CES 2012

….was the relative competition between China and India for their future piece of the global TMT (Technology, Media, Telecom) landscape.

The verdict: At CES, no question this round goes to China — a virtual shutout of India, which was almost invisible in contrast to the enormous and growing presence of Chinese technology manufacturers, telecom hardware and software providers and infrastructure players in glitzy splendor among the 153,000 attendees of this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

Such Chinese leaders as telecom giant Huawei (with its sub-$100 Android smartphone) had significant floorspace. And this very large presence was more than exceeded if you total the dozens of smaller companies more modestly showing one or another interesting new take on an existing business (e.g. super-powerful, super-inexpensive tablet computers) or on a new business (cleverly designed bluetooth-enabled holders to attach your iPad to the back of the front seat of your car to create a cheap backseat entertainment center).

But the ‘missing force’ at CES was India, whose large and growing technology and telecom industry was more or less AWOL from the show. Not that India’s tech executives were absent: I had several great meetings with leaders from several Indian players in the telecom and IT outsourcing industries.

But given the pace of growth of India’s telecom and technology industries and the increasing global role they are playing, it was intriguing India’s technology leaders were most notable in their absence. I know from the very strong growth app-store marketplace leader Appia is seeing in India through its relationship providing mobile applications for Vodafone India, for instance, that the Indian market is surging.

Yet Indian manufacturers and technology companies seemed almost invisible at this year’s preeminent consumer technology showcase.

Why? There are those who say CES is past its prime, and perhaps that explains the absence of some of these players. But at an event where China played such a visible and growing role, the  contrast with India provides an interesting anecdote.

The only conclusion on the ground was: China is ‘leaning in’ on a global export opportunity, and India — by appearances anyway — seems to lean in the opposite direction.

You may not yet know Appia, which provides white-label app stores to carriers around the globe — but if you have downloaded an app on any of the seven Continents, chances are high you have used Appia to do it….

I am looking forward to helping the Appia team accelerate their already growing momentum, and hopefully helping lead to an outcome as great as a previous company I had the privilege of Exec Chairing –  WHERE – has enjoyed since their acquisition by eBay earlier this year.

I’ll continue my roles on the boards of some other great companies as well. The focus: accelerating profitable growth.

AllThingsD had a nice writeup here…

Press Release is here…

Tonight, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt did just that. And it is worth noting the authenticity with which he recounted his biggest screw up in a decade as Google CEO was fairly stunning for its directness.

And that is a management lesson for us all to consider.

Specifically, Schmidt said Google missed the huge opportunity to create the social platform that Facebook has become, noting that the now-being-solved platform opportunity around our “identity” is one of the defining opportunities in technology.

“The CEO should take responsibility. I screwed up in missing the ‘identity’ opportunity,” he said. “I wrote memos about it four years ago. I wrote memos about it three years ago. But I did nothing.”

There was a brief pause while the audience simply took in the direct point.

And then Kara asked the perfect followup:

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I was busy,” said Schmidt. Which he no doubt was. Not an excuse. Just a statement of fact.

Schmidt said many other interesting things during his remarks, and then a few more when several of us ate dinner together (though it was a short, cold dinner outside once the sun set). Among them: Google is working on the next generation of search which will be about algorithmically winnowing down its results to the best answer to a query, as opposed to its current model of finding the web page that most closely seems to relate to the query. (This is a big change — and a big deal if done right). He also expressed concerns about countries beginning to wall off the internet from the basic standards that makes it work the same way from Lebanon, PA to Lebanon, in the Mideast. And he showed new Google wallet payment technology which is the company’s entry into the new era-defining opportunity of local-social-mobile commerce. The Mashable guys did a fine job summarizing his remarks here.

But the most memorable thing was his no-nonsense answer to the direct question of what he got wrong, which he volunteered with no caveats.

My own view is that this is what we will remember the longest about what he said here tonight. And there is a lesson in management for all of us in that.

