BU Tech Strategy Presentation

I'm finally getting around to posting some of my work to Slideshare. Below is my team's winning presentation from the 2007 Boston University Tech Strategy Case Competition. Each team had 24 hours to address the subject, “What is the best way for Motorola to win in seamless delivery of media and entertainment?” We recommended that Motorola leverage their position in the set-top box market to enable a P2P media delivery system. Check out the presentation. I'd love to hear your comments.

Motorola's Strategy for Media Distribution

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: box set-top)

Harrah's Innovation

Last year I had the opportunity to be part of Harrah's newly formed Innovation Team. We were working on some cool projects including the Microsoft Surface, location based services, and mobile applications.

"The best way to fast-track a promising innovation, he says, is to operate it as an independent venture, separate from the tethers of everyday business processes. That often means running an innovation project on separate IT systems to avoid mingling experimental data with business operations." Tim Stanley, CIO & Chief Innovation Officer

Check out this InformationWeek article on the innovation process at Harrah's.

Mobile Start-Up Presentation

Slideshare is a great site for all kinds of useful information (once you sort through the junk). Check out the mobile presentation I recently found. Also, you can find a number of my presentations there.

The Mobile Start-Up Ecosystem - Rudy De Waele

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmedia startup)

2nd Annual Open Web Awards

Check out the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards and vote for Rearden Commerce and all your other favorite companies. You can nominate and vote for companies in 26 different categories.

Update: The 2008 winners have been announced and can be found here. Some of my personal favorites from the list include Gyminee, Evernote, and Doodle. Be sure to check out all the rest of the winners and finalists.

Tech and the financial crisis

Check out this presentation by Mary Meeker from the Web 2.0 Summit. She talks about some of the causes of the financial crisis and the outlook for tech. The video of the presentation is available on TechCrunch.

Mary Meeker Web 2.0 Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0)

Ready For Any Weather

It seems that this week everyone is talking about how an economic downturn will effect Silicon Valley. Case in point, today's NY Times article titled, "Credit Crisis Spreads a Pall Over Silicon Valley." I'll leave the financial health of Apple or Google up to the experts and say that Rearden Commerce is still growing like crazy. With a $100 million in fundraising this year, Rearden was recently cited by TechCrunch as one of the firms ready to weather a downturn.

Even more important than Rearden's $100 million is a business model with multiple revenue streams and a product that gives companies a platform to capture and reduce their business expenses. In tough economic times the impetus to manage employee spending only gets stronger. The dramatic growth of Rearden's customer and supplier base is a perfect testament to this. Additionally, Rearden's upcoming entry into the consumer market through a partnership with Chase (pdf) will further solidify the company's position as one of the tech companies ready to weather and even thrive in this tough economic climate.

Update 1/30/09: Despite Rearden's war chest and strong customer growth the comapny hasn't been imune to significant layoffs. In November the company had to layoff over 10% of their employees, including the majority of the marketing department, in an effort to reduce costs. Oddly, the compay is now reporting that they are hiring aggressivly including increasing R&D spending by 20%.

An Open Platform for Mobile Application Development

As my MBA experience comes to an end it seems like a good time to post some of the project work I've done over the last two years. One of my main areas of focus has been mobile technology. This semester I took a class called Winning in Technology Markets which used System Dynamics as a framework for tech strategy. My team project was an evaluation of an open platform strategy for the Japanese cell phone company NTT DoCoMo. Here is our presentation deck. If I get the chance I will also post the full analysis.

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Yahoo's New Fire Eagle

Tom Coates of Yahoo's Brickhouse announcing Fire Eagle, their new location sharing service. The promise of location based services take one more step forward.

The Future of Mobile

The BU Tech Strategy Case competition is now a few weeks past but I haven't been able to stop thinking about my team's proposal. We proposed a new platform based business model for Vodafone with Ericsson (competition sponsor) as a strategic partner. Unfortunately, we didn't make it beyond the first round (more details later).

I sat in on the presentations of the four finalists. For the most part these presentations were high level type consulting reports that advocated moving to a mobile broadband world. It was disappointing to realize that the competition sponsors just weren't ready for an innovative idea like ours. On the upside I'm starting to realize that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Check out this great blog post and discussion from one of my favorite blogs, Telco 2.o. To quote from that post:

Then you have to ask: “Don’t we need a new business model here, in parallel with the 4G technical developments?” The answer is of course, yes, and we explained why to NGMN.org in detail over a year ago on this blog. But, of course, we’ve had a deafening silence from the tecchies about this (“Not
our problem!”).