The Indian company has spent USD3 million for a majority stake and will make further investments as it plans to acquire more shares from existing shareholders by 2014. Cash payments will be made based on valuations linked to LTT’s profitability.
The acquisition will expand coverage of MakeMyTrip’s travel services to Southeast Asia. LTT has arrangements with over 100 hotels in Singapore and more than 25 in other parts of the region as part of its hotel reservations, tours, and related services business.
MakeMyTrip raised USD70 million last year with a NASDAQ listing and it’s also backed by private equity investors.
We’ve sought comments from MakeMytrip but have yet to receive a response. We’ll post them once we do.
LewatMana is a crowd-sourced CCTV traffic monitoring system with dozens of cameras located in the greater Jakarta region. Anyone with a permanently attached public camera is welcomed to contribute to the service by registering to the website. Those without a camera are welcomed to report traffic conditions to the service’s Twitter and Facebook accounts
The award recognizes web innovations and uses that may shape consumer behaviors and communications in the years to come, overseen by scientists, journalists, and academics. This year is the fourth time the awards have been handed out, having first held in 2008. Each year the organization picks out 100 of the most interesting uses of internet technologies and the top 10 gets flown to Paris to receive the award.
Hendry Soelistyo, founder of lewatmana explained in an interview with DailySocial that the selection criteria covers originality of idea, impact to the society, and how the service is seen s a role model.
This international recognition is another boost to the Indonesian technology entrepreneurship community after Enterprise Ireland invited the four StartupLokal initiators to visit Ireland in March to meet with leading Irish tech/web entrepreneurs and present a selection of Indonesian startups before the Irish government and investors.
The Netexplorateur winner’s list can be found on the website along with the rest of the finalists.
Anideo, the Singapore-based company backed by famously ousted Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, will add two new partners on March 1. Arun Thampi and Andy Croll, who run Deep Calm, a web design and iOS app devleoper, wrote on their blog that they would join Andrew “AJ” Solimine as partners at Anideo.
Thampi, who published the post, said Deep Calm’s products, which includes an app that pulls news feeds from British newspaper The Guardian, would become part of Anideo’s portfolio. Thampi also wrote that Anideo was interested in developing a “conversation engine”, but that it was a “preliminary idea” for now.
According to Thampi’s post, Kent Nguyen, a developer who recently graduated from the National University of Singapore, will also do work for Anideo, although it is unclear what title he will take at the company.
Thampi wrote that he and Croll met Solimine for beer at a Duxton Hill pub named The Toucan in November. The meeting ended up lasting six hours and the first seeds of a partnership among the three were planted.
Anideo has been in Singapore for months, but has maintained a low profile. The news that the Thampi and Croll are joining as partners is the most significant information about the company’s activities since it appeared on the scene in Singapore. Until now, Solimine and Saverin, who both live in Singapore, have been the individuals associated with the firm. An email I sent to Solimine about three weeks ago seeking comment, when rumours of the partnership began circulating, remains unanswered.
Affiliates’ Corner brings together, intellectual property owners, innovators and experienced professionals who are interested in entrepreneurships to promote commercialization of innovations through generation of start-ups. This next Affiliates’ Corner will have Ms Woo Yin Yang of the MDA Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office share on the “Continuous innovation in the IDM sector” .
Topics
“Continuous innovation in the IDM sector” by Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office
The Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office (IDMPO) was created in Aug 06 as one of National Research Foundation (NRF)’s 3 strategic programmes to support Singapore’s long-term vision of growing into a global IDM capital.
The presentation will include a brief overview of IDMPO, and the schemes & programmes available to help grow Singapore into a vibrant global media capital. It will also provide an insight on the latest developments and some upcoming plans of the Programme Office.
The IDMPO is an inter-agency outfit hosted by the Media Development Authority of Singapore to coordinate efforts between agencies to grow Singapore into a vibrant global IDM capital, establish Singapore as a preferred test-bed, and in the process, achieve breakthroughs for the next generation media. Ms Woo Ying Yan works with various partners and appointed incubators to support startups in their exploration of the technical merit or feasibility of technologies and ideas that have the potential to create business disruptions and build new industry subsectors.
“Fundamentals of IP and IP Management” by Christopher Lane
Christopher Lane, an IP Consultant and director of IP Matters, will share the basics of intellectual property and how to manage your intellectual property to protect your business and help it to grow.” Chris is an IP mentor with IIE to provide IP assistance to start-ups.”
“A Start-up Experience with government assistance” by Socialico
Keith Ng, founder and CEO of Socialico, recipient of MDA iJAM! Grant will share his start-ups experience, leveraging on the Innovation & Entrepreneurship ecosystem in Singapore
Event Details
When: Wednesday 16th February 2011
Time: 6.30pm-8.30pm
Where: SMU Administration Building, Level 6, University Lounge, 81 Victoria Street, Singapore 188065
If you’re looking for a real-time Q&A solution for your event, check out PigeonHole Live. The team at PigeonHole has kindly agreed to allow event organisers who quote SGEntrepreneurs to get to use their solution for free till end June 2011.
At Pluggd.in, we keep sharing inspirational, unpluggd (i.e. minus hype/pretense) stories from entrepreneurs that inspires fellow entrepreneurs to not give up and instead go for the big kill.
And we are quite glad to share a great story of Nirav Mehta, founder of AppsMagnet,a Mumbai based startup. Nirav has been through a typical ups and down of entrepreneurial life – he was asked to resign from a company he started 11 years ago, scratched his own itch, launched couple of products, a lot of them failed and here he is – a six figure $$ revenue in 2 years.
Watch the entire video
Video Transcripts
I was utterly confused as I started working on this video. You see this video contains material I have never disclosed before. I was not sure if I should bring it out in public. But after three days of struggle, I favored transparency. Let’s start with the piece I was most uncomfortable sharing.
$163358.99
That’s Apps Magnet’s revenue for last year. Almost three times the previous year.
Number of customers grew by another 2306.
95.48% of our customers are happy with our products. And 31% returned to make another purchase during the year. Our refund rate is 3.43%.
We added six more products this year, taking the total to 15.
I am actually amazed by these numbers. Especially when I look back at last two years.
You see, in July 2009, I was asked to resign from the company I started 11 years ago. We had big losses and partners blamed each other for the mess. Our hearts were bitter and financial situation of the company was sour. No one wanted to hold this fireball.
Then I took charge. I started Magnet Technologies 11 years ago. It was my second identity. I committed to saving the sinking ship.
My company provided web design and programming services to customers across the globe. We were known for our quality and work culture. We had 120 people across two locations. The services business generated cash flows for the company and we were stuck in a loop. Finding projects, hiring team, training people, delivering on projects and getting cash flows. That’s what we kept doing month after month after month for over a decade. I wanted to develop products to get out of this rut. We developed 22 products over 11 years and almost everything flopped. Cash flow pressures would bring me back to chase the next project and pay our bills.
I knew services business will not make us big. It had to be products. I was inspired from the success of Balsamiq Studios. I was looking for the next big thing for Magnet. Deep down, I wanted to take away the “cheap outsourced IT labor” label from India and prove that we can build innovative products.
On the other side, we used activeCollab for managing our projects at Magnet. We could tweak it to our needs. So on my spare time, I built a reporting dashboard, an illegal hack to Balsamiq Mockups that allowed creating mockups from activeCollab and a planning tool that let me easily create milestones, tickets and tasks. I wanted to share this work with others but in a way we could sustain for years.
activeCollab was a small market though. I wasn’t sure if it will make enough money to pay the bills. iPhone apps market seemed very lucrative and I felt it would be the next big thing.
I also did not want Magnet to shoulder the risk. So we formed a new entity called Apps Magnet and commissioned Magnet for some development work.
In February 2009 Apps Magnet launched Reports module for activeCollab. We released three iPhone apps soon after.
Interestingly, activeCollab business did much better than iPhone.
I subsequently built PlannerX for Basecamp. I always admired Basecamp and 37Signal’s project management ideals. Basecamp’s huge user base also meant bigger revenue potential.
This is also the time when we came to a split end for Magnet. This is when other shareholders asked me to resign.
But I did not give up. I took responsibility of saving Magnet.
I started cleaning up the mess at Magnet in my day time and worked late nights on Apps Magnet. I was curating an old tree in the day and nurturing a young plant during night.
By 20th July 2009, Apps Magnet’s total sales reached $4074.
In August, we released Planning module. And I know I remember this.. Sales hit $7541 for August alone.
This felt like hitting a jackpot. The amount was multiple times my salary at Magnet. I was thrilled by success.
Over next few months, Apps Magnet kept growing. We had steady monthly cash flows. I was making passive income. And most importantly, my work made a difference to hundreds of people world wide. Customers kept appreciating our work. When we completed our first year, we had 850 customers, 9 products and over $60,000 in sales.
In the second year, business saw steady growth. We hired Malay full time, launched 6 new products and improved existing offerings. And as you saw at the beginning, our revenue tripled in the year.
Yet the fact is that we still have a long way to go. Many of our products are under development for long and some have incurred losses. I will share more about my product development experiences in a separate video, but I have observed three key principles.
One, people buy only what solves real problems for them. Your products have to be pain killers, not vitamin pills.
Two, you need strong passion to improve if you want to build products. You need an itch to scratch.
And third, deep compassion for end users is the key to deliver “wow” products.
I can share more about them some other time, so let’s come back to the present.
As it stands, Apps Magnet has created a new market for commercial extensions for activeCollab. We are known for building finely crafted products and prompt customer service. My wife takes care of finances, while I and Malay take care of development and support. We also contracted Magnet team to get more work done.
Yes, Magnet is still alive. We have cleared a lot of emotional and financial burden. And I am steering Magnet towards product development as well. Magnet launched its new brand “Store Apps” last month. Our first product – Smart Manager for WP e-Commerce – delivers breakthrough productivity improvement for WP e-Commerce store owners, much like our Planning module. Magnet team has also worked on Putler – our business intelligence tool for web entrepreneurs.
Day to day business at Apps Magnet hasn’t changed though. We have lots of updates coming. We are launching Communications module for activeCollab in a few days. Communications module is like Twitter + Campfire Chat + Public Announcement system. And I think it will be useful to you. We also have acGarage’s next version coming. acGarage 2 will be like WordPress auto update for activeCollab. There’s a lot going on…
So you’ve heard a lot about us in this video. But the next video is going to be all about you.
Look, setting up your web based project management system is one thing and getting your team to use it is another. Managing projects successfully is yet another. In the next video, I’m going to tell you why your team does not use activeCollab, why you never complete projects on time and what you can do about it. It’s packed with unnerving truths and some more of my secrets!
In the meanwhile, I have created a separate “Entrepreneurs’ List”. I plan to share more business insights with people who are entrepreneurs or are planning to start on their own. Sign up if you are interested.
I would also love to hear your comments. Would you like to share your own experiences? What do you think we should be doing next? Post your comments below and join the conversation.
Mobile is global, and a lot of opportunities in mobile businesses are local in nature (hint: LBS).
A lot is happening in Mobile space and we earlier shared the mobile trends for 2011, a very comprehensive coverage of the trend and opportunities in the m-business.
The Mobile Internet business is witnessing innovation in terms of content, ad format, apps and most importantly, gamification of apps.
How will this pan out? What are the hot trends in mobile internet space? NFC? Healthcare? HTML5 vs. Downloadable App?
KPCB has a very comprehensive presentation (embedded below) on the current plus upcoming trend for Mobile Internet 2011 and trends that will shape this decade.
Early stage investment firm, Seedfund has closed $54 million in the second round and is launching an incubator – 2,000 sq. feet of space in Mumbai. The fund recently won India’s best early stage investor award (of 2010) at the Apex Awards.
Here is an interview with Bharati Jacob/Mahesh Murthy (two of the cofounders) on the future plans.
Qn: What’s the new fund size. Earlier fund had Google, Reliance ADA as LPs. Who are the LPs for this fund?
Mahesh Murthy: The new fund is around US$54 million. Many of our LPs from the first fund have returned. But as you can imagine, we need a wider mix of LPs now that we are managing a larger fund and also now that Seedfund has plans for subsequent funds. So in addition to many of our earlier LLPs, we have endowments, pension funds and other large financial institutions who believe our asset class make sense to them to partner with over the long term.
Bharati Jacob – We have close to $70 million under management across 2 funds. Our investors are a great mix of institutions who believe in and are committed to long term viability of early stage investing in India. Our investors include large financial institutions, pension funds, trust funds and a few marquee names from India. We have a few returning LPs – again a great vote of confidence in the team and the early stage investing.
Qn: Early stage investments in India – A lot of money has been invested in ecommerce market. Do you think there is a big story out there? What are Seedfund’s new investment areas (apart from Internet/Mobile).
Bharati Jacob– yes, a fair bit of money has been invested in e-commerce. We do believe that e-commerce (of the right kind!) will do well over the next 5-7 years – may not be in a hockey-stick fashion but steady growth. The number of internet users has increased substantially over the last few years and people seem to have greater comfort using credit card online (especially after dual security measures).
Our investment areas for Seedfund2 are very similar to Seedfund1 – we would like to invest in India markets focused companies; companies that are creating “sectors” and companies that can quickly get to leadership position within the sector. We are fairly sector agnostic but believe the investments will happen in healthcare, education, internet, alternate energy, retail,etc. Our overall vision is to invest in companies that are creating the new India!
There isn’t a difference between Seedfund1 and Seedfund2 strategy except that we have more money in Seedfund2 and hence, can stay support our portfolio for a longer period of time!
Mahesh Murthy: Well e-commerce is still commerce – it has to work as a business. Just putting a lot of money into something which has an ‘e’ in front or a ‘.com’ at the end of the name is neither a necessary or sufficient investing condition. We have never believed in trend or momentum investing. An e-business still needs to be a business.
We invested in RedBus many years ago – when it was unfashionable to invest in e-commerce, and we’ve worked hard on the fundamentals of delivering value to consumers while its rivals got far more money and far less traction. Finally what matters is not how much money you got – but how much you made.
We don’t quite invest with sectors in mind – in fact, in retrospect, most of our investees are in what you can call “not-yet-sectors-when-they-got-funded”. Whether it’s Printo or Vaatsalya or RedBus or CarWale or Edusports or ThinkLabs – these are companies that grew to leadership and in the process defined the sector around them.
We will look at any and all plans that come to us – e-commerce or not. We are not theme investors. We look for a company’s and team’s ability to become a leader in an emerging marketplace – and grow profitably in that space. That is more important to us than whether it’s e-commerce or m-commerce or z-commerce.
That said, we have significant online business experience among the partners at Seedfund – and can probably help and mentor a team with a good e-com plan better than most other investors around.
Qn: End of 2010, Seedfund had a few exits. What were a few learnings you had from the early stage investment in India, so far?
Bharati Jacob -Yes, we are very pleased with the exits we have had in Seedfund1 – it validates our hypothesis that led us to start Seedfund in 2006 – that early stage investing is a profitable business, that we can exit such investments and that early stage investing shouldn’t take a whole lot of money; rather it requires more time than money! These exits have been profitable for our investors as well and that has led to Seedfund2.
Our deal flow is growing – at a healthy pace, month on month, year on year – all pointing towards growing entrepreneurial desire amongst Indians – to be their own boss; create wealth for themselves and the society in a transparent and ethical manner!
Mahesh Murthy:
Well, some of our learnings:
1. Our theory behind our first fund was largely correct. You absolutely could build great companies with a little bit of money and a lot of mentoring if you picked the right team and the right space.
2. Our first fund largely invested in the $500,000 to $1,500,000 range per company. We learned over time that there were unmet opportunities on both sides of those limits. At the lower, sub $500,000 end there were startups that needed a lot of mentoring and handholding and we are creating an interesting infrastructure to handle that in our second fund – an in-house incubator that should be I think India’s first for a VC fund. And at the other end we believe that we should have the dry powder as it’s called to support our companies further through their growth – and hence we now have the ability in the second fund to put up to US$5,000,000 in a company over its lifetime. In simple terms, what was a 500k to 1.5M fund is now catering to a larger startup market – one with a range from 50k to 5M.
