All-in-one sound, vision, chat, games - Pocket 'real estate' to accommodate several devices
Europe Tech Report
By Madeleine Acey, FTMarketWatch
Last Update: 4:01 AM ET Jan 23, 2001
LONDON (FTMW) -- Short message service (SMS) is a massive
success, creating a reported 20 billion text messages via mobile phones
each month. But according to venture capitalists who concentrate on the
wireless communications market, it is just the beginning of a revolution in
consumer electronics.
Sending little text messages is the equivalent of baby steps, according to
Ken Blakeslee, chairman of Vesta WirelessWorks.
He says recent products from the likes of Fuji Photo Film (FUJIY: news,
msgs) and Ericsson (000010865: news, msgs) (ERICY: news, msgs)
point to what people really want to do while they're on the move. And to
which companies are best placed to give it to them.
Fuji recently released a combined digital camera, digital video camera and
MP3 audio player. Mobile phone makers including Ericsson have come
out with combined mobile phone and MP3 audio players. Computer
games start-up Cybiko (which Vesta WirelessWorks has invested in) has
combined computer games, chat, MP3 and other features in a handheld
wireless networked gaming console for kids. See story.
Blakeslee says people have made "real estate" in their pockets for an
essential wireless device. Even suit makers have started making men's
suits with special Palm Pilot-sized pockets. But consumers won't carry
more than one around with them.
For this reason, plus the fact that many of these devices share similar
features such as a screen and a four-arrow rocking switch, electronics
makers are planning more and more convergence.
Electronic postcards
"What can that turn into?" asked Blakeslee of the SMS explosion. "What
do people really want to do?" He suggested one thing they want to do is
show people where they are, or what they're looking at. Lying on the
beach, you can send an electronic postcard back to the office and 10
friends in real-time, for a penny, he said, with a combined digital camera
and mobile phone. The telecoms network operator cleans up on the fact
that at least three people will message you back to tell you what they think
of you. "It's driven by people," he said, not the technology.
He also cited shoppers needing to consult their partners at home over the
phone. A picture would help.
Blakeslee says he finds the prospect exciting as this will all need software
to make these products and services work together. And Vesta
WirelessWorks is in the business of finding and funding makers of such
software and helping that software get into the hands of the mobile
network operators.
Vesta WirelessWorks is particularly interested in software companies that
can make the end-user software work with operators' back-end systems
such as billing. "Some applications producers are unknowingly building
enabling technologies," Blakeslee said. "I would imagine there are some
Microsofts out there."
Amadeus in tune
Amadeus Capital Partners' investment manager Badri Nathan agreed it
was an exciting area. "There's going to be a variety of combinations [of
devices]," he said. An interesting area would be companies that can make
different services work on different communications platforms such as
Bluetooth, he said. Or a software platform that can allow information to
be sent to different devices. One of the companies Amadeus invests in is
Bluetooth specialist Cambridge Silicon Radio. See story.
In the meantime, both agreed that consumer electronics giants such as the
Sonys (SNE: news, msgs) and Matsushitas (MC: news, msgs) of the
world would probably corner the hardware part of this converged market.
"Phone companies don't make good games," said Blakeslee. "The Sonys,
Matsushitas, Samsungs and Kyoceras are just doing interesting things.
They're starting to mix and match. The mobile phone part of it is no longer
any kind of art."
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