Sriram Krishnan™ Live

Ladies and Gentlemen, after a long hiatus, I am back and bad. Currently sipping some pina coladas (no, really!) in a cafe in Budapest and having another month of travels to go.

In the meanwhile, enjoy the conversation with Erik Starck of GlocalReach. In summary, Erik was formerly with Sony Ericsson, started his first company in 1998 and here, will speak about his latest venture, GlocalReach.

So who are you and what are you up to these days?

Who am I? Well, that’s a question we all ponder on from time to time.

The thing is, we all have different roles in our lives and the role
we’re currently playing depends on the social context, the time and
the place we’re currently in.

The company, GlocalReach, I recently co-founded is based on the idea
of helping you manage how people reach you based on the different
roles you “play” in your life. Currently, we’re building the first
version of the service, hoping to launch a beta this autumn.

That’s the long version. :o) The short version is: I’m 31, have a
masters degree in Software Engineering, started my first company in 98
and have worked the last three years for Sony Ericsson with
standardization and requirements for their java platform.

More about your company. What does it do?

We’re called GlocalReach and we’re just at the startup phase, but what
we’re trying to build is based on two fundamental ideas:

1. As mentioned above, we want to help people manage how they can be reached.

2. The greatest asset of any operator is the customers. We want to
build the world’s first crowdsourced operator. We want to build a
framework that allows our customers to utilize each other as
resources.

Then we’re packaging our services and our business models around those
two core ideas.

Now for a triple header:
1) What trends are you noticing in the market?
2) What are potential clients asking for?
3) Where do you see the markets heading?

Most disruptive technologies have a phase in which it is hyped as its
predecessor but with a twist. The car was a “horse-less carriage”. The
train was like a boat on land. TV was like radio with pictures. Up
until now, IP-telephony has been like traditional telephony but
cheaper.

I think that’s starting to change. What IP-telephony does is make
voice an application just like any other application. It sort of rips
voice out of the network and has it standing on its own. That way,
it’s infinitely more flexible.

For example, using an XBox game console, you can talk to other people
online while playing a game. Would you call the XBox a phone? Most
people wouldn’t.

I think we will see voice pop up in more and more applications as just
another way of communicating over the net. It will become more and
more integrated into the internet user experience.

Isn’t the VOIP market a bit too packed at the moment?

Back in the early 90s, the NMT mobile network (the predecessor to GSM)
had about 10% user penetration on the Swedish market. Then some crazy
people decided to bet billions of SEK in the more capable GSM network.
“You’re mad!” they were told. “The market is saturated. There’s no
room for further growth. All the people that want a mobile phone has a
mobile phone!”

Well, they were wrong and the crazy people were right. Now there are
more GSM subscribers than people in Sweden and many other countries
share the same stats. Partially this is because of what I wrote
earlier: people play different roles in their lives and they want
better control of how they are reached. So, they have one mobile phone
for work and one for private use. Well, why stop there?

So, back to VoIP… Today 14% of the Swedish population uses their
broadband connection for calls. That’s a 151% growth over one year. Of
course there’s room for lots more growth.

At the same time I don’t think the evolution of VoIP will mirror GSM.
It will be more like email, where you have many different email
addresses. So, I think we will see much higher market penetration than
100%, at least counting the number of “VoIP-accounts”.

We will also see VoIP-spam…

Tell me more about the team. How many of you are there and how did you guys meet?

We’re three founders: me, Nicolai and Lars. Nicolai hired me a couple
of years ago in one of his previous ventures and we have been talking
about starting up something for quite some time. And, well, here we
are.

Have you guys received any funding?

So far we’re self-funded.

What are your thoughts on Fri TV

TV is a perfect example of how the internet really is changing every
business from the core. Everywhere you look there’s rapid change. And
not linear, “ordinary” change (like going from black and white to
color television or to HDTV), but a fundamental shift of the business
logic. Pretty exciting times.

Flickr vs Photobucket

The beauty and the beast of photo sharing services. :o)
I’m a Flickr-user and love it.

iPhone vs Nokia N95

The beauty and the beast of feature packed smartphones. :o)

iPhone is good for the mobile phone market as it raises the bar for
what a phone is and what it’s expected to do.

It’s also noteworthy how Apple is removing the word “computer” from
it’s name while at the same time Nokia is claiming that their phones
are what “computers have become”. The computer is the phone and the
phone is the computer. Again, these are exciting times. The rules of
the game are changing everywhere you look. Disruption everywhere. I
love it! :o)

Thanks alot Erik and all the best with GlocalReach.