A great partnership, like a great marriage, is about value creation. As my wife and I watch our eight year old son Kyle grow up, we mostly are concerned with what values we are helping to create within him. In our community we nurture and promote our shared values. My work has always been towards that same end. Success for me is value creation. That will be my legacy.

For a partnership to create value, a common set of core values is necessary, but not sufficient. Creativity is also paramount. Without creating something (or someone) there can be no value. In business we create products and services. To be truly creative you must make combinations. The values of the partners are supplementary and reinforcing. Everything else, i.e. people, processes, products & services, are complimentary. If that were not true, and you believed in yourself you would go “lone wolf” and compete and win. (If you don’t play golf, read this explanation of Wolf in Chi Chi Rodriguez’s book, “Golf Games You Gotta Play.”)

In my past, I have successfully gone “lone wolf” and successfully partnered. It is more fun to partner. Especially when you know your long game compliments their short game or vice versa. It’s called shared success.
A good example of the supplementary and complimentary aspects of a Numerex and Ublip combination are the following:

Ublip brings a service-oriented architecture
Numerex brings a service-oriented infrastructure
Both have a service-oriented culture

In the coming months you will see what I mean.

Stratton Nicolaides, President & CEO of Numerex and myself realized we have supplementary values, and complimentary people, products, and services. Through this, we will combine, create, and deliver “insanely great” value to the customer.

Just watch.

Or, better yet, come join in the fun.

- Jeff

In 2000, I would have voted Wilson for Best Supporting Actor. You remember Wilson the volleyball from the movie Castaway. In many ways Tom Hanks character reminds me of many of the people that I have met responsible for successfully deploying M2M projects within their organizations. They are castaways. Lonely, on a deserted island, with insurmountable odds. Much to overcome: device, network, gateway, application. A seemingly hodgepodge of items that they could use to improve their situation, and a loyalty to themselves and their vision.

Fred Smith had a cameo on Castaway. I had the opportunity to meet Fred Smith and tour the Fedex facility a couple of weeks ago. What an amazing company. What an amazing guy. Fred Smith is a true pioneer. A visionary. A castaway. A hodgepodge of items that he was able to coddle together to survive years against insurmountable odds. And during all of those trials he kept focused, determined, true to himself, and persevered.

When asked what his most important character attributes were Fred Smith said “Probably conviction. I was convinced that what I was trying to do with my teammates was important and that it would be successful. The opposite side of that coin is persistence. Very rarely have I ever seen any business or major undertaking that goes in a straight line. There’s zigs and zags, victories and defeat, and you have to be propelled by that conviction that what you’re doing is right and what you’re doing is important, and to persevere in it. That’s probably more important than anything else.”

Have you ever felt that way?

“The fundamental principle behind fast cycle or express transportation is that you are substituting your services for other processes.” - Fred Smith

Sound familiar?

M2M is a mechanism for substituting more efficient services for other processes. As each application is proven an individual adoption occurs exponentially.

As M2M deployments become more prevalent and “embedded”. The invisibility of those applications will continue to bring focus on the innovative ones. A casual observer could misinterpret this as a lack of progress, but to the experienced the frontier moves forward.

Maybe less of an obit than a testimony to my long friend the Analog Mobile Phone System. In technology, 25 years is a reasonably long life. In 1979 I was a sprite young engineer working on the first microprocessor based 800 mHz trunking and cellular systems for Motorola. I was there when AMPS was born. I helped deliver her. It was a painful delivery. In the summer of 1979 I invented a way to identify where software glitches caused pops and clicks when you talked on radios and cellphones. Then I would debug the code. A 4 bit microprocessor called the COPS 410 followed by an 8 bit micro the 6801/6301. Most of the programming was in assembly and machine code - every nybble helped.

AMPS was enabled by the microprocessor. It provided the technological and cost reduction necessary for mass adoption. Price elasticity. Waltz me around again Matilda.

I remember contemplating starting a Cellular company with Jay Gurley, and Bill Werner. Most entrepreneurs are forced into it. Life at Mother Mo was too good. Perhaps if we would taken the leap this blog would have been posted from an island in the Caribbean (or for me a private Robot Laboratory).

