So Motorola invested in Scanbuy.

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. and NEW YORK - February 2, 2010 - Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), through its strategic investment arm, Motorola Ventures, today announced an investment in Scanbuy, Inc., a leader in mobile barcode solutions. Motorola acted as lead investor and was joined by Masthead Venture Partners, Hudson Ventures and select private investors. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

This event says a whole lot about the importance of being product/customer-driven (i.e. Scanbuy) vs. being a patent troll (i.e. NeoMedia).

[To NeoMedia: Told you guys, people (investors) dislike patent trolls and like real businesses - focus on real products that satisfy real customer needs]

The NeoMedia investors I’m sure are going ballistic about their “IP” and how come this event was not them, and about the “agreement” between Scanbuy and NeoMedia (that settled all litigation between the companies and granted non-exclusive patent licenses to each other), and most them are clueless about what just hit them…

Congrats Scanbuy!

ceo

As I read Terrence’s blog Goodbye Sun & Thanks, Scott, I think back at my days when I worked closely with Sun. Many believed that I worked for Sun but I actually didn’t…

I have been a fan of Sun Microsystems through out my school years and then during my professional career. Like many, I was part of Sun’s and Java ecosystem and developer community.

Sun and Java have played a big role in my professional career…

I had the pleasure to work with many great people and minds at Sun and use Sun’s technologies. I spent a lot of time working with Sun’s mobile (from KVM to J2ME/Java ME) and server technologies and even writing for them (also see my Mobile Java section on my blog).

For years I ran a popular website/blog called J2MEDeveloper.com and I wrote one of the first books on MIDP. I participated and contributed to many Java Specs (JSRs) and was a very active member of the Java Community Process (JCP) and the Mobile & Embedded community where I was recognized as a community champion/star. I also helped co-design Sun Microsystems’ Mobile Java Developer Certification Exam (SCMAD). Even recently I provided advice to the ME executive committee on the future of mobile Java. In 2009 I was nominated to the 7th JCP Annual Awards.

While I was at AGEA, a startup where I was one of its first employees, I helped bring both companies to work very close to each other. Back in 2000-2003 we created products based on J2EE and J2ME and created NetBeans extensions for developers to create mobile apps. I even helped raise $12.2 million in funding most of which as the lead investor came from Sun, making AGEA a Sun portfolio company. And when I was at Aligo, I created or help create a number of software solutions based on end-to-end Java. And at eZee and others. And via Artemis Wireless Werks the dozens of companies I helped with their mobile Java solutions. And today it continues from Java ME to Java on Android.

As you can see, Sun played a big role in my professional career. Those were great days that I enjoyed very much and which I am very proud of. Those days as Sun are gone now; a new era indeed. I can’t get used to see Oracle’s brand on Sun’s sites. Bye Sun Microsystems, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish…

ceo

Folks, just got an email from Google about their upcoming Android Developer Lab’s tour. Very cool and Austin is the 1st city in the tour on Feb 4, 2010.

Registration deadline for currently open sessions is February 1st.

The Lab will expose attendees to lab sessions working directly with Google Advocates. The session will last 4-6 hours. Details will be emailed to attendees in advance of the event. From their website (http://sites.google.com/site/androiddevlabs/home):

“Our Android Advocates are going on a world tour, traveling to locations all around the globe! Hear about the state of the Android platform, get hands-on with the latest version of the SDK, meet like-minded Android engineers, play with the latest Android devices, test your apps, and ask your questions directly to Android team members.”

I am definitely attending and if you are into Android, you should definitely attend as well! Again, register by Feb 1 by visiting the tour’s website.

ceo

You can see some photos of the meeting courtesy of Clark Wimberly (AndroidandMe):

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/clarklab/tags/androiddevaustin.

Thanks to our sponsors the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI Wireless), Motive/Alcatel-Lucent and MobileMonday Austin.

ceo

As part of the ReadWriteStart series titled Never Mind the Valley, Chris Cameron of the ReadWriteWeb wrote a very nice piece about the Austin startup and tech scene.

See Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Austin.

Thanks Chris for covering Austin and for the great job with the article…

ceo

So, while we are working on BlackBerry versions of our apps, we are really interested in finding out where the “common denominator” is. Is it sufficient for us to target BlackBerry OS 4.6 and above? Or, do we really need to go all the way to OS 4.2 or even OS 4.0? Do we need to release a seperate app for touch screen BlackBerry devices? Can we rely on the BlackBerry AppWorld to distribute our app?

Read more about the BlackBerry survey and participate….

ceo

Rudy De Waele (@mtrends) has put together a collaborative outlook of the mobile trends for the next 10 years:

Update: Mobile Trends 2020 has been updated to include views from Russell Buckley, Tomi Ahonen, Yuri van Geest, Kelly Goto, Raj Singh, David Harper, Marc Davis, Loic LeMeur…

(You can find my contribution to Mobile Trends 2020 on slide #40)

:
To this end I have been writing down my predictions in mobile & wireless for a couple of years now. This year I thought it was the time to move on and do something different, so I asked some of my personal heroes in mobile to write down their five most significant trends for the coming decade.
:

For background information on how this came about see Rudy’s blog Mobile Trends 2020.

I am honored to be part of this collaborative effort one full of vision of the things possible during the next decade on mobile, together with an awesome/top group of Mobilists such as:

Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Gerd Leonhard, Timo Arnall, Carlo Longino, Katrin Verclas, Atau Tanaka, Alan Moore, Marek Pawloski, Ajit Jaokar, Nicolas Nova, Inma Martinez, Tony Fish, Jonathan MacDonald, Willem Boijens, Carlos Domingo, Russ McGuire, Raimo van der Klein, Michael Breidenbruecker, Robert Rice, Steve O’Hear, Ted Morgan, Martin Duval, Andreas Constantinou, Fabien Girardin, Matthäus Krzykowski, Rich Wong, Andy Abramson, Ilja Laurs, David Wood, Stefan Constantinescu, Henri Moissinac, Kevin C. Tofel, Felix Petersen, Tom Hume, and yours truly.

Below is the Slideshare which you can also download.

(You can find my contribution to Mobile Trends 2020 on slide #40)

Enjoy!

ceo

With my first blog post of 2010 I would like to wish you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.

And with the new year and the new decade, I reflect on the previous decade and my involvement with mobile; writing this helps me remember the good and not so good times and prepare for the new decade of mobile.

2000-2009. Wow, ten years have past! Some good times and some bad times. I survived, making a living throughout the decade mostly working on mobile. Not too bad…

During the last decade I did a bit of everything: a software developer, architect, a products guy, CTO and evangelist, business owner, researcher, speaker and writer, startup founder, raise angel and VC money, board member, mentor, events organizer, standards bodies, blogger, open source, inventor, documentation and testing, marketing and managing people and products. Top to bottom, left to right. I did great on some and not as good on other. All that while being a husband and a father…

From WAP and cHTML, to web clipping, PalmOS and BlackBerry, Symbian OS, web and widgets, local/native apps, connected and occasionally connected apps, J2ME, Android and iPhone too. From device to network to server, J2EE and Servlets and containers, from XML to Java, PHP, C and C++, DBs and many OSes. Algorithms and patents. