Mike Butcher

The Inquirer is reporting on some Strand Consulting research which says:

While many players are focusing on the growth markets like India, Brazil, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh – countries where cheap handsets and SIM cards will attract millions of new customers – that’s not the interesting bit, Strand says.

The real challenges are markets like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland and Germany, where mobile prices are plummeting at the same time as the operators are investing in the launch of 3G.

This is very interesting. What it appears to imply is that mature markets – places where people use mobiles as if it was second nature – will be the places to watch over the next year.

Any hick can put up a GSM base station in Bangladesh. Not anyone can make mobile successful in places where people shrug their shoulders at 3G services.

Having just been on a trip to Scandinavia, I’d say it’s going to get tougher – especially as people switch on to Skype and WiFi phones…

I’ll be at 3GSM in Barcelona next week. See you there if you’re going!

It was a warm day in Helsinki. Minus five. And I found myself walking beside the city’s frozen lake, talking about Web analytics.

Jouko Ahvenainen heads an analytics firm which has hit upon an idea. Over lunch beside a wintery, but beautifully sunlit setting, we talked about the dramatic changes which are about to take place in the mobile industry.

Jouko runs Xtract which has traditionally been a high-end anlytics firm. Like many in the space, it creates software to analyse millions of customer transactions every hour, automating the routine work of customer analytics. Like many, they think they are unique.

But one thing might set them apart from others in their space, which is the increasing concentration on the mobile arena.

Put it this way.

We have heard quite enough about how Web analytics are wonderfully useful for working out how users move through web sites and how it can be used to improve sites. But what about mobile?

Think about it. When you go “online” via your mobile it can be a frustrating experience.

Often you are presented with a completely Web-like interface, through which you must navigate to the area which interests you most.

But this is the wrong way round surely?

Using analytics software, would it not be possible to work out – through techniques like collaborative filtering – what sort of user you are, before you even got there. Then, as you arrive, it could present you with the kind of information the brand or publisher reckoned would be most relevant at that moment.

Why not think in terms both of demographics, but also of time of day, or even type of mobile handset. A smart phone user with a more sophisticated mobile browser client is going to want something different than the user of a Vofafone “Simply” phone, yes?

Since we often interact with our mobiles at least as much as the Web – plus we take it with us, unlike the desktop PC – it makes sense that analytics solutions should start to move towards the mobile phone.

And, of course, why stop there? With so much talk about IPTV occuring these days, analytics is certain to become a feature inside the flat screen in the corner of the living room.

But, you’ll be delighted to hear, talk of mobile analytics didn’t entirely dominate our lunch! The food was far too good for that.

There’s nothing like being surrounded by 800 Geeks. You start talking in code – Ajax, RSS, tags, XUL.

In late February I’m launching a series of weekly podcast shows in Central London. “Bitecast” will be a half hour show looking at interesting new trends in the digital media business, covering mobile and the web. In particular the show will look at the shift to digital music, entertainment and the impact on mainstream media. We’ll review the week’s news, check out the latest mobiles, shoot the breeze about the new trends on the web and generally have fun. We’re looking for guests to come on, as well as potential sponsor(s) for the show (although let me make it clear from the outset that sponsors will have no say in the editorial content other than being billed as a sponsor). Contact me on mike AT mbites.com for more information.

Here in Helsinki I met up with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Researcher, at the University of Helsinki. She has some fascinating ideas about the “Long Tail“.

In part because of creating Hobbyprincess.com, which was about how you get girls developing technology and blogging about crafts, she got interested in the idea that the stuff which people make – perhaps a coat or a sculpture – will drop off the ‘long tail’ because it can’t be categorised digitally, unlike mass produced items which all have bar codes and unique product codes and identifiers.

She met Jimbo Wales from Wikipedia at a conference and has gone onto to produce a sort of product-code-generating wiki called Thinglinks.com.

“Thinklink.org is designed to test the theory about what happens when product codes are attached to things which are hand made,” she explained to me.

Currently there is no site that aggregates things which are non-mass manufactured.

So for instance Etsy.com has an item code for things which are sold on the site which are hand made, but once it’s sold, the item will drop off the digital map. It won’t be part of the Long Tail, where niche products can find markets.

Why is this important? Well, consider the small producer who normally has to deal with middle-men, retailers and wholsalers to find a market. Or even craftspeople in the developing world, who don’t have access to the ‘barcode’ market.

This is almost an open sourced, Creative Commons approach to bar codes, which could benefit small-scale producers.

Ulla is now developing the ThingLink database. It will be fascinating to see what happens.

