The goal of every company is to grow and make money. The goal to become a hot platform is something else. And if you want to become a hot platform, grow and make money while you compete with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, ….. well, then there are many question marks to answer to and most people would say: you must be either very rich or out of your mind to enter this business field. But we did and today we are happy and proud to be prepared for market entry in 2019. We have many reasons to believe that the timing is perfect for gigaaa AI assistant to be recognized as a serious alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant with a great perspective to grow and make money. A song by Rod Stewart from the 70’s goes through my mind and he tells it like this:

“If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, Come on, sugar, tell me so

If you really need me, just reach out and touch me, Come on, honey, tell me so”😊

In business, timing is everything. There is no early-mover advantage, just as there is no late-mover advantage. There were many early movers around the world and today they are gone. Prominent ones — and for a while, very very successful — were Nokia, Yahoo, Friendster, and MySpace. The spectacular success of Nokia — the company sold nearly 41 million cellular phones in 1998 — helped the company surpass Motorola and become the world’s top cellular phone maker in that year. It’s worth mentioning that the Nokia 6110 was the first phone that came with the classic Snake game pre-installed and people loved it. Nokia’s net sales increased over 50% year-on-year, operating profits shot up nearly 75%, and stock price sky-rocketed a whopping 220%, resulting in an increase of market capitalization from nearly $21 billion to around $70 billion. The year 2001 saw the company launching the Nokia 7650, it’s the first phone to feature a built-in camera. It was also the first to sport a full-color display. In 2003, the company launched the Nokia 1100, a budget-friendly phone that sold around a whopping 250 million units, making it the best-selling phone as well as the best-selling consumer electronics product in the world. Incidentally, it was also the company’s billionth phone sold later in 2005. With Apple launching its first-generation iPhone in 2007 and the growing popularity of touch-screen phones, Nokia ignored to see the changes coming and followed own strategies, feeling untouchable as the world´s №1 Mobile Phone company. The year 2009 saw Nokia laying off 1,700 employees worldwide. Later in the year, the struggling Finnish company finally acknowledged that it was slow to react to the changes on the market, which was now slowly being taken over by the likes of Apple and BlackBerry, and influenced by newcomers like Samsung, HTC, and LG. The Finnish company’s unwillingness to embrace drastic change when it was required the most was probably the biggest reason that brought the mobile giant down. The company took way too long to embrace the smartphone revolution and when it finally did it made way too many errors in its strategy. As they say, nothing is permanent and whatever goes up must come down. However, that doesn’t take away the fact that Nokia remains a huge part of mobile phone history that will never be forgotten. But today the Nokia Mobile Phone is dead. I´m just thinking about a song from The Weekend called Starboy and it goes like:

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, Look what you’ve done, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I’m a motherfu……’ starboy

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, Look what you’ve done, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I’m a motherfu….’ starboy”😊

In the year 2000, Yahoo hits its highest valuation at $125 billion. Yes, 125billion! For the collapse of Yahoo, there is no one single reason that Yahoo “went wrong”. There are product reasons, strategic reasons, and cultural reasons, like for example: Focusing so much for years on Panama (Google AdWords competitor) and search in general, when they ended up losing to Google and eventually outsourcing this to Microsoft. Yahoo tried to do everything and became too unfocused. The shift from a desktop world where everyone used home pages to a mobile and social world. Yahoo failed to build their own successful mobile and social products or to acquire any. Yahoo got too bloated, and nobody would ever make the cuts needed to both headcount and its products/properties. Buying Flickr for $35 million was a bargain when you see how huge social photos are today. They could have turned Flickr into the next Facebook or Instagram and instead didn’t invest properly in it. Failing to acquire Google and then Facebook. Yahoo had opportunities to buy both of these companies when it was clear they were going to be big successes and instead wouldn’t pay what was needed. For example, their deal to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion was pretty much accepted, then Yahoo’s earnings came out and the value of the deal dropped to 800M due to stock compensation and Zuckerberg balked when Yahoo wouldn’t change the deal to put the price back up. Think about the value of Facebook today and that Yahoo didn’t purchase them over a $300M difference. Looking at the leadership changes, Yahoo has had a shifting cast of CEOs and executive teams that has never provided a longer-term vision and execution path to take shape, because of the mentioned reasons, but of course, there have been many more. Today Yahoo is so far behind any hotspot, that consumers are not interested in Yahoo services anymore.

Looking back some 13 years ago, we are talking about the year 2006, for some reasons Facebook turned into worlds hottest web platform. They suggested a new model for how connection, communication, and commerce work online — a radical and ambitious rethinking of the Internet’s potential. Zuckerberg designed Facebook to re-create online the web of people’s real-world relationships. That was different than most existing and successful social networks. Sites like MySpace practically encouraged users to create new identities and meet and link to people they barely knew. Zuckerberg didn’t care about using the Internet to make new friends. “People already have their friends, acquaintances, and business connections,” he explained, “So rather than building new connections, what we are doing is just mapping them out.” Friendster was launched in 2002 and reached 3 million users in a few months. It was sold in 2009 to one of Asia’s largest Internet companies, MOL Global, reaching at its peak 115 million users, mostly in Asia. Friendster was shut down in 2015. In 2006, MySpace reached 100 million users and surpassed Google as the most visited website in the U.S. But it also started to run into serious problems. It was treated as a media outlet rather than a technology platform and seemed more interesting for maximizing advertising revenue than in fixing or improving the site’s underlying technology. In April 2008, MySpace was overtaken by Facebook in terms of the number of unique worldwide visitors, and in May 2009, in the number of unique U.S. visitors. Today the Myspace mobile app is no longer available in either the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

2019 we are entering a new era and the world is a different one than it was 15, 10 or even 5 years ago. Today people care about data protection and privacy, people don’t believe in public news anymore and question every information they are presented with. People have a way higher choice of products and services, faster access, better information, and transparency. and that’s why they have higher expectations before they get excited about new offers. They don’t care about who’s behind, they just want the best, they want a fast and a simple execution. The common attitude is: what’s in it for me, what can you do for me, what can you do better than others, I want it all and I want it now.” That reminds me of some Queen lyrics and the song goes like:

“People do you hear me, just gimme the sign

It ain’t much I’m asking, if you want the truth

Here’s to the future for the dreams of youth

I want it all, I want it all (yeah), I want it all and I want it now”😊

Today Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are by far the two leading Voice Assistant player in the markets, but they have become so dominant, so big in so many different businesses, that they are just too big to succeed. History has proven, when things become too big… yes, exactly, that´s the dinosaur story.

gigaaa AI assistant has yet to prove itself as a technology and business. But the timing is perfect. The markets are ready with rising acceptance for smart loudspeakers and other voice-enabled devices. Following the last couple of years how Alexa and Google Assistant entered global markets, we can see a long list of technical and business mistakes to avoid. We at gigaaa have identified the way we will go, and we can clearly see the space we are entering to take a strong and safe position in the competition of voice assistant technologies. We believe to know how to deliver a better user experience and satisfy consumers expectations. Skeptics may argue that we’ve seen this movie before. For the internet, email was the killer app — a program so useful that it transformed the platform into a massive communications tool. There’s no killer app for gigaaa assistant yet. Or maybe there is, but we haven´t announced it? And if yes, are we sitting on a gold mine and nobody knows it? 😊 Stay tuned, follow us and see what the coming months we will deliver. It´s a long long way to go, but we are ready for the big challenge and we are ready to start. Have a great time and see you next week.

“Life is gigaaa!”