The new strategy of the tech giants in USA is to make a living of what is unique about your company and give the competitor’s key product away for free.
Google does this to Microsoft with Office, Amazon does this to Netflix with free movies for prime customers, Google does this to Facebook with Google+ which surprisingly has no ads, Google does this to Apple with Android, Google does this to Microsoft/Skype with Google Talk, Amazon does not give the Kindle Fire for free but it is going after Apple with iPad at a huge discount. Now one of the reason’s Apple continues to be the most valuable company in the world is that they don’t give anything away for free!
2011 21
Lumia 800 by Nokia, my impressions
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Europe with No Comments
I am testing a Nokia Lumia 800 that I got thanks to Hans Peter Brondmo a friend at Nokia. It is a beautiful phone. My favorite hardware right now, even better than an HTC, Samsung or iPhone in terms of look and feel. One hardware drawback though is the lack of a front facing camera which is not Nokia’s fault but Microsoft’s. The Nokia Lumia 800 feels pretty solid, whatever material is made of looks better than the Samsung plastic or the iPhone metal/plastic combination. WP is also beautiful but it does have many missing features that I need. If you are used to Google you’ll be annoyed as WP forces you to use Bing, it makes it very hard to use Google Maps and forces you to use Nokia Maps which have awful graphics although work pretty much like Google maps. There is no app for Tumblr, and the Youtube “app” is a joke (it’s simply a shortcut that takes you to the Youtube homepage). In general, the availability of apps and games is very limited compared to iPhone and Android.
What is great about WP is the Xbox Live integration which enables connectivity with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console with Kinect. You can see an example of how this works in this video. For all users with a strong interest in gaming, this unique feature should be a strong argument to get a device with WP.
Sharing websites from the Internet Explorer is complicated when you want to share only on one social network (by default it will share simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook and an unknown network called Windows Live, unless you manually select only the network you want). If you live in a multilingual world as me, Swiftkey is the best keyboard for Android to do predictive multilingual typing. WP also has predictive multilingual typing but you have to switch from language to language with a key that is just in the wrong place. At least the iPhone has a globe but Android is best for that. Hitting the right keys on the Lumia when typing is difficult, and it’s disappointing that there is no way of activating haptic feedback (small vibrations) when you type.
Android is very well integrated with Google photos and Google+ and whatever pictures you take go to the “Google cloud”. iPhone has the same feature. WP does not have a photo cloud nor automatically sends pictures to a photo cloud that is good. There is some kind of Microsoft cloud but its workings are obscure to me. Also in iPhone and Android you just log in for Apple and Google but for the Lumia you have to log in to Microsoft and Nokia with two sets of passwords and more accounts to open. People used to have Microsoft passwords, now few do. I have yet to find an app or setting that allows me to easily turn on and off different wireless connections like bluetooth, WiFi or 3G to increase battery life. Now what is great about the Lumia is the short time the phone takes to boot and the overall speed at which apps work.
If Nokia and Microsoft manage to get the 500 or so most popular iOS and Android apps onto the WP platform and correct some of the shortcomings I mention above, their strategy might be successful after all. I argued earlier that Nokia only had a 20% chance of surviving, but after seeing what they accomplished in the past months I now think they have a higher probability of succeeding. It would be great to see Nokia regain some of its old strength. More competition always improves the ecosystem. My last comment is that when I hold the Lumia 800 I wish it ran Android!
In October 2007 I had a 90 minutes meeting with Steve Jobs. It was a very special moment in my career. At Fon we were already partners with Google and I had met most of the key actors in the technology world by then but not Steve Jobs. The meeting was not a success. Steve Jobs then told me that Apple was going to do Fon without Fon. I am glad they never did!
More news is coming out now about this initiative that never materialized at Apple.
As you can see I was very cautious about what I said about Steve Jobs then.
2011 20
Testing Android’s speech-to-text capabilities
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
I would like to know how accurate Android voice recognition is for native US speakers. 
