Learning to fly

In Mobisy we have a famous joke, “after a year of entrepreneurship, you start becoming philosopher”. In the same vein, I recently posted my thoughts on couple of leading technology blogs in India. The Alootechie post is more related to technology or market trends while the pluggd.in post is more on emotional note. Let me know which one you liked better.
Cheers,

Last few weeks have been sort of turning point for Mobile Internet.

iPhone is phenomenal for us in Mobile Industry. I feel it would be awesome for consumers as well.
You may have already heard the hype
1.iPhone means tail wagging the dog
2.it means a completely new era in Mobile industry,
3.It is special since it’s a laptop convergence device running a full OS X
All of above is true but from our point of view the biggest impact iPhone will have on mobile industry will be as an internet device running a full web browser. A first mobile phone vendor which dares 3rd party developers to develop applications ‘only’ based on their Safari browser.
“Safari” is the key. BTW like many other innovations in iPhone, iPhone is not the first device running full Safari browser on a mobile device. Nokia has been doing it for more than a year now, what’s more they have even open sourced their Symbian port. Steve Jobs declaration in Apple WWDC really changes the rules of the game. To give you an idea, we in Mobile Industry struggled with following application development environments till now

1.Native (Symbian, Microsoft Pocket PC, BREW etc) :- These are extremely powerful in terms of technology but completely un-portable across devices and operating systems
2.Java/J2ME :- This is moderately powerful and moderately portable.
3.Flashlite :- A new entrant in the area and a good competitor for J2ME in games development area.
4.Micro browser based :- These have very limited functionality but are portable provided you do not use any AJAX/ Web 2.0 technologies.

iPhone promises that today we can develop all the AJAX applications we want with the hope that tomorrow Apple will make the browser based environment more powerful by giving it device access.

This brings me to second life changing event in Mobile internet area, advent of Google Gears. Google gears basically enhances your PC browser environment by enabling developers to give cool features like off-line access to application data. And bringing this development to Mobile phones has excited many analysts in the world as you can see here and here. I feel it’s only matter of time.

I still haven’t talked about how does it all affects Mobisy, I mean why the hell am I ranting about it?
Hmm.. if you don’t know us probably you may not know, we started talking about Mobisy with a vision of reinventing Mobile Internet around an year ago. Our whole idea is of a scripting based fully customizable and personalized simple User Interface platform for Mobile Phones(Mobile Easy). No wonder the product we are working on is also in the same area !!! iPhone and Google gear validate our concept today. And that’s why we take this opportunity to talk about our product publicly. Not to mention, it also saves us some effort of explaining basics ..:-)
We are working on a product which complements the visions of Apple, Nokia , Google to the core. We are building an application development platform for mobile phones which will enable developers to develop internet applications with capabilities of a native environment with off-line access!! Sounds impossible? Not quite.. We already have some private demos and proof of concepts working, so watch this space for more details in future.. If you can’t wait to know more, feel free to drop me a line.

Here is a nice post about how iPhone will impact our ex company Infineon in a positive way. A good read as always from Sramana Mitra.
Main points to be taken are :-
iPhone and it’s nearest competitor PRADA are both based on Infineon chips and hence its money for Infineon on both sides of the fence no matter who wins. I find it a little difficult to believe the revenue numbers for Infineon since I do not think modem chips can be sold for that much in today’s market. All the same, fact remains that Infineon seems to be turning a corner with iPhone.

Coming from technical background we all tend to think with our technological spectacles. When someone asks us simple questions like btw who is your customer and how are you going to sell this thing, we tend to fumble. Our thoughts start from cool things we can achieve with technology at hand and tend to end with how users will benefit from it. Which means user perspective is sometimes the last thought on our mind. After talking to plenty of people in the industry I came to realise that this phenomenon is not only limited to us technical people, we have been able to successfully infect all the marketing ,sales and finance guys who work with us as well. You know what if you look at some funded companies in India you may get the feeling that VCs love cool technologies too. (see all the funded companies in the area of IMS, WiMax, and so on…)

BTW here is a nice article explaining the advantages of ignorance in start-ups.(wink)

As usual there is other school of thought from people coming from non technical backgrounds like finance, marketing, sales or people who have really seen the world and know many things.These guys tend to believe that an idea should start from a business case, we need to know what is the market, whom and how we can sell our product and eventually how we can make money from it from the beginning. Like someone told me the other day, you can do a start-up in two ways first, where you do what you love to do and believe in it, this way you may succeed but chances are low. Other way is where you try to know as much as possible in advance and then be flexible enough to start loving something which you know will sell, this way you may not be an outright success, but the chances are more that you will not fail completely.

Now with time, I have come to realise that the later kind of people do have a valid point after all. It is eventually how you want to do your start-up. If you do it as a business, you should listen to these guys and should create something which you know will sell from the beginning. But if you are doing it for your own pleasure, you can have a luxury of venturing in to something completely unknown.Here is a nice read about mindset of current bunch of entrepreneurs from Sramana Mitra.