Pissed off that Google is censoring results? Then start typing badly. Blogger Paul Boutin found that image searches for Tiananmen throw up innocuous images of fountains and temples. But type in Tianenmen, or some other close mispelling and you see tanks and protesters… With any luck Google will be able to argue that it doesn’t have to control or censor mispellings. Well, I hope it takes that line, but these days you never know…

Why have small countries like Finland and Scandinavia produced such global power house like Ikea, Nokia, Ericsson and Volvo?

I think it’s down tot he national character that is prevalent in these Nordic countries. Both Swedes and Finns tend to be quiet, modest people (at least compared to Brits and Yanks, who seem loud and egotistical by comparison). Let’s face it, if you live in a climate which is dark and cold most of the year, you don’t really feel like being loud and outrageous. In the past, just surviving the winter months would have been tough enough. And when the community has to pull together just to survive there is not much time for grandstanding or rampant individualism. So the Nordic national character developed in this way – both respecting the stillness and power of a cold natural world, while keeping the community together. In fact there is quite a famous Swedish comedy called “Together” which pokes fun that this concept. This community feeling means that both Swedes and Finns don’t like to stand out from the crowd. You can see it in the way they dress. Sure, people are fashionable, but, as one Swede said to me, you don’t want to be “too” over dressed or too plainly dressed. You need to be “in the middle” (which is literally a Swedish phrase to describe their national character).

Ordinarily you’d think that would lead to rampant rignt-wing conservatism, but that focus on community has helped foster a pretty good natured desire for social democracy and state support for the vulnerable. At its worst however, it’s lead to a sclerotic obsession with benefits – something most European democracies are now trying to deal with as populations age.

But that doesn’t explain why we got Nokia and Ericsson. My theory is that, constrained by the desire to look and act similarly, the Scandinavian character has instead had to strike out in new directions to vent its creativity. Combined with their geography, on the edges of Europe, this means the region has produced outward looking societies, in business and culture, ready to trade and explore. Let’s face it, the Vikings were the first!

Further: One Finn said to me “the dream of most 40-year old Finnish men is to go into the forest and build their own house.” Swedes too, love to go the archipelago – most have holiday houses there. Both nations have fostered a sense of self-sufficiency. That makes them “can-do” people. Indeed Finnish children are taught from an early age about basic skills like carpentry.

Meanwhile, back in Britain we are tripping over ourselves to keep little Darren away from the kitchen scissors. And any tradition we had for actually craft work or making things has largely been destroyed from two angles. Firstly the re-characteriation of craft as “hobbies”. So, now hobbyists are either sad people who muck around with balsa wood and Airfix glue, while women’s craftwork is cast as something old ladies do with doilies. At the other end of the spectrum, the free time of British young people is eaten up by MSN messenger, Sony Playstation, TV and Big Brother.

However, there’s hope for the Scandinavians yet. My travels here reveal that the young are as equally obsessed with text messaging and MSN as ours are, so pretty soon we’ll all be the same. “Together” indeed.

WiFi on every street corner (most of it free). Technical excellence at local technology universities. A young and hungry population. Widespread e-banking and even e-voting. A reputation for producing the talent that coded Skype. Estonia is powering ahead as a technology hub, and not just because it’s wages are lower than comparatively expensive Sweden and Finland.

Everything I’ve seen here in Tallin, the capital, says Estonia has what it takes to the the “Ireland of the North”.

However there are just two things they are not doing well. One is that they are not marketing their capabilities to the outside world very well (although large sections of the tech and mobile world are beating a path to their door, so perhaps they don;t need to right now).

The other – and this is not a damning criticism by any stretch – is that the Finns and the Swedes trump Estonians on the English language. That’s not some Old England view, just a fact of life in business these days, where English is the Lingua Franca.

Other than that I don’t see any reason why quite a lot of the technology we use won’t be Estonian made in a few years time.

One more thought: St Petersburg looks like it may be the next tech hub. A triumvirate of Helsinki, Tallinn and St Petersburg could well from a real powerhouse in years to come.

Meeting Cecilia Stegö Chilò of the Timbro thinktank was an experience. A former journalist, she is a passionate believer in the future of Sweden as a liberalised economy. The problem, she says, is that in a globalised world, the Nordic “social model” of high taxation, expensive public services won’t work, and nor will it create the jobs Sweden’s young people will need in the next few years.

She is also the author of a book about how Sweden became the nation it is: “The Shift of Systems: a 19th century story”, written at the beginning of 1990s. It electrified the political world. However, she says, Sweden’s apparent dynamism is masked by a stultifying public sector which is dragging down innovation and driving people abroad to more dynamic and faster health services, among others.

For instance, there is the recent incident of a woman who went to Germany for a knee operation, who later said ” I didn’t realise how good it was in other countries. I could have lived without the TV set and nice nurses at home if I could just get the operation faster.”

And while Stockholm thrives, the north of the country is effectively “dead.”