Wak Oentoenk

Product management is becoming a hot topic in Silicon Valley. The UC Berkeley business school had me speak at a seminar on the subject last week, a lot of consultants are focusing on it, and it seems to be getting a lot more buzz than I remember seeing in the past.A product manager is the person in a company who translates customer needs into product features. He or she is not necessarily an engineer, but tells the engineers what to build (assuming you work in a company where the engineers do...

I've had Telepocalypse in my blogroll for a while, but I never explained why. Marvin Geddes is a telecom consultant living in Scotland. He's interesting and acerbic and he has the deep pool of skepticism that seems to develop in many people who work closely with wireless operators in the US and Europe. He also writes extremely well, which makes his weblog a nice mix of information and entertainment. For example, here's his description of the psychology of an operator offering data services:...

I'll be at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas next week. Please drop me a note if you'll be there and would like to talk. When I get back I'll blog on anything interesting that I s...

Forgive me for the cynical headline -- I actually think we should view this as progress. The accounting and consulting firm KPMG just announced it has discovered that most mobile phone customers aren't willing to pay anything extra for new features or services on their phones. In particular, only about 30% of users were willing to pay more than a 10% surcharge. The figures came from a survey of about 3,500 mobile phone users around the world.How much mobile phone users are willing to pay for enhanced...

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a Japan-o-phile. My relationship with the place started when I was a competitive analyst at Apple, which paid me to fly over there and wander the Akihabara electronics district buying interesting products (you never appreciate the really good jobs until you're reminiscing about them). If you've never been to Akihabara, it's an area of maybe six or seven square blocks packed with electronics department stores, many of them six or eight stories tall. There's also...

There's been a very interesting discussion in response to my post about the Access Linux Platform, but one of the comments deserved a more lengthy response. Catherine White of Llamagraphics wrote:"The cost of devices is a big factor for the carriers, who often subsidize the cost of the handsets. Having the OS and phone driver support on one chip, as it is for Symbian is an advantage in keeping the cost of the smartphones down so that the increase in revenues from increased ARPU from data traffic...