Obviously the best case scenario is that these two kind of people converge on something they are both really convinced about and that’s when you get the Woz and Jobs combination.

A must read for everyone dealing with Mobile industry.
It just gives a perspective on Mobile Phone industry and can break some popular myths ..:-)
Especially the one I like is Mobile Internet is “Not the dumb little brother of the Internet”. Something we all know in Mobile industry but especially people coming from PC Internet background find hard to digest.

In December last year, when we started with the idea of Mobisy, we had little knowledge about open source revolution that is happening. In our Mobile Handset Embedded software world, everything is proprietary and there is little or no talk about open source. Chhavi having worked on LwIP, was our only source of information. Personally, my information was limited to Linux kernel. But then, it all changed when I downloaded Open Office in Feb 2007. I was amazed by the amount of functionality offered by an open source product , it was running smooth on my Windows XP and for converting docs to pdfs I now did not have to buy Adobe acrobat writer. For converting images to SVG I did not have to pay huge money to Adobe. To convert documents, I did not need to use slow and crappy Microsoft office. What more for our new laptop, we decided to not even install Microsoft office. And then we came across this whole wave of Open utilities. One of our first projects is based on an Open source browser for mobile phones, S60Webkit by Nokia. There is even one more open source browser available from Mozilla called as Minimo. Imagine if this was not available we had to start from writing/porting our own browser setting us back by at least 6 months and god knows how much money. Now even a key component like J2ME which provides most deployed applications execution environment to Mobile Developers all over the world is getting open sourced.
Purely from technical perspective, it has never been easier to run a successful start up. Open source community is a huge boost to the entrepreneurial spirit.
If you look carefully around your product, you will find multitude of open source projects which you can simply re use. And this also encourages the start ups to open source their own code to get more and more developers contributing to your platform to make it richer.
We are really entering an era where not only the internet is maturing with Web 2.0, software is really becoming a service as the open source community once envisaged.

When we talk about Mobile technologies, monetising data platforms and lowering the walled gardens, we all conveniently forget that killer application of Mobile Phone is “call”. This thought is also supported by Steve Jobs in iPhone launch who arguably came up with coolest phone on the planet. I also heard it from Dr. Aditya Dev Sood of CKS consulting recently.

So what are the call based applications we can come up with for Indian market which is hugely multilingual, multicultural but ready to pay?
I think following should be some basic characteristics of such applications

1. It should be easy and intuitive to use.
2. Literacy should not be a barrier to entry.
3. It should be localised to the audiences tastes ,wishes and languages?

So I am more and more becoming of the opinion that, in Indian Mobile world, it is not about how many eyeballs you can attract, it is about how many eardrums are listening to what you have to say/ provide.
How you can achieve easy to use voice based applications which can network those for whom reading and writing is not at all convenient / desirable?
How can you bring Mobile 2.0 with innovative applications of Voice/ Call?

Now that’s a thought which will keep me awake for a few nights !

Today I attended the Open C conference arranged by Forum Nokia. It was refreshing. First of all I really like Nokia and Symbian’s fresh attempt to attract more developer base. They are going to need that while competing with Microsoft Pocket PC, Embedded Linux and more recently, OS X from Apple. All the other operating system run their full version on the PCs and have a developer base they can draw from. Symbian’s user base till now is only from Mobile C++ development community. Today, I heard that there are approximately 2 million registrations on forum Nokia website. This is extremely big number compared to the Linux developer community. But I feel the Linux developer community is much bigger and actually majority of 29 million of their users prefer Linux as a development environment !
Another thing to note is that if today’s mobiles are converging towards becoming a replacement for laptops as Sramana Mitra suggests, Symbian & Nokia have to find a way to offset the advantage Microsoft, Linux and Apple have in their existing development community.

What could they do more?

I feel if Nokia decides to give device access on S60 via Open C, it would be even better. My suggestion to them would be to use LiMo foundation API to do that. It would eventually mean that applications developed for LiMo version of embedded Linux can work on Symbian series 60 as well! That would mean two of the three major mobile operating systems would be inter-operable leaving Microsoft to fight for its own survival. Another fact to note is that these two operating systems have backing of the three biggest OEMs in Nokia, Motorola and Samsung.

I would like Nokia to address another drawback. Some of these cool features they have developed for S60 3rd edition need to be back ported. For example, it’s a pity that their cool open source browser is not available for existing S60 2nd edition devices. Similarly they seem to have no plans to back port Open C, which again I feel is a poor choice by Nokia. This makes life of S60 application developers extremely difficult. And the target market for potential Open C developers is not 100 million as Nokia suggests, it is much lesser and limited to around ten million 3rd edition devices.