Randall Howard

The World is My Oyster - State of Connectivity in Europe

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And, don’t worry, with modern hand luggage restrictions, I didn’t have my sword to open the oyster to extract a pearl! In fact, Oyster is a Transport For London brand for their payment system. Many here in North America feel we are at the epicentre of the technology universe and have a monopoly on great technologies empowering the connectivity behind our increasinly always on lifestyle. With a different work-life cultural balance, Europe has much to teach us about deploying state of the art technologies, especially those we might encounter in daily life. But, too, not all are absolutely without flaws. I will share a few experiences from a recent pan-European sojourn.

OYSTER CARD:

Although deployed for a few years, this convenient contact-less payment card, containing an RFID chip, has in the last year or so taken off to the point that it is now used by around 90% of all trips on London Underground, buses and even some National Rail services. While, in North America, we think of RFID’s use in logistics and as a more active version of all those UPC barcodes, these embedded applications may be the more fundamental ones.
How does it work? You simply pay £3 for the card, which is yours for life, and you then top it up as a pre-paid card. Oyster users pay less per trip, and, by monitoring your usage and appropriately capping charging, it also replaces a single day travelcard. Further, Oyster can also be used as a multi-day pass. You can register online so you can keep your money should your card be lost or stolen. In use, it is important to swipe both in AND out at the turnstiles, like in the photo above.

Compared with:

• Toronto Transit Commission, which replaced its 50 year old tokens, with ones that are harder to counterfeit, or with
• San Francisco’s BART, which uses 1980’s technology magstripe cards,

Transport For London (TFL) has taken a much bolder step in payments with their Oyster Card. It was convenient, fast, well documented, but …

What’s the Catch? Several times, I found that I got the message “See Supervisor” and would have to swipe again to make it exit. And, remember, that unless you swipe both in and out from your journey, you may find a £4 charge for a short trip, instead of the correct charge of £1.50. How this happened to me was that I swiped on exit, got the “Supervisor” message, and swiped again. The gates opened, but I found it had ended my first trip then begun a second trip, which it viewed as uncompleted, hence the £4 charge!

Like most great technologies, it comes down to intelligent software design and execution. Clearly smarter pattern recognition in the software could have removed this artefact either because of the short time between trip end and trip start or because this was an outbound turnstile, from which trips should end not commence.

WiFi ON BUSES:

Normally, I don’t travel on buses. Here in Canada, they are typically unpleasant, crowded and I’m old enough to remember when they were smoky as well. Because of a missed flight by my partner, I made one unscheduled 1 hour inter-city connection on a bus. Imagine my surprise when the price was great, there was free coffee served by a human, TVs with headphones and comfortable seats. But, most surprising of all, and I haven’t seen this anywhere else, was FREE WiFi connectivity on the buses. I was actually able to crack open my notebook and connect to the web and synchronize my email. While it did fade in and out a few times, I was totally amazed that this would even work at all. I’m still trying to figure out what technology connected the bus to the rest of the world (is it 3G wireless?), but clearly this was impressive. So, a combination of great technology, great service and comfortable buses was instructive in creating a “business class” experience in a European inter-city bus.

FON WiFI HOTSPOTS:

I was excited a few years about when FON was launched to make an open, universal WiFi Cloud. Part of the idea was for each person to “open up” their home or business routers, but in a secure way, to create a cloud in an almost open source way. And, because part of the founding energy for Spanish company FON, came from the Skype principals, it looked very promising indeed. So, I signed up in 2005 and then nothing happened.

Imagine my pleasant surprise to be in a cafe in Munich, called News Bar, and to see the familiar FON logo. Furthermore, after having paid €3 per hour at a previous cafe hotspot (not to mention £4 per hour in London!), it was great that this cost only €3 per day. What is more, I logged in at 2 other cafes that day, all using FON and all for that same €3 charge in the first hotspot. Although the FON business model includes a revenue share with the hotspot owners, they will not get rich from the proceeds. It was great to see the high level of FON penetration in Munich, and London appears to be following along. I can only hope that Waterloo and Toronto will wake up to this movement to create an open source cloud, as well.

