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Francis McInerney's Profile


Managing Director
North River Ventures LLC
United States
Joined: Over 6 months
Last online: 4 days ago
 
About Francis McInerney
Francis is managing director of the Corporate Innovation Project. CIP creates sales doubling opportunities for its Participants by using a virtual venture capital (VVC) system to build key innovators into well-defined, scalable, revenue acceleration models.
Francis McInerney's Posts
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" Martyn, ALU has two huge problems. One, it is not prepared for the Zetabyte era and neither are most of its major customers. When we asked ourselves at NRV's Corporate Innovation Project what remains remains of value under Zetabyte loads, the answer was: wireless PoPs of any size, backhaul, distributed caching, and new power systems to make this work. None of this describes Verizon, for example. Indeed, most of these will be operated as shared assets, real estate operations like cell towers. Few incumbents play a role in any of these four markets. Neither, therefore, does ALU. Two, ALU's working capital is a mess. It has 50 days of sales in inventories indicating that its supply chain is in chaos. And it has 72 days in receivables, indicating that its sales operations have imploded. The combination is not survivable and the CEO -- I'm on your team on this -- needs to have a frank chat with shareholders. "
In The New Plan: Back to the Future for Alcatel-Lucent 4 days ago by Francis McInerney
" Martyn, I think what Schmidt means is that TV is dissolving into the Apposphere. What is happening in the US is that as this process unfolds, advertisers are paying fewer upfronts to the legacy content makers who are in turn forced to demand more distribution up front payments from the cable and satellite companies who are in turn being squeezed by the growth in cord cutting. This is an and of business model situation for legacy TV. You are right, of course, that the big panel is not going away. Indeed, in only 2006 the global TV market was some 80 million 36"-42" units with replacement cycles of 8-20 years. This number had been growing slowly for decades. Now the market is over 240 million units of much more expensive 50"+ panels and growing so fast that it is knocking on the door of smartphone sales. This is why Apple will move into this space with the first smarTV, fully appified and synched with iCloud and Apple's other platforms. But this won't be your father's TV. It will be a 55"+ iPhone, if you will. With all 850,000 apps. Check out who is chairing Apple's board and you can figure out the rest! This will be a huge game changer. "
In First it was the end of history. Then the end of the the tablet. Now it's the end of television! 2 weeks ago by Francis McInerney
" Ian, This is an area of huge opportunity. The best part about it is that it works with the lights "off" to human eyes and is secure -- you have to be in the room being lit to get the signal. It is also efficient: you can use existing, unlicensed visible spectrum and reuse it over and over again room by room. The benefits are exceptional and the downside minimal. Rethinking the economics of LEDs is a no brainer. "
In Li-Fi networks: using LEDs and visible light for broadband 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" This is almost certainly not the place for Nokia to put its money. Having spent 15 years in corporate venture capital and private equity, I know that the first thing you have to do is to understand what business you are in. For Nokia, this is not mobile. Nokia is in the cloud access business. Its customers must be able to access cloud services across multiple platforms of which mobile platforms are only one, and not the largest, part. Cross platform cloud access is where its CVC money should go. "
In Nokia to pump $250m into mobile venture capital fund 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" Ian, I remember doing an analysis nearly two decades ago that ran something like this: if you can get X MB/mo for $Y, what is 8kHz voice worth. The answer came out, if memory serves, to 3¢ a month. The new Facebook app for iPhone is priced right!! The same thing is happening today in video. Why pay when you don't have to. Especially when the sports feeds are killing the distributors and forcing them to drive up prices. Might was well cut the cord and move elsewhere to get only what you want only when you want it and at the price you'll pay. "
In Are users paying too much for broadband/TV bundling? 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" This is great but Mozilla must remember that it is not in the cell phone business. it is in the cloud access business. That means managing customer experience of the cloud across all existing platforms from cell phones to 100"+ panels and all future ones. Like heart monitors and cars. If the Firefox OS is not designed to do this, it will find itself with no lift speeding to the end of the runway. Big ouch. "
In Firefox OS developer phones unveiled 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" We are working with product developers who are having such trouble getting Android's code to function that they have dropped Google smartphones no matter who makes them and support only Apple. Because these products happen to be in one of the world's largest industries, and fastest growing too, Google faces a serious code rewrite problem not too far in the future. Most people don't know this and likely Samsung hasn't a clue because it is so far removed from the cross platform drivers that attract developers to Apple. At some point however, it will become clear just how far sighted Apple was to think through the monetizable interactions of all three Cloud Membrane -- App, App Enablement, and App Delivery -- so early in the game. "
