Ordering an e-pizza may be just around the corner
A Silicon Valley techno-whiz is about to make it big, in Poland, after years of spadework. And his innovations could help Poland get a competitive edge in the cutting-edge e-commerce market.
He is Brian Gaon, 33, who came here in 1995 from San Francisco. He already was a veteran of international high-tech trade with Russian emigre partners in Houston doing business in Russia. That one is long gone.
His company, SatCon Communications Europe, registered in the United States and doing business throughout Europe, recently signed agreements with Siemens' Polish operation, Zwut, and with Hewlett Packard for what he calls a "wireless portal." They would work with local GSM operators.
A pilot project will be concluded by next spring and mass retailing is on track for next summer.
"We'll compete with Yahoo but in the wireless arena. We're a wireless information broker brokering e-commerce services, anytime, anyplace," Gaon said.
"Everybody's talking about e-commerce. But nobody's delivering, where you don't have to be on a computer or to have an AOL internet account. You only have to have a mobile phone and you can use that to order. You don't have to go to an internet cafe. You can do it from the back seat of a taxi, using a mobile phone," he said.
Like what, you ask? "You can order pizza and if you are a German here, you can order it in German and it gets translated into Polish and your order is placed. And the pizza shows up at your hotel room 30 minutes later," Gaon said.
A pizza company would pay a fee to get this automatic-order service included in a GSM packet. For those ordering the pizza, "you'd only enter your debit card number once. You could access it after that with a pin code," Gaon said.
The pizza company would have a Hewlett Packard "black-box computer" to handle the debit-card orders. The mechanism for automatically translating an order from German into Polish is something that "the Siemens software folks in Vienna could develop," Gaon said.
Most consumers never would deal directly with SatCon. The GSM operators would incorporate the SatCon e-commerce service into what you get when you buy a mobile phone. For Siemens, Gaon said, the SatCon linkage "is a value-added service for the infrastructure that they can offer the telecom operator. Siemens and ERA are close so this helps establish Siemens as a one-stop box."
And what's in it for the pizzeria? Why would they pay to have their company available for these e-commerce orders? "We could double their market size in a year," Gaon said.
There are lots of targets beyond pizzas, for the smaller-than-$15 orders that are labor-intensive when done by humans but very effective when handled by computers: orders for chocolates, flowers, and books or for newspaper classifieds.
Hewlett Packard already is doing financial data processing here in a big way, including a 24-hour, off-site data center for Citibank. "I want to do the same thing," Gaon said, "and HP already has those boxes in Poland. IBM and Compaq don't have that."
His local partner here is Carlberg&Son Electronic, whose Zurich-based managing director Rene Weilharter is in charge of Polish and Hungarian operations. The mobile infrastructure guru for Siemens-Warsaw is Ralph Griewing. And Tomasz Laudy is in charge of Siemens' business applications.
Kudos to Helena Luczywo, who edits Gazeta Wyborcza. She was honored recently by the International Center for Journalists in Washington. She was one of two international journalists selected for a Knight International Press Fellowship Award. It was recognition of her trail-blazing work to figure out not just how to start and nourish a new, national newspaper at the beginning of the Solidarity reform government in 1989 but with publisher Wanda Rapaczynski, a Polish emigre in New York who came back early in the decade, to figure out the business-side mechanics.
And, of course, now it's not just Wyborcza: it's a media empire, under the auspices of Agora, which is the largest private start-up company (vs. a privatized state enterprise) on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE).
Luczywo also was one of the key Polish authorities sought out by the BBC last week to talk about this remarkable decade of transition.