3G:

Perhaps WiFi will become less important as 3G technology, in particular HSDPA with around 3.6 Mbps download speeds, becomes pervasive. Having started rollouts in 2003 in UK and Italy, Europe has about a 5 year head start on North America. Few will realize that Rogers has been staging a rollout of HSDPA into major Canadian cities over the last year and, similarly for AT&T across the US.

Enroute back to Toronto, I was in the Air Canada Maple Leaf lounge, struggling, like everyone else, to connect to their WiFi network, when I noticed one Swedish laptop user was productively downloading, surfing and emailing. His secret? His 3G PC card. Now, of course Europe insn’t a total 3G data utopia. I suspect it will be a year or more before international roaming in 3G data becomes more reasonably priced (read not extortionate) and, for those of use who aren’t residents and rely on prepaid cards, unlimited prepaid data tariffs become available. However, hope is on the horizon - my colleague, Alec Saunders, at World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, used Yoigo for an amazing €1.50 per day, on a prepaid basis. How long can it be that such a great concept will propagate from Spain to the rest of Europe, and perhaps the rest of the world?

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CeBIT 2008 - World’s Largest ICT Show Still Strong in the Age of the Web!

As part of a European trip through Vienna, Munich, London and Berlin to meet with some tech startups and key tech investors, yesterday I stopped in at CeBIT in Hannover Germany.

For those who don’t know CeBIT, this massive Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) show remains the largest computer show in the world. I’ve attended CeBIT off and on over the last 25 years, with my first one being in 1984 to launch Coherent on a prototype Commodore C900 machine. At that time, CeBIT was a “show within a show” of about 5 buildings in the 25 buildings that comprised Hanover Fair (HannoverMesse, in German). The rest of the show was chock full of large industrial equipment, construction technology, mining equipment and the like, so incredibly diverse. Today, CeBIT consumes 27 buildings (plus a number of smaller pavilions), each building the size of a large convention centre/trade show facility in itself.

Today, before heading out to Berlin, I wanted to share a few impressions:

• The show is still going strong - while the web is disintermediating large US shows and even reduced to 6 days, down from 8, the halls of CeBIT were packed.
• In all the chaos, there is still some room for focus. e.g. I estimate that last month’s World Mobile Congress in Barcelona to be about 5% the size of CeBIT, and CeBIT’s 5+ buildings of mobile and wireless are likely double WMC’s exhibitor footprint.
• Other key focuses are security (whose hall was mobbed yesterday), navigation and tracking, big server and other hardware, and of course the many smaller companies from around the world.
• Notwithstanding the amount of German signage, the show continues to be quite international. Although US presence may have dropped a bit, the Asian presence continues to grow dramatically, and those companies are moving up the food chain - not just contract manufacturers, but producers of innovative products and technologies.
• Top people were there - CEOs, senior executives and the like - clearly, it’s an environment where global tech business gets done, alliances are built, etc.
• I can’t remember when I’ve seen so much big iron - servers, telephony switches, etc. While Verdexus doesn’t invest in this area, it was interesting to see the trends here nonetheless - companies like Thomson with their media strategies are notable in this regard.

Out of this plethora of technology riches, here are just a few themes that I’d comment on:

MOBILE:
Given that Symbian (Nokia, Sony Ericsson) has a installed base over 10 times the size of RIM’s Blackberry, I was really surprised to see that Vodafone’s entire enterprise and data-driven applications displays were pretty well 100% Blackberry-oriented. While someone in Waterloo wouldn’t be surprised at this, for Europe this was surprising in a region where Blackberry sitings (except among Americans and Canadians) are still relatively rare. And, as a corollary for obvious reasons, there really weren’t a lot of Apple iPhones around.
SECURITY
A whole new generation of security players, relative to Symantec and Macafee, are rapidly gaining market momentum. Companies like Kaspersky Labs, AVG, GData, Trend Micro, etc. now have a huge footprint. There’s lots of talk of IPO activity in this sector (which will certainly be a welcome change), and it’s interesting that the new security business model is less to build the all-singing, all dancing suite (a la Symantec), but to stick more closely to a pure play strategy. These trends should be of strong interest to all those building startups in the security space - new partnering and liquidity strategies may be needed.