…Claims to be among the smallest 4G phones, it is hard to see how such applications as WHERE can be integrated on the tiny screen….But if you think the screen is small, you should see the keypad…

The HP Veer is the sort of phone ‘Zoolander’ would have liked….

It is the ninth annual WSJ D conference since Walt and Kara started this global gathering of the digital elite, and my fifteenth since I left daily newspaper journalism at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones to get involved in this “obscure” (as it was considered then) and “geeky” (again, that was then) thing called….The Internet….

Today, what is now known simply as “Convergence” has brought together the worlds of media, communications and technology in ways that were simply a vision back then.

I have been privileged to operate big jobs at the center of this “Convergence” from several vantage points (“Big Media” (@TimeWarner), “Big Internet” (@Yahoo!), “Big Telecom” (EarthLink), and successful startups in websearch and mobile (Infoseek->Disney and WHERE->EBay).

And it’s funny: when you look forward, big changes really seem evolutionary. It is only when you have the perspective and opportunity to look backwards that you can see how revolutionary the changes really are….

This WSJ D Conference provides plenty of both perspective and opportunity – so I will be pimping for my current startups every way I can!

And Walt and Kara and their growing team have assembled a great lineup, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Hewlett-Packard CEO Léo Apotheker, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, DARPA director Regina Dugan, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division, among others….

I’ll tweet as best I can! Once a reporter, always a reporter….

I just returned from a longish trip to the Mideast including Lebanon and Turkey and this post is mostly about the perspective one gets from such travel. As a telecom and technology executive, I was fascinated to see up-close the powerful role mobile and social technology are playing in the popular uprisings currently shaking so much of the Arab world. And it was so interesting – and invaluable – to meet and speak with to speak with so many people who are using new mobile technology to create a new landscape in the region.

Just over the past week, unrest in Syria left over a hundred people dead and underscored a widening of the popular uprisings that have already occurred this year (in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia and Libya) to Lebanon’s neighbor to the East. There surely is more upheaval to come.

I spent much of the past week in Lebanon, traveling from the southern Shuf Mountains to the northern city of Tripoli. I had a memorable time seeing a beautiful, diverse country that is rebuilding and seems on the move despite all the obstacles stacked against it.

In contrast to the impression one has from afar, Beirut today and its suburbs nowadays are a bustling hive of construction sites, highway projects and a busy international airport. Years of civil war have left deep scars of course, and opened the door for such rivals as Dubai to eclipse Beirut as a regional center. But with such awe-inspiring construction projects as the center-city Solidere redevelopment site – one of the largest engineering projects in the world – it is possible to imagine Beirut once again becoming the ‘Paris of the Mideast.’

Of course, the outward appearance of modernity and economic progress may prove fragile, as it has so many times before by intervention from its neighbors and internal civil strife.

To say it’s a complex neighborhood is a deliberate understatement.

Regardless, one principal impression stays with me after 10 days spent in the region:

The coming fault line of conflict in the Mideast will be within the “neighborhood” of Islamic Arabia itself, and it will NOT principally be a battle of Islam with the rest of the world. The United States and the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa are not at the center of this reformation. Nor is the Palestinian-Israeli issue the key. In fact, this isn’t even principally a battle involving nation-states.

Rather, the confrontation is shaping up as a battle for the soul of Islam – between extremist Shia and Sunni groups.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and now Syria have thus far not illustrated this in the early rounds. But I have a hunch we will see the Sunni-Shia extremist conflict emerging soon as a central narrative in the so-called Arab Uprising of 2011. When? It may be a while, because so many institutions of post-authoritarian regimes need to be rebuilt. But there is very little question it is coming, and in some places possibly soon.

How can this be? Many of the worst repressive regimes kept “bottled up” the worst kinds of the religious conflicts among the two main strains of Islamic faith. Now, as these regimes crumble, the prospects for more openness and democracy increase, but so do the possibly of internal civil war.