I speak English with an Argentine accent but obviously a very slight accent because it is remarkable how well Android understands my English. Interestingly my wife has a German accent in English and Android cannot understand her at all. Android gets almost every word she says wrong, as if she was speaking another language. But in real life few have problems understanding Nina. Now what I found unusual is that when I choose Argentine Spanish as default and speak in Spanish Android makes the same 10% mistake rate that it makes when I speak in English. Maybe I am not a native speaker of any language anymore or maybe the best Android can hope now is to get things 90% right. Another answer could be that Android has experimented much more in English, has found that a significant part of the US population has a Spanish accent in English and recognizes those.
2011 5
Fon organized the launch of Facebook in Spanish
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Entrepreneurship with No Comments
This was surprising, I was speaking at a conference in Zurich and somebody from the audience came up with this video of Mark Zuckerberg and I in 2008. That was superkind of this person, to shoot this video I mean. You can see how Mark Zuckerberg was going around the world promoting Facebook, this was the Spanish launch at it took place at a theatre I owned in Madrid called Teatro Lara. The video starts in Spanish and I speak, then switches to English and Mark speaks.
Martin Varsavsky and Mark Zuckerberg present Fon and Facebook from Martin Varsavsky on Vimeo.
My 17 year old son Tom was sick for Roshashana the Jewish New Year that we celebrated last night. I felt sorry for him and asked him if there was anything I could get him that would make him feel better. He answered “I don’t know Dad, all I want I get on my laptop”.
When I was his age being sick meant book, magazines, videos and TV. Now all that comes over the internet.
But then I thought that everything I could possibly get him I could get him thanks to the internet. That our home, our car, our vacation home and whatever we have we owe to the companies I built that deliver the internet to people. That my career has been all about companies that deliver the internet to everyone, including my son Tom. He gets his internet via Jazztel and Ya.com and Fon (the two Spanish telcos that I founded and deliver internet via DSL, and Fon WiFi).
So there we were, a son who anything he wanted while sick was on the internet and a father who anything he could possibly buy him was thanks to the Internet.
We are a good fit Tom and I.
2011 23
Disconnection
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in International with No Comments
I belong to the tech world. But also to the real world. And the disconnect has never been greater. The tech world is one piece of good news after another. The real world is falling apart. Especially in Southern Europe where I live. But even in NYC where I am now the talk is of gloom and doom.
2011 23
Testing Google TV
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
I am testing Google TV for the first time, it’s like Apple TV + Chrome. The Logitech execution is poor, lots of work to be done. It’s shocking that Logitech put the enter and the delete buttons so close to each other that many times you want to enter, you delete. I don’t think Google’s method of allowing everyone else to build anything off their code really works. At least Apple retains control of the final product. Google bought Motorola and that is great. I am not saying Google should not license. But Apple is showing that corporate fascism pays off. Somewhere in between is best.
2011 12
Four quick ideas for Blackberry
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
-Make it such that when you get a new Blackberry you can clone the old one, apps included, as iTunes does with the iPhone, now it’s just Blackberry services. As a manufacturer you want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy your newer products.
-Create an API for the keyboard and trackpad so any other gadget in the planet, including your iPad, your TV… can be managed from your Blackberry acting as remote, of course the Blackbery should be the remote of the Playbook. What people love the most about Blackberry is the keyboard.
-Make it easy for developers to write stable apps for Blackberry.
-Have BBM connect to the iPhone, Androids and the web. It is useless to give this business to WhatsApp if you are RIM.
2011 30
Netflix to launch in Spain
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Probably the fact that Spain is the country with more downloads per internet user in Europe made Spain the first EU country to get Netflix. When I recently met with Presidential hopeful Alfredo Rubalcaba he spoke about how much pressure the Spanish government received to stop the downloading of US content without pay in Spain and was very aware of how Spotify was making it in Spain as a legal alternative.
Now the challenge will be to see if it was true that people downloaded because DVDs are a rip off or because they don’t want to pay any price for movies. Because Spotify really took off in Spain but only the ad based version. Few pay. And there is no ad version of Netflix. Only on Hulu there is. But to me Netflix is an incredible deal. To pay less than €10 per month for all you can eat quality streamed movies is unbelievable.
I pay for Spotify and for Netflix. Netflix I had to sign up through our home in NYC and use it with VPN service Witopia that makes me show up as a US client.
I love Spotify on my mobile!