3. We were ourselves a startup – now that we’ve proven our basic thesis we can grow our own impact. We started with a little money and a reasonably unusual strategy, to prove that true, risky venture capital is possible and profitable in India. Most of the firms that started alongside us in either the early 2000s or around 2006 have all grown into growth funds or PE funds or even hedge funds – and manage way too much money to be able to look at true-blue risky startups, and mentor them. We believe we now have a system that allows us to deal with that risk that other firms are not comfortable with – and that this gives us some sort of a unique position in the market. We’re now in our second fund and in 3 locations around India – unique for a fund of our relative small size – we can’t do chequebook investing by sending money to a company we’re not in close touch with all the time. We hope that, over time, we can be wherever there are entrepreneurs in India, offering local, hands-on mentorship and guidance, and helping build companies that are what we’d like to think of as “the backbone of the new India”.
- What next?
Oh, raising the money is just the beginning. Now to execute. To find and fund great teams, to offer valuable advice and mentorship. To create market leaders and in that process, make money for our entrepreneurs, our LPs and ourselves.
Lots to do!
-
Have questions for the team? Ask them in the comment section.
To answer this question, let us first look at the bright side of patent. If you have a patent granted from your invention, it gives you the rights to exclude others from commercializing your patented technology for 20 years in the country in which it is granted. In other words, it means, you enjoy monopoly over the patented technology for 20 years in the country in which it is granted.
This sounds like a great way to protect your invention. However, before drawing such conclusion, let us try to get an idea about the effort involved in getting a patent granted.
On an average, it takes ~47 months (identified using a sample of 3191 patents granted in 2011) in US from the date of filing a patent application to get a patent granted. Patenting is a time consuming process.
Patents are territorial. This means, you will have to file patent applications in each country in which you want to protect your invention.
You will have to pay a statutory fee to the patent office in each country you file a patent application. Additionally, you will also have to pay the patent consultant who helps you with filing the patent application in the respective country (we once received a quote of $2000 from a Japanese attorney for filing a patent application in Japan). In a nutshell, patenting is an expensive process.
Irrespective of all these hurdles, individuals and companies file for patents. In certain circumstances, it makes perfect sense to protect your inventions using patents. However, in my opinion, you should ask yourself some questions before you decide to protect your invention using patents.
How easily can my invention be reverse engineered
How easy is it for someone to work around the invention and achieve the advantages provided by the invention?
Is the invention attractive enough for someone to copy it?
For how many years will this invention be relevant to the industry?
How easily can my invention be reverse engineered?
In rare occasions, the nature of invention is such that reverse engineering the same is extremely difficult. In such cases, it is advisable to protect the invention as trade secret. By maintaining your invention as trade secret, you can benefit from it as long as someone reverse engineers it. On the other hand, if you were to protect this type of invention using patents, your protection would be limited to 20 years and to the countries in which you have secured a patent. Additionally, your competitors will get sufficient information from the patent specification, which can be used to work around your invention.
Companies often use patent and trade secret protection wisely together to derive maximum benefit.
How easy is it for someone to work around the invention and achieve the advantages provided by the invention?
One of the main objectives of getting patent protection is to ensure that advantages of your patented technology are not provided by your competitors’ products/processes. However, in some cases, the nature of the invention is such that, one can easily work around your patented invention, irrespective of how well a patent specification is drafted. In such cases, even if you do get a patent for your invention, you may not essentially gain any significant advantage from that patent. When such is the scenario, patenting may not be the best step forward, especially in cases where money is a concern.
However, if you indeed decide against patent protection in the above-discussed scenario, you can consider defensive publication as an option. By adopting defensive publication, you ensure that competitors do not patent obviously-similar technologies and stop you from using such technologies.
Is the invention attractive enough for someone to copy it?
Well this question, in most cases, is extremely hard to answer. However, if the answer to it is a straight NO, then from a commercial point of view, it may not be a good idea to get patent protection. As mentioned earlier, patents give you the rights to exclude others from copying your invention. If nobody is interested in copying your invention, then there are very few reasons to get patent protection. However, as in the previous case, if you decide against patent protection, you may consider defensive publication as an option.
For how many years will this invention be relevant to the industry?
Some industries are such that certain technologies become redundant within an extremely short span of time. Considering the time consuming nature of patenting process, sometimes the technology you are intending to patent becomes redundant even before your patent application is published by the patent office, leave alone granting of patent.
In cases where life span of technology is significantly short, you will have to consider factors such as, the time required to copy your invention by your competitors and potential revenue generation from the patented technology. If your invention is such that, the time required for copying your invention and launching a product based on that technology by your competitors is pretty much equivalent to the life span of that technology, then I see few reasons for patenting. Instead, a defensive publication is a better option.
To conclude, one needs to take an informed decision on protecting business interests, be it through patent protection or otherwise.
I hope you find this article helpful in taking decisions with respect to your inventions.
[About the author: Kartik Puttaiah is a patent consultant and co-founder of InvnTree Intellectual Property Services Pvt. Ltd., a patent services company based out of Bangalore http://invntree.com/]
It’s no secret that in recent years, quite a few foreign (mostly American) web brands have made it big in Japan: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Amazon etc.
But what about startups that don’t have huge budgets to internationalize, no staff in Japan and – in some cases – not even a Japanese user interface (usually a dealbreaker for most local web users).
Here’s a recent (yet surely incomplete) list:
Instagram (we just recently reported about the silly printed how-to-use-Instagram book available in Japan)
Foursquare (KDDI wants to help Foursquare to become bigger in this country)
Bump
Hootsuite
Tweetdeck
Tumblr (official data submitted from Tumblr to Quantcast shows Japan is their No. 5 market worldwide)
Seesmic
In 2010, Evernote established an office in Japan, the company’s No. 2 market worldwide, so it can’t really be part of this list – even though the app was already very popular before that.
Which foreign web and mobile startups flying under the radar in Japan have we forgotten?
Nokia dropped a bomb on Friday as chief executive Stephen Elop announced an alliance with Microsoft to adopt Windows Phone 7 as its smartphone platform of choice. It hasn’t dropped Symbian and Meego altogether but the two will become open source platforms and the company will continue to ship Symbian devices for the remainder of the year.
This is something that many had expected to happen especially since Stephen Elop left Microsoft to replace Olli Pekka Kallasvuo as Nokia CEO and president. However, this is not what many Nokia fans and supporters had hoped for. Indeed, as far as Nokia’s platforms are concerned, this is a death knell.
Spiralling into irrelevance
At the moment Nokia still enjoys the largest global market share for the entire mobile phone industry and 37% of the global smartphone market, according to Gartner. However, Asymco notes that Nokia’s profit share since 2007 had gone from more than 50% of the entire industry to roughly 20%. The most profitable mobile phone company is now Apple which gained 51% global profit share having sold only 4% of the word’s mobile phones.
Nokia is hurting and it’s hurting really badly. Despite enjoying market leadership, it is in fact in decline. Its profit share dwindling, its mind share in tatters, its innovation stagnant. No longer do companies strive to copy or imitate Nokia. Developers have mostly left the Symbian platform in favor of iOS and Android. The N8 which is supposed to be the company’s highlight and savior, did not sell well at all. Its Ovi initiatives had failed to make a dent in the mobile application and music markets. Nokia crashed and is now burning, its own CEO had admitted as much.
With this partnership, many fear Nokia may suffer the same fate as Palm down the line. Like Palm, Nokia hopes to bring back short term profitability by letting Microsoft do the work on the software side of the mobile equation while they focus on churning out the hardware. It’s leaving Symbian behind and cutting off most of the air flowing into MeeGo.
This deal with Nokia however, surely will ruffle the feathers at LG who is also Microsoft’s strategic partner. Perhaps Microsoft decided to up the ante with Nokia after an LG executive publicly expressed his strong disappointment at Windows Phone 7.
Terms of the deal
Nokia and Microsoft had revealed a handful of the terms of their partnership but neither company has yet said what will happen to Nokia’s existing markets.
Aside from using Windows Phone 7 as its preferred smartphone platform, Nokia will use Bing on all its handsets and adopt Marketplace as its app and music stores. Microsoft also gets access to Nokia’s billing service which allows charging for content downloads through phone bills instead of credit cards.
These are all wins for Microsoft as Nokia cedes control over its platform. Nokia’s one win from this deal? Nokia Maps to power Microsoft services.
What of Ovi Store? The fledgling service built in to every Nokia smart phone looks to be deprecated as Windows Phone 7 becomes more common. Ovi Music had been shut down in most parts of the world which leaves the application store. With the announcement that Qt will not be available for Windows Phone 7, it makes no sense for developers to continue creating apps using this environment. Whether they will jump to WP7 remains to be seen.
Plan to disrupt the market
As part of the adoption of WP7, Nokia has agreed to ramp down on Symbian development. The company may have stated that it will still ship 150 million Symbian devices this year but nobody expects sales of those units to be brisk. Elop said the partnership will disrupt other mobile ecosystems swiftly but unless Nokia can churn a family of Windows phones by summer, swift it will not be.
By the middle of the year, we’ll have new versions of iOS, Android, and webOS being rolled on to the market along with significantly upgraded hardware. Windows Phone 7 software has yet to see its first update since its launch in October last year. Nokia itself had the N8 delayed by almost a year, finally delivering the phone when it no longer mattered. These further compound the doubt over Elop’s claim of being swift.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 is not widely available and the Marketplace is not global. Microsoft had decided that the selection of phones would be limited by region, possibly to ensure each partner get maximum exposure to drive the platform rather than running head to head against each other.
For all Microsoft’s strategies, they don’t seem to work. Gartner reports that while there were 111 million units of Symbian handsets in the market in 2010, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 only managed 2 million units since October. Even then, it is not sales to consumers but to resellers and sales partners.
In traditional Nokia strongholds, even the low end markets are being seized by a multitude of brands. China’s ZTE has eaten much of Nokia’s lunch in the Asian market for cheap phones and has crept up to become the world’s number four phone manufacturer, knocking Apple to fifth. Nexian is grabbing the low end market in Indonesia and various brands using cheap MediaTek chips are flooding the scene.
So how exactly does Nokia plan to disrupt the market?
The fall of giants?
Some say the Nokia-Microsoft alliance is like the Hindenburg meeting the Titanic. Both giants in their respective fields hoping to stay afloat in an onslaught of smaller, more agile competitors. Om Malik likens it to the fall of the British Empire. Google executive Vic Gundotra said, “two turkeys don’t make an eagle,” — though Elop responded by proxy saying, “two bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio one day decided to fly.” He was referring of course, to the Wright Brothers.
Microsoft has never managed to get a grip on the mobile industry. Its Windows Mobile platform never took off even during its heyday and was laid to rest once Apple crashed the party. Nokia still dominates but has failed to take advantage of that position and in the past year has lost a significant portion of its lead.
Windows Phone 7 is the freshest and most innovative software to come out of Microsoft in years and all it needs is a really good hardware partner. Nokia is arguably the world’s best mobile phone manufacturer and distributor but it hasn’t managed to come up with a compelling smartphone software. Its Symbian hasn’t really progressed in years, it shelved Maemo, and by the time MeeGo comes out (if it ever), the world may have moved beyond mobile devices as we know it.
Whose phone is it, anyway?
Seen through this perspective, Microsoft and Nokia could be a match made in heaven — but is it? Both companies lack focus and execution. Both have had issues with significantly delayed products. Both companies are too large to pull quick maneuvers and both made the jump from burning platforms. Will the two giants sink together or will they be able to pull each other out?
Given Microsoft’s past partnerships, things don’t look too good for the Finnish company. Asymco, again, highlighted this sad history of partnerships. Nokia’s own Microsoft history apparently had Elop’s signature all over it and produced nothing of value. Microsoft’s mobile partnerships had gone from failure to failure to failure.
With former Microsoft executives at the helm in the headquarters and in the US, and the company’s smartphones to rely on WP7, Nokia is becoming essentially Microsoft’s mobile hardware division. They may be working closely together to create unique phones in the WP7 ecosystem, but they won’t really be Nokia’s phones — they’ll be Microsoft’s.
In a deal that will span three years, Indian online travel booking service Makemytrip.com will fully acquire Singapore based travel agency Luxury Tours and Travel (LTT).
Affiliates’ Corner brings together, intellectual property owners, innovators and experienced professionals who are interested in entrepreneurships to promote commercialization of innovations through generation of start-ups. This next Affiliates’ Corner will have Ms Woo Yin Yang of the MDA 