I had dinner with Ed Comer the inventor of the Bellsouth system Cellemetry cellular control channel system the other night. We toasted to AMPS demise. The most successful deployment of CCC arguably was the GM On-Star system. CCC On-Star customers were disabled on Dec 31, 2007. There still are 1 million analog phones used in alarm systems. These will go dark quietly. In the famous words of the prophet Monty Python - “I’m not dead yet, it’s only a flesh wound.” Certainly some carriers will continue to support AMPS (for a short while)- but the efficiency of digital channels - economics - prevail, and, the digitization of the airwaves continues. It is fitting that during our bereavement, we are in the middle of one of the most important spectrum auctions in history - especially for M2M. The 700 MHz spectrum reclaimed from television is up for bid. No one knows who is bidding it up, but it has surpassed the financial threshold for open access - perhaps it is Google.

I never had a Betamax. But with Wal-mart’s announcement last week, Toshiba announced just a few days later that HD-DVD would be abandoned. The market speaks again.

Technology marches forward and backward compatibility is a difficult and sometimes impossible task.

A microsecond of silence for our long friend AMPS.

It is ironic that after a hiatus of 15 years, once again, I am helping rid the world of mosquitoes. In 1992, Larry Chapman worked with me at the Superconducting Supercollider. Larry, like myself, is an idea hamster, problem solver, closet inventor, and electronics geek. Red wine, outdoors, Scientific American, and Circuit Cellar are a strange mix, and the hamster started spinning around west nile, piezoelectric, and entomology. It turns out that only female mosquitoes bite. It is also true that most of the time female mosquitoes don’t prefer the company of male mosquitoes. The masses of male and female wings are different and therefore they flap at different rates. So, as the Chapman-Smith theory goes, if you can make the sound of the vibration of a male mosquito’s wings you won’t get bit. Overcomplicated the problem, d’ya think?

So, after a small production run we were ready to solve the worlds Mosquito issues. We purchased cable channel time on either side of the Final Four tourney in areas of Florida that had not sprayed for mosquitoes. Trouble was, we built devices and bought commercial time and ran out of money before we had made the commercial. So, since we couldn’t afford real cameramen, actors, or editing, I starred in the commercial.

MosquitoNix® employs a specially engineered system that automatically distributes a fine mist of a natural insecticide around the perimeter of your home, yard or other property where you need mosquito control. Ublip will be providing location based services for its fleet, and eventually tank level monitoring for proactive replenishment and maintenance.

Cellular radios and data plans have dropped in price by a factor of 5 in the past few years. ROI can now be measured in weeks. The embedded internet will continue to grow exponentially due to price elasticity. Applications like these provide a great means for both cost reduction and differentiation.

Of course sometimes you get the technology right and miss the market - “skeeter git” vs teen repellent - and sometimes you get the market right and miss the technology. Sometimes you get both and miss the timing. In the end, it is all about execution.

Market + Technology + Timing + Execution = Success.

What are you selling?

I was asked that question a few nights ago. We were having dinner at an upscale place in Cabo. The guy that asked me is one of the best salesmen I have ever met. I have heard the question before at a sales seminar by Jack Daley and knew immediately where my friend was going. “Peace of mind” I said with the utmost of confidence.

According to C.S. Lewis, there never has been and never will be a radically new value or value system. “The human mind can no more invent a new value than create a new primary color.”

You had better be selling something that people value or you will fail.

Knowing where your kids are and that they are OK provides peace of mind.

Knowing where your stuff is and how it is doing provides peace of mind.

A retail notion is that all purchases are emotional and then buyers rationalize the need after the purchase.

I can’t help but relate this to a comment from the “Nanny” post. This customer is buying peace of mind. The comment from “Janis” criticizes the purchase as “keeping her on a leash”. The customer has decided that the incremental cost of a device to provide “touch points” during the day gives more peace of mind than the same money used to pay for a more secure Nanny. All purchases are emotional. I doubt an increase of $15 a month to a Nanny, would provide the same incremental “peace of mind” that the Ublip tracker provides.