{"id":4431,"date":"2002-03-27T14:15:25","date_gmt":"2002-03-27T20:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.socialmediaperformancegroup.com\/?p=4431"},"modified":"2002-03-27T14:15:25","modified_gmt":"2002-03-27T20:15:25","slug":"stratvantage-news-032702","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stratvantage.com\/index.php\/2002\/03\/27\/stratvantage-news-032702\/","title":{"rendered":"StratVantage – The News 03\/27\/02"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wireless Serendipity<\/h2>\n
\u00a0Sometimes you can get lost in the Web when you\u2019re seeking specific information. And sometimes getting lost is actually productive, turning up information you\u2019re much more interested in.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This happened to me the other day, while doing research for the next CTOMentor white paper, on wireless. The paper will be based on one<\/a> I did for a client in October 2000, and I\u2019m starting to go through it and update the information. What follows is a description of the path I took to answer a simple question: What happened to Ericsson\u2019s cell phone manufacturing business? Along the way I tripped over a few very interesting infonuggets I might not have found had I been looking for them.<\/p>\n

It all started when my intern, Jeremy, sent me a link to a ZDNet story<\/a> on Palm\u2019s integration of Bluetooth capabilities into an add-on card for its PDAs. The story mentions a company called Sony Ericsson. I couldn\u2019t remember what the deal was with this company, although I knew Ericsson had pretty much gotten out of the business of making their own phones. This is a testament to the competitive nature of the cell phone business \u2013 Ericsson was the number one cell phone manufacturer not all that long ago, until Nokia ate their lunch.<\/p>\n

So to figure out if Sony bought all of Ericsson\u2019s manufacturing business, I go towww.ericsson.com<\/a> and scan the press releases. Sure enough, there\u2019s a mention<\/a>\u00a0of Sony Ericsson and Ericsson banding together on a project: Ericsson\u2019s Instant Messaging and Presence Server (IMPS). Cool. I vaguely remember reading something about this, and Instant Messaging is something I wrote quite a lot about in the CTOMentor P2P white paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The IMPS is built upon the Wireless Village version 1.0 specification and the companies claim it \u201cwill provide network operators with an advanced personal communication tool for users that can deploy to 2G, 2.5G and 3G networks worldwide. The new instant messaging solution, which also works with legacy handsets, is to be announced by Ericsson in the upcoming months.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never heard of Wireless Village, but the press release describes it: \u201cFounded by Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, Wireless Village, the Mobile Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS) Initiative, was formed in April 2001 to define and promote a set of universal specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sounds like an important initiative, so I check out the Wireless Village Web site<\/a>.Turns out they just recently launched<\/a> their 1.0 specification. Also on the site is a white paper, which quotes ResearchPortal.com<\/a>: \u201cResearch Portal.com reports instant messaging is the Number Two requested application after voice. With the monumental growth patterns of SMS, where 10 billion messages are sent every month globally according to the GSM Association, and the adoption rate of desktop instant messaging (IM), with over 100 million registered users and over 50 million regular users as reported by Jupiter Media Metrix, we foresee that wireless IMPS will capitalize on both these trends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hey! That’s the same ResearchPortal survey I quote in my earlier white paper: “Surprisingly, instant messaging (which we imagine includes paging functions) was the most desired feature by mobile professionals. Equally surprising was the fact that consumers rated both messaging and email more highly than did the professionals.\u00a0Understandably, professionals ranked the ability to manage Personal Information Manager (PIM) data higher than did consumers.” The study thus has to be about two years old, then. There\u2019s no stat like an old stat.<\/p>\n

\"NokiaNonetheless, the Ericsson\/Sony Ericsson\/Wireless Village initiative combined with the fact that VoiceStream<\/a> is offering access to AOL Instant Messenger on its phones means I’d better talk a lot more about wireless IM in the next white paper.<\/p>\n

Getting back to the original questions (What happened to Ericsson\u2019s manufacturing and who is Sony Ericsson?) I dump \u201cSony Ericsson\u201d into Google, and come up with their Web site<\/a>. In the \u201cAbout us\u201d section, it says: “Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications was established in 2001 by telecommunications leader Ericsson and consumer electronics powerhouse Sony Corporation. The company is equally owned by Ericsson and Sony, whose combined mobile phone businesses on a pro-forma basis achieved annual unit sales of approximately 50 million units and sales of USD 7.2 billion in 2000.”<\/p>\n

Plugging “Sony Ericsson” into ZDNet’s search yields an interesting article<\/a>: Old Atari games will run on cell phones. In case you have never heard of Atari<\/a>, they were the king of video games in the ’70s, originating the classics Asteroids and the world\u2019s first video game, Pong<\/a>, both of which will be available to play on Sony Ericsson cell phones.<\/p>\n

I still want to know if Sony got all of Ericsson’s manufacturing business, so I plug “cell phone manufacturer” into ZDNet’s search. And finally, I get the payoff<\/a>: Ericsson is licensing its technology to other cell phone makers, including LG Electronics and Samsung, and \u201cEricsson Mobile Platforms, based in Sweden, will stay within the Ericsson group when the company merges its handset operations with the mobile-phone unit of Japan’s consumer-electronics group Sony on Oct. 1 [2001].\u201d<\/p>\n

Arguably I could have answered my question by finding Sony Ericsson\u2019s site in the first place, but where\u2019s the fun in that? Besides, I found several other interesting pieces of information along the way, including the fact that folks are still relying on a survey of cell phone users that must be at least two years old.<\/p>\n

So, two important points for those doing research on the Web: serendipity, within reason, can provide surprisingly pertinent results; and don\u2019t believe stats asserted without citations \u2013 things have a way of taking on a life of their own on the Web.<\/p>\n

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Briefly Noted<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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