In Anything Google can do, Apple can do four times better 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" This is likely a gross overestimate and Ericsson itself bought BelAir because these numbers are so far off. Facebook has a new Apple app that allows all its customers (said to number Ericsson's 2016 LTE estimate today) to make all their calls to each other over Wi-Fi. This cuts LTE off at the knees. We are advising clients to look at LTE as a backhaul opportunity primarily and to cut back on direct access investments that they will never be able to recover. "
In LTE subscribers to hit 198m in 2013, then skyrocket to 1bn in 2016 4 months ago by Francis McInerney
" I think this is missing the M2M picture big time. M2M is a direct function of the rate of cloud inflation which is defined as the number of devices (anything) X the power of the devices on the Moore Curve X the power of the apps supported. Since all three axes are growing exponentially -- no surprise since the cloud grants universal access to unlimited computing at marginal cost (zero)-- M2M is the largest market in history. It is a fundamental error, moreover, to attempt to squeeze marginal cost-based M2M into an average cost-based LTE world. As Cisco has made clear many, many times, cellular will absorb an ever smaller percent of M2M traffic. Cellcos will play only a small role in M2M because their business models could never tolerate the loads or the prices, no matter the combination. The math just doesn't work for them. M2M raises a lot of questions. One of the answers is that we are about to see a new set of carriers. You can be sure that their primary innovations will be financial -- to capture marginal cost-based traffic -- rather than technological. Cell tower- and data warehouse-like shared asset models will supplant vertically integrated operations. Another answer is not China. The Party cannot outrun the rate of cloud inflation, something M2M will accelerate beyond the imagining, and some kind of social collapse is inevitable there. China today is run like France in 1770. Set your M2M clock to the Moore and Memory-density Curves and you can assess your China risks pretty easily. "
In M2M predictions for 2013 and beyond: Macario Namie, Jasper Wireless 5 months ago by Francis McInerney
" The big question here is why Sprint would want to increase bypass traffic rather than bring it on net and get paid for it. The only answer that makes sense is that since Sprint doesn't see bypass, its bean counters don't calculate the losses. Another oddity is that Sprint wants to slow network performance. But app delivery is a price/performance pure play, which is why so many app users have moved to bypass for their app services. Trying to go back up the information cost curve is like trying to push the market back into minicomputers when was moving to PCs. Which is why DEC is no longer with us. Strange that no one at Sprint has thought of this. I can recall like yesterday warning our telecom market research customer in August 1980 -- 32 years ago -- that user price/performance calculations would rule their business models for at least the next century. Twenty years ago Jim Crowe called my calculations "market physics". A third of the way through the century and Sprint still can't use a spreadsheet. Amazing. "
In Sprint’s Boost Mobile to start smartphone throttling in January 5 months ago by Francis McInerney
" Guy, Great piece. This has to be one of the most bizarre things that I have ever heard of. What on earth can the EU possibly have to with clouds? Anyone with a smartphone uses the cloud day and night and has for years. I use the cloud on my PC for almost everything. Not using clouds means losing money and time, which is more than enough incentive for rapid take-up. Does the EU mean to subsidize the huge energy intake of server farms? Kind of a Common Cloud Policy? WTO implications perhaps? "
In EU expects €160bn extra GDP from its Cloud strategy Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" It doesn't take to much to see how Virgin will move into content distribution big time, perhaps launching its own Netflix. A smart way to do this will be to integrate CDNs into small cells as in our Corporate Innovation Project's App Delivery Architecture. This will leave the cellcos in the rear view mirror. "
In Virgin ditches UK LTE ambitions, focuses on building wholesale WiFi network Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Martyn, Ian: Here is my formula for Nokia: 1. Recognize that the purpose of all business is to turn customer information into cash faster than your competition. Get this wrong and you cannot identify your scale drivers, let alone manage them. NOK for example has 22 days in inventory when Apple has only three. It has 68 days in AR compared to Apple's 19. This is not winnable. NOK needs a complete overhaul. (My phone hasn't run so there is no risk of this happening!!) 2. Recognize that you are in the cloud access business, not the cell phone business. Cloud access is a cross-platform space that runs (today) from cell phones to TVs. NOK has ignored all of the platforms that it needs to be in to win this battle. 3. Recognize that brand is managing your customers' experience of what you offer, which in this case is cloud access. To do this you need huge amounts of customer information hitting your servers in real time. This is when the hard work begins. I agree that hitting NOK's share price without seeing its products is seriously wimpy. But NOK has not acted on my three points, ever. (Not for nothing Nokia, but I do know SOMETHING about telecom!) This undermines investor confidence and lets the wimps take the day on the Street. "
In Calling all Nokia knockers: what would YOU do? Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, It is way too late for this as ALU knows better than anyone. Cellular is yesterday's net. The telecom world has moved on. It's all about Wi-Fi and that is about cablecos and, possibly, electric utilities. "