And, with my interest in new startups and the business models they enable, I’ll mention one university spin-out from Regensburg called Psylock Years of research seem to have finally provided a commercial grade, hardware-free authentication, accurately identifying people based on their typing behaviour. I’m convinced that Psylock will enable some very interesting new applications.

RFID
Another promising technology, coming from some brilliant minds in Zagreb, was an OEM RFID implementation sized at 50% of existing products and consuming much less power. This, when combined into barcode scanners or other technologies, will help RFID move into entirely new applications. This is another technology to watch.

OFFSHORING
The days of cheap offshoring (nearshoring) for European companies in countries like Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are probably over. The very talented companies in this area are now focused on quality and human capital and no longer on price. You have to look further east to Ukraine or Russia or Asia to lower software development costs.

So, there you have it - CeBIT, there’s nothing else quite like it, and amazingly strong after all these years …

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Free Love and the Mini

For those from the 1960’s such a pairing might trigger nostalgia. But in the new millennium, what does this mean? Believe it or not, the former is hot, emerging branding strategy for a media-saturated populace.

This week, en route from Vienna, via Munich to CeBIT and on to Berlin, my European Verdexus partner Suresh Patel, and I had an opportunity to see the mantra of “free love” marketing techniques playing out on the strassen and autobahnen of Austria and Germany.

Niki Lauda’s eponymous and innovative car rental cum advertising company LaudaMotion in Vienna, rents a brand new BMW Mini car for an amazing €20. And, given Suresh’s obsession with carbon neutrality, a Mini is definitely planet friendly. Our Mini came painted out in the badge of the same Niki Lauda’s FlyNiki.com, which includes flights between London and Vienna for as low as £1. The business model of such low cost airlines is probably a topic for another day. As well, today we saw Smart Cars and Minis advertising SkyEurope, Allianz, etc.

Clearly this business, of transforming rental customers like us into moving billboards, is predicated on us driving around a whole lot and in areas with good “viewer” demographics. The pricing model, which among other things, encourages in-city travel, by including only 100 km/day, attempts to optimize eyeballs, and the right ones at that. Unfortunately for LaudaMotion, our circle trip around Germany significantly strays from their demographic sweet spot.

Anyway, this type of free (or almost free) stuff combined with product placement is well described in this month’s (March 2008) TrendSpotting briefing.
Enjoy! As much as we love Hertz (or Sixt), we certainly enjoyed a unique car rental experience.

Isn’t this post Web 1.0, mobile enabled world, way more interesting than the 1950’s Procter and Gamble, soap-opera style of advertising?

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Musings and Machinations

BLOG MANDATE

Technology is a passion.

I have, over the years, had the good fortune to work in researching key technologies, designing and building great products based on technologies, founding and growing great companies built around technology, and now investing (in a “hands-on” way of course) in great technology businesses.

I also happen to have a passion for the arts, the environment and entrepreneurism. And, in recent years, business models, approaches and systems coming from technology-based business, is starting to transform the social sector.

What used to be called philanthropy, is definitely becoming more business like and, in fact, the boundaries are blurring. Is innovative micro-lender Grameen Bank a charity or a profit making business? Well, to short change a long discussion, it is a bit of both. And, that’s what’s exciting about the new work of technology and the social sector. Rules are being broken, new businesses cannibalize old, and it is the human intellet, well applied, that wins the day.

BLOG APPROACH

I’m a pretty opinionated guy. And, I like nothing more than to share and debate those opinions. Feel free to give your (constructive please) feedback, insights or contrary opinion.

I will endeavour to flag opinion as that and to double check sources, but like everyone else, I’m fallible and will rely on you the alert reader to set me straight.

As well, to spice things up, I plan to invite occasional guest bloggers, who are people from my network that I feel could add value to the topics we are discussing.

Enjoy …

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