation of Web-based applications, like widgets, social networks, and collaboration tools that are quickly transforming the landscape of the Internet itself.”

Read the whole article here.

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