Learning to fly

If there is something that is booming right now, it is mobile software. In spite of the vast variety of incompatible platforms, the number of mobile applications is growing very rapidly. Business houses know that mobile presence is imminent for them, and developers just can’t stop themselves from making new applications for their mobiles. Given such a huge development activity, one would expect current day mobile handsets to be full of software to do almost everything. However such is not the case. The discovery and distribution of applications is still an open problem. People want to try out software on their phones, but they don’t know what software to try, where to get it from, etc.

App Stores from Apple, RIM, Palm are initiatives in this direction, and they have definitely solved a part of the problem. For these phones, there is atleast  one place where software can be found. However all these initiatives are very specific in nature, and are usually not very unbiased. There is usually an entry cost for applications, and a number of other things one could of have done without.

There has to be something simpler, something more genuine. So there is Munimo. Munimo is a community initiative, started by Mayank Kumar and Mobisy association with MOMO Bangalore, where mobile enthusiasts come and share their favorite applications. With a very small number of contributors at the moment, Munimo has already started turning useful for new users. Go there, and you can see the favorite applications of most avid mobile users. You know of an application and you want to share with others, just log in to Munimo and add it to the collection. Your contributions will surely go a long way in making mobiles more useful for everyone.

In its current state, Munimo is simply a web portal where people come and tell about the applications they love. The next step for us is to push out Munimo mobile application for as many platforms as possible. Though it may sound like an ardous task, but thanks to Mobitop it essentially is just a few clicks job. Oops, not aware of Mobitop? For the uninitiated, Mobitop is magic wand for mobile application developers developed by Mobisy. Mobitop is an application platform which allows developers to convert their wap sites into mobile applications via a packaging tool. As of now, Mobitop is not directly available on Mobisy website, however that’s going to change soon. But feel free to get in touch with them, Mobisy team is more than eager to share their creation with everyone.

Once the applications are out, what would you like to see more? If you got any ideas, please let us know. Ideas/Suggestions are more than welcome. Code to implement them – even more . Just e-mail your thoughts to team at munimo dot com.

What do you think about a Mobile Application Profile (MAP). So you use a phone, and have a number of applications on it. The applications and their genre is what I call a MAP. When you move on to another phone, chances are that you are going to use a similar set of applications. What if all that happens by itself using your MAP. I think it’s very cool. What do you think?

Let’s make it happen.