In Alcatel-Lucent seeks to gel telco API effort Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, this problem is huge. M2M will be the whole wireless market in a short time simply because the number of M2M devices will surpass all P2P devices by orders of magnitude. Carriers' failure to plan for this means that the market will shift to unregulated spectrum, leaving cellcos in the cold. No growth here. "
In 2G sunsetting plans may leave M2M out in the cold Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Good luck with that!! Four years ago at the Corporate Innovation Project in New York we alerted a Games sponsor that this would happen and what could be done about it. We said that you have to start with Marshall McLuhan's 1964 rule that copyright came in with the printing press and linear media and would go out with non linear media. The solutions to this are not rocket science. Played smart there's money in this. "
In The Social Media Olympics? Not if the IOC can help it Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, Sadly, this story was well under way when I started collecting data on the company in 2003. Already days of sales in receivables were 49, indicating that the company's sales operations had collapsed. By 2011 they peaked at 83, indicating a complete catastrophe. (In the same period Apple went from 49 days to 15.) Data like these mean that management had almost no customer information and no way to tell what the market wanted. When Apple shifted the market away from cellphones to managing how customers access the cloud, RIM didn't notice. It stayed focused on yesterday's business, cellphones, while all the premium customers went to the cloud via Apple. Because RIM didn't know the market had changed, it also didn't see that cloud access is, by definition, cross platform. Anything will do from a cellphone to giant plasma flat panel. So, if you sell one platform, like a cellphone, you have to offer all the others if you are going to manage your customers' cloud interaction. RIM never got this because, once its sales operations collapsed a decade ago it had no way to know what was going on. When the iPhone hit in 2007, RIM's receivable days were already at 71 and simply kept climbing. Sooner or later, the cloud would out inflate RIM and that would be that. Which is where we are now. As a Canadian who warned Nortel's management of its coming implosion years ahead of time, to see Canada two up and two away when once again the data were clear a decade ago, this is sickening. "
In Dead man talking? RIM's death spiral accelerates Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, "infrastructure spend?" Say it ain't so! Has the last bastion of literacy in our sector fallen in the hail of barbarian arrows and shot? Have the walls of our England finally fallen to the illiterati? What now? Will all our gerunds be neutered? Will all our infinitives be split? Will our definite articles be slaughtered to the last? Will our prepositions be forced to march starving to the ends of sentences, there to die? Good King Harry would answer: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage Then lend the eye a terrible aspect Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noblest English. Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof! Fathers that, like so many Alexanders, Have in these parts from morn till even fought And sheathed their swords for lack of argument: Dishonour not your mothers now attest That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture let us swear That you are worth your breeding which I doubt not For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!' "
In Carrier WiFi set to enjoy big spend Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, Another huge part of this is how carriers will bill for M2M. M2M traffic can range from tiny (telemetry) to huge (video) and there will be so many devices that they will blow everyone's traffic assumptions right out of the water. Yet most M2M devices are optimized for a few cents a month at the most. VZW's new pricing at hundreds of dollars per device essentially closes the door to M2M. VZW is exiting the M2M business before it arrives, driving most traffic onto something else. Could be smart grid, Wi-Fi, who knows. But cellular it won't be. All because of billing. "
In M2M enabler: Big Billing Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, a couple of factors will be key. Wi-Fi supports the marginal cost-based pricing M2M needs. Cellular cannot do this. Also, the endless 1G-2G-3G-4G network migration is too disruptive for the M2M world where no one can afford to constantly upgrade so many, often difficult to reach, devices. Smart meter suppliers are already going bats on this one. They say Wi-Fi is easier to manage. "
In WiFi poised to make waves in M2M Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Ian, Steve Jobs planned an Apple exclusive Wi-Fi net with some PE partners in 2007, but a lot of the technology needed -- that people like BelAir, Ruckus, and Ubiquisys have today -- wasn't there. He dropped it. Cook could easily revive this and has the cash to make it stick. Also, as Apple knows better than anyone, almost nothing on the power end of the More Curve today uses cellular (as you report on the iPad)and it is hard to imagine that anything coming up on deck (think 4K OTT video) will do so. This traffic will all bypass cellular entirely. Which is why, at the Corporate Innovation Project in New York, we call Wi-Fi the Dark Energy of Wireless: the invisible force blowing the cellular world apart. 4G carriers already offload as much video and data as they can to Wi-Fi because their core-dependent nets just aren't designed for it. Cisco told us that it expects only 50% of devices to be 4G by 2016 and that cellco revenue and costs will cross going the wrong way that year. Ugly. This is not a space Apple will want to enter. The space for Apple is ubiquitous and redundant (and cheap) Mac Mini CDNs on every third telephone pole with integrated small cell Wi-Fi. This, with backhaul, is total customer control -- iCloud on steroids -- Apple style. And $5 trillion in core-dependent global telecom plant obsolete at a blow. The number of folks who don't get this beggars the imagination. "
