Kaizen Bits

Two weeks ago, I was in Bogota and we met with top executives of Estevegomez, a building management firm. They were extremely nice, polite and the conversation encompassed several topics. All of them were extremel interesting to me and that´s the reason why I am reproducing them here.

Firstly, the influence of Spanish companies in Colombia, as a representative of a Latam market. According to them, Spanish companies simply showed up and took the purse out asking: how much is this company? End of story. They were not that interested in joint-ventures or local partners, but they are big enough and have critical mass to simply purchase companies.

Then we talked about Latam markets and how China and Asia were looking at them because of raw materials they need for their huge economies to keep the growing rate. I am not that sure about Chinese interest (concretely in Colombia) I have not seen any Chinese companies or movements, even takeovers. Also, in a recent renewable energies fair, in Madrid, I was asking the main responsible of Yingli, a solar panel Chinese company about expansion in Latam markets and she looked surprised. “We had no plans (and plants) there”.

Finally, we discussed a bit about innovation. Now that Mockus, from the Green Party, will probably win the elections, I think the time has come for Colombia to ask real questions about the productive model and the role they should take to at least follow the flow and try to decrease the distance between US and Europe.

Well, I know that besides not writing very often lately, due to lectures and specially project proposal writing, I might be deemed as lazy (which in my very deep I am, or aspire to be), I am recently devoting my posts to Google, talking about them becoming a phone company or about Chrome for Mac.

But when last week, for some reasons I don´t finally understand, Firefox, my favourite and best of breed web browser, started underperforming (I can´t store bookmarks anymore and can not use the back button when browsing, don´t ask why), I thought of giving a hard try with Chrome for Mac and here is what I have to say: go Chrome go!!

Simply, because the Google folks are probably the best software engineers in the world, changed and revolutionized the Web and seem limitless in terms of innovation (or even disruption). Chrome for Mac is extremely fast, reliable and it has a great look & feel. So what is the moral of the story? In many software related areas and apps, Chrome is the way to go. Yeah.

If the ebooks war just started between Amazon and the big six publishers, there´s a second war coming whose contenders will be the Amazon Kindle (we were talking about it and the new app ecosystem) and the world-famous but by nodoby touched iPad.

Personally, I am quite a Mac fan. I am typing on a MacBookPro, use an iPhone (world best invention, don´t know how I could live before) and a couple of iPods. I will hence buy the iPad (once it will be released by Amazon UK, probably May) and hopefully use it, but there is also another question on Spanish ebooks?

What will happen? Word in the street is the three biggest publishers in Spain, namely Planeta, Santillana and Random House Mondadori
, will join for a common ebook platform. That´s good news. Let´s remember Peter Drucker mantra: “When the rate of outside change is bigger than the inner, the end is insight”.

It´s everywhere on the web now, Amazon just announced the release of its Kindle Development Kit, major features include:

– Multi- Platform
– Three kind of apps:

* Free – Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge to customers. Amazon will pay the wireless costs associated with delivery and maintenance.
* One-time Purchase – Customers will be charged once when purchasing active content. Content must have nominal (less than 100KB/user/month) ongoing wireless usage.
* Monthly Subscription – Customers will be charged once per month for active content.

- User revenue will be split 70% to the developer and 30% to Amazon net of delivery fees of $0.15 / MB. Remember that unlike smart phones, the Kindle user does not pay a monthly wireless fee or enter into an annual wireless contract. Kindle active content must be priced to cover the costs of downloads and on-going usage.

Interesting stuff and Apple right about releasing its iSlate or whatever the name is, but it´s a tablet…

I am just back from Bucharest where I attended a (really boring) EU project meeting (no offence intended for any of the participants, I think we would all agree). My impression of the city was very bad. Apart from old Communist style buildings, the center was quite dirty and dodgy. Services were way behind EU standards but at least, the food was good, beer is cold and people are nice.

A couple of colleagues from Greek institutions mentioned that there were Greek companies taking over in Romania, since it became the land of opportunities after Ceaucescu´s fall in 1989. Particularly, they talked about Cosmote, a subsidiary of Cosmote Greece, the largest mobile network operator in Greece, member of the OTE group. I was surprised to see that Cosmote also bought Germanos Group, a famous chain of stores mostly devoted the electrical devices, a kind of Mediamarkt. They also pointed at Everest, a fast-food chain from Greece.