The principal Shia action groups on the list are very familiar: Iran, Amal, and of course Hezbollah (which in Lebanon these days seems as much the huge force it is in the mainstream of political life, with visible signs of its power plastered all over, especially in the south, not at all a marginalized splinter group it is sometimes portrayed outside the country). On the Sunni side, the names are less well-known to non-Mideast experts but no less lethal. Perhaps the most terrifyingly brutal are the extremist fighters belonging to the Salafi orthodox Sunni sect, who claimed responsibility for the brutal murder of a pro-Palestinian Italian activist kidnapped and murdered in Gaza while I was traveling here.

In Syria, there is a scenario in which Syrian strongman Bashar Al Assad losing his grip on the country, and setting up a conflict between Sunni majority in the country, and the Shia and Alawite minority who have dominated the political landscape for 40 years. In the region, Christians, Druze and other religious minorities all fear becoming caught in the cross-fire. Such a shift in the balance of power in Syria could put Hezbollah and Iran on the defensive, and then usher in a new period of realignment in the region.

Despite the West’s strong interests and involvement in the region, the heart of the issue is essentially local in nature. It does not revolve around Washington, London, Beijing or other world capitals. Which may be worth remembering as the calls for global action, especially for the U.S., escalate.

WHERE is the leading location media company and provides a hugely useful mobile service that helps you find and share your favorite places, at home or on the road. My view is such mobile, location-aware services are at the forefront of the next-generation of consumer and business marketing, media, advertising and technology. Innovating a breakneck pace, WHERE sits at the crossroads of the local, social, mobile and technology ecosystem.

WHERE’s latest product release reflects all that. I’ve commented before about the usefulness of features that help you store, manage and share the places you like. With the current release (updated last week for Android and iPhone) WHERE now is starting to recommend local places that you and your friends are likely to find most alluring, based on algorithmic analysis of you and your friends’ preferences. It’s very cool.

And the company is on a tear! In addition to reaching four million mobile customers monthly, WHERE is also the biggest location-aware advertising network — (that hasn’t been snapped up by Apple or Google) — serving more than two billion monthly mobile advertising impressions. Although a private company that doesn’t release its financials, WHERE is both growing revenues fast (in the double-digit millions) and has been profitable for the past six consecutive quarters. That kind of performance reflects the fact the company is a great team, led at its top by a terrific CEO – Walt Doyle.

What does an executive chairman do? I’ll be working on corporate development and strategy with the team, who are doing great things in the relationships with carriers, handset manufacturers and other important partners. Mostly, I will try to be helpful to the WHERE team and its stakeholders, just as WHERE tries to be helpful to its customers. And I’ll continue with my board roles at several other private companies I am equally enthusiastic about.

I am excited to be off on the next phase of the WHERE ride!

But when it comes to global consumers benefiting from advances in technology, media and telecom (my professional “workshop”) I find it hard to be anything other than optimistic.

Here’s why: We are at the beginning of another major wave of innovation, which promises to accelerate changes that will enhance the business and personal lives of producers and consumers alike. And in terms of “manufacturing growth online” or “accelerating” such growth, I am focusing on companies, products and services that leverage three dramatically innovative technologies that are forever going to change the we use and interact with content, people, locations and commerce.

That’s my conclusion from my involvement with several emerging internet, online-video, telecom and consumer-technology businesses in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, (and after four years in the southeastern U.S. focused on internet, media and telecommunications issues in the U.S. and globally).

To start at the beginning: In recent posts, I have discussed the importance of saving users’ time, money and delighting customers when it comes to designing winning products.

These are the most important building blocks of great online products. And at the start of the consumer internet, there was an “architectural” reason why the most successful brands (for instance, Yahoo!, EBay, and Amazon, to name just three) became so: They used the basic “building blocks” of the medium — hypertext markup language (HTML) – to usefully link related text documents in a manner that delighted, and saved time, and saved money for their millions of customers.