In Is Apple poised to launch an MVNO? Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Martyn, Very useful thought on MSFT swooping in on NOK. It occurred to me as I read this that Compaq swooped in on DEC and paid a horrible price. Makes one wonder ... "
In How are the mighty fallen. Samsung takes Nokia's crown Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" The bigger issue is that Nokia thought that it was in the cellphone business when it was really in the business of managing its customers' experience of clouds. Nokia let Apple take this space and all the money that goes with it. Of the three Cloud Membranes -- App Membrane, App Enablement Membrane, and App Delivery Membrane -- Nokia was only marginally active on one: App Enablement. This was to have been corrected with the Microsoft OS but comes much too late to affect its position on the other two. That makes its business model terminal. Apple was first to identify and dominate the biggest and most profitable x,y,z Cloud Membrane Intercepts, leaving its competitors in the commodity end of their markets. This made Nokia a "good" competitor for Apple. Apple took the premium customers and the profits across several markets. Nokia took the rest, but only in cellular. Indeed, locked in its cellphone prison, Nokia did not "see" that the power end of the Moore Curve is Wi-Fi almost exclusively, not cellular. Nokia is stuck in yesterday's wireless business. Think DEC, 1985. Worse for Nokia, as a Membrane dominator, Apple was able to look back out from the cloud, as it were, and see that the cloud is indifferent to what is attached to it from cellphone to 80" plasma to car to health care device. Nokia could not see this Cloud Indifference and never understood that to survive it had to move across App Enablement platforms in a steady march as Apple has done. RIM has an almost identical problem. Samsung is struggling with the issue, but has several other platforms ready -- like flat panels -- and in theory could make the transition to managing its customers'experience of clouds. We will have to see. "
In How are the mighty fallen. Samsung takes Nokia's crown Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Shocked! Just shocked! Had no idea! "
In Nokia's waking nightmare continues Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" As a percent of middle income, or consumer, households, this must be getting to 99%. This will fuel the small cell revolution in a very big way. "
In Nearly half the world's homes will be WiFi'd by 2016 Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" The great lesson here is that RIM thought that it was in the cell phone business when it was really in the business of managing cloud access. Missing cloud access meant missing the market. It focused in phones for business long, long after the Moore Curve said that the market would shift to consumer and would then explode into everything from flat panels to toys. I remember explaining this to the management committee of Nortel in the mid 1990s and being told in front of everyone by non other than John Roth that I was crackers. Oh well ... Canada is two up and two away on this one. With no one else on the bench! "
In Bye, Bye, BlackBerry Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Acquiring BelAir would be a very smooth move. These guys are leading edge in small cell deployment and this is where all the growth is. "
In Is Ericsson preparing to go WiFi? Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" We are even bypassing Skype by using Gmail conferencing and other tools. "
In International minutes growth stalls while Skype booms on - report Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" What is sad about this is the amount of money being wasted on LTE -- the Long is just way too long for the traffic explosion from the app loaded cloud -- when what carriers need is a Short Term Revolution, STR. Already, anything far out on the Moore Curve avoids cellular by design and there is no evidence that this will change. So carriers are racking up huge costs and getting none of the revenues from anything with real horsepower. This means that investing in LTE makes about as much sense as Compaq buying DEC. "
In Further evidence that LTE is dancing on WiMAX’s grave Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" Martyn, you've pointed to the dirty little secret of just about everyone but Apple: lack of basic ethnology. Apple is almost certainly able to show, to the cent, its R&D and SG&A savings per dollar spent on ethnology. It never ceases to amaze how many companies think they can do without this and still sustain long run success. "
In Delusional Nokia claims "youth" are fed-up of the iPhone and irritated by Android Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
" The issue will be post LTE. The number of devices now coming on stream will not work on an average cost-based cellular net like LTE. M2M, especially, will need marginal cost-based Wi-Fi or Super Wi-Fi. Also, Cisco's data show that all the most powerful devices today use Wi-Fi exclusively and that all this traffic bypasses cellnets like VZW's so they never see it, don't even get to offload it, and cannot monetize it. Mapped onto the Moore Curve, cellular is core-driven, like a mainframe, in a post PC world. There is no way to bridge this gap. Indeed, Cisco told us recently that cellnet costs and revenues will cross going the wrong way as soon as 2016 unless there is a replacement for average cost-based architectures. Wi-Fi is now the growth market in wireless and VZW will have to figure out a Wi-Fi strategy if it is to remain a top player in wireless. "
In Verizon’s transformational drivers Over 6 months by Francis McInerney
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