That pointed out my total ignorance about companies and economic relationships in Eastern Europe, especially in South-Eastern Europe. A year and a half ago, when I was in Athens for a conference, I did not research or event think about most of these companies. However, they are now a good field to show up in future exams in my courses

Telefonica (which is being reorganized from a brand viewpoint: it will keep its Movistar brand in Spain and Latin America and O2 for the remainder markets) has bought Jajah, the VoIP service company for 145 Meuros. The article in GigaOm has very valuable insights, as usual.

The company had raised 35 Meuros from Deutsche Telekom, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital. It has 25 Million subscribers (Skype outnumbers them by half billion) and a native backend network, which can be interesting for Telefonica. The backend network is shown in the following picture:

According to GigaOm some of the reasons for the deal might be:

* Cheap international calling plans are a way to retain/attract new customers. Telefonica has a strong presence in Latin America, and Jajah’s network can be a good way to increase its share of voice minutes.
* Jajah’s VoIP platform can be used to essentially turn O2 into a long-distance voice company.
* Like BT which bought Ribbit, O2 could rethink its approach to the voice business and start focusing on how it can marry voice with web/mobile apps.
* These mobile applications could then leverage not only Jajah’s platform but also O2’s next-generation wireless broadband networks that use Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology.

I can hardly add anything else. I have also asked myself a couple of times how come there are no MVNO in Latin American in my frequent trips over the continent. Perhaps a good answer is that alterantive operators such as Jajah could be the first step to it.

The last Cisco Annual Security Report points out, according to this press article in Spanish, that most organizations do not fully trust in outsourcing their data and processes to the Cloud. On the other hand, some minor organizations do exactly the other way round and trust too much in a hosting or Cloud services.

To me, this is just the beginning of a technology whose origins are not clear at all and is going mainstream slowly but surely. Cisco is a great company and their equipment is all over the world and same applies to most companies providing Internet infrastructure. They simply know the Cloud is out there and space and resources will be a commodity for a clear cost-reduction reason.

It´s been a while since I have been thinking in writing a long essay (the word “book” makes me shiver, pure fear ) about how most Cloud features have long showed up in many business models we have these days. The book would analyze how new and promising business models are backed on Cloud features.

I was warned via email (because I had previously subscribed in Google) but I hope it has been worthwhile. Actually, I have tried Safari, Firefox and also Camino for Mac, but I am always hoping the best from Google because I just simply (and I have no interests or disclaimers or whatsoever to do, since I am purely an academic) think Google has always the best and last word to say!!

Update: Bloody hell!! I can´t install it with my OS version, Tiger 10.4.11

I was reading about fonYou, a new Virtual Mobile Operator (VMO), which is not at all a VMO

Actually, to me, fonYou is not a mobile operator, but a phone company service based on the re-location of the call. That means, you do not even need a SIM card, fonYou assigns a customer a Spanish phone number and then redirects any call to this number to any other number, either a fix line, mobile foreign phone… probably even Skype.

I like the fundamentals, so the question could be: for when the other way round? I mean, having a digital number (or identity) and re-directing to any other number like Google Voice was already doing in the US?

Surprised to see that Bloomberg has acquired Business Week for less than 5 M$. Once upon a time, the ever powerful media could buy anything, even among them, but actually these last movements tend to say something different. Media markets are mature, media advertisement revenues are split over a number of channels, namely the Internet, TV and press… and finally, media can also buy their akin.

This also happened in Spain last week when PRISA, the biggest Spanish media company sold 35% of Medica Capital, the Portuguese media company leading major newspapers to Ongoing Strategy Investments and the 25% of Santillana to a Latin American private equity, DLJ South American Partners. That meant 362,5 M$ in the latter.
The former is a family company which owns 23,5% of the Impresa Group and has stocks in Zon TV-Cabo y Portugal Telecom (PT). Ongoing Strategy Investments also owns the Semanario Económico and the Diario Económico, which boasts 250 million potential customers in Portuguese speaking countries.