(To be sure, they also took advantage of the power of the distributed architecture of the internet-protocol (IP) network to ensure point-to-point communications, regardless of the route the digital packets take to reach their destination. But that’s another story, for another time. This post is already “geeky” enough .)

Today, dramatically new ways are emerging to usefully link information and thereby create the building blocks of sustainably successful online businesses.

In my view, the three that are most profoundly meaningful are the social graph, the location graph (a “graph” for places), and the video graph: more about each of them below. Amid evidence that “silos” are emerging that threaten to render these three radically new approaches less effective than they otherwise might be, there is emerging great business opportunity in “mashing up” and merging technologies that take the best of each and drive value from all — or a synthesis of several — of them.

That’s where I am focusing my investment attention and board leadership. Each of the four companies on whose boards I sit (WHERE, Coincident TV, Success Television and MotiveCast) are playing innovative roles in meshing these various silos of user engagement and attention. And they are generating meaningful revenue, engagement and customer growth as a result.

The first of the new methodologies is the “social graph,” or social ecosystem, which is linking many of us through our “friends” and expanded contact lists. Both Facebook and LinkedIn are two companies exploiting the social ecosystem very effectively and with great success. OK, perhaps now it is not so “new,” but it’s worth keeping in mind that 500 million-member Facebook is still less than a decade old, and we are only beginning to see its impact on the social graph.

In the social-graph organizational construct, I know you, and you know me – with the appropriate nod to privacy settings, and familiarity, we share a web of interests, web objects and social “relationships,” and we can benefit from each other’s networks. The net result from a business-process improvement perspective is — among other benefits — dramatically lower customer acquisition and retention costs, as well as dramatically higher-value relationships with your customers (largely because businesses have the potential to know so much more and have such closer relationships with those customers).

There are similar business-acceleration benefits when it comes to the “location graph.” A number of companies are using location awareness to drive customer gratification and revenue generation. Location-based Service (LBS) leaders such as WHERE, Foursquare, Groupon and Gowalla are using location as the key-building block of a new “location-centric” web. Their applications – helping users find valuable local businesses and offers – is providing another organizational theme for distributed information.

At MotiveCast, the team has built a powerful platform for branded advertising in a location-centric, social gaming environment. They recently were selected by PepsiCo as one of the 10 most innovative online companies as a result.

Finally, there is video. Although online video is now a mass phenomenon (and Success TV and before that MyPrimeTime were true pioneers in that), online video in my view remains stuck in a very “1.0” experience.

That’s starting to change. Coincident TV has created a new programming language, along with a software editor and API set, that allows owners of online video to link that video in context to another other distributed objected on the internet.

In just six months after shipping its first product, Coincident TV has developed dramatic performance enhancements for its customers (including MTV,Fox’s GLEE franchise and Audi) in terms of generating more clicks, more Facebook “like”-button adoption and more search.

I’m betting that applications and software that leverage these new ways of “navigating’ across the social, location and video grid (as well as text of course) will deliver tremendous new growth for those companies smart and innovative enough to deploy them in ways that save user’s time, money or delight them in some way.

We are already seeing it at WHERE, CoincidentTV, MotiveCast and Success Television. And my view is we have only just begun.

(Note: This is an expanded version of some remarks I delivered at Landmark Ventures recent conference on Media and Technology in Los Angeles. I want to thank the Landmark folks for giving me an opportunity to assemble these thoughts. Some coverage photos of the event are here.)

But the marketing experience for filmed entertainment simply has not kept pace with the constant transitions and advancements of filmmaking. The audience that saw the trailer for “Casablanca” would be entirely comfortable watching the trailer for this season’s “The Town.” Marketers still employ this “one-way” promotional technique – directly from the producer to the audience – offering film highlights but not much else. Until now, studios still unroll the traditional and dated film trailer for every new cinematic release.

With the launches of the interactive trailers for 20th Century Fox’s “Machete” and “Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps”, Coincident TV (CTV) is changing things — bringing its interactive, immersive video technology experiences to a new audience – the film-going public.

The Coincident TV bet (I am on the board; please look below for a disclaimer) is that movie marketing and promotion will never be the same. Rather than simply providing an internet-distributed video of edited film highlights – as in an online trailer – CTV is partnering with 20th Century Fox to create an interactive experience designed to promote the film well before the ticket-buying window opens, and to carry that immersive experience well beyond the actual cinema viewing of the film.

How is it done? Basically, the idea is to use the interactive power of CTV’s programming language to create relevant links, or cue-points, for the audience that go well beyond the linear highlights of the film. These can include:

• Links to the online “social-grid” involving stars and their characters, as a way of including producers and talent and allowing the audience to interact.

• Links to the merchandising opportunities created by the film, including access to ancillary products ranging from soundtrack albums to logo-merchandise.

• E-ticketing. This one is obvious but CTV provides a direct way for interested audience members to pre-book their seats with all the various popular ticketing platforms.

• Brand extensions and franchise development. This is a major enhancement of the film marketing experience. Through the CTV online platform, film-goers can continue to engage with the characters, stars and brands that are created in the magic of the movie theater well after the lights have come back up.

Indeed, the interactive film trailers hold the prospect of becoming ongoing destinations in and of themselves, with a lifecycle that could continue until a sequel or a new franchise is underway.

These two titles also underscore the ability of CTV technology to “write once, run anywhere” as they function seamlessly on Apple, Android or Flash technology. With the combination of new technology and interactivity, CTV is helping Hollywood and movie-marketeers worldwide take that big next step to the future.

To be sure, not everything is currently appearing in our apps for these two trailers. Some of the above features are still “world-of-tomorrow” enhancements that CTV’s team of creative minds and engineers are diligently working to create.

Still, as Humphrey Bogart says in “Casablanca,” CTV believes its partnership with Hollywood marks “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

(Note — This is a slightly expanded version of my post on the CoincidentTV blog. I am on the board at CTV, whose new video technology (which basically does for video what HTML did for text) is currently powering interactive sites for Fox, MTV, Audi and several other media and consumer companies).

I won’t go into the details of how we got there (although that’s an interesting story). But get there, we did. And we believed then, as I do today, that a great product:

1. Saves customers’ time.

2. Saves customers’ money.

3. Delights customers in new ways.

Seems simple? Well, in my experience this is far easier to say than it is to do.

I am reminded of this today because after some very hard work, the WHERE team (full disclosure: I am a board member) has launched a feature called Placebook in its new location-based app build that does all three. And thank heavens, because the pain relieved by this new release is large and longstanding.

Placebook is a constantly updatable ‘Rolodex’ of your (and your friends) favorite spots. You can use it on your IPhone. You can access it on the web. (They sync)! And you can FORGET having to REMEMBER all those names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.

You might be wondering “what’s the excitement?” Please let me answer that, from a personal POV.

Have you ever had the experience of knowing that the restaurant you love, in a city you visit frequently, is just around the corner somewhere. But you can’t recall the address, or exactly the route to get there, or even the restaurant’s name? Frustrating? Time-wasting? Totally useless?

The problem is solved. Go to a restaurant, or any favorite spot. Click once in the WHERE app to store it to your Placebook. Click again to give it a rating. And from now on, you can simply forget about having to remember. Once stored, your profile and Placebook will remember for you.

Now, the WHERE guys are not the first folks to think of this. There are countless listing and reviews services. There are competitors. Once upon a time there was a clever startup called Vindigo that did something similar. It was useful, too.

But Placebook is a big step forward, right now.

Of course, simply building such great features as Placebook are no guarantee in and of themselves of a huge business success. Building better products is simply a gating issue that allows successful companies onto the battlefield that will determine their ultimate ability to go from ‘Good to Great’ as Jim Collins puts it.

But it is a great start to have a great product, filled with useful features. And — on behalf of busy, forgetful people all over, thank you to the WHERE team for solving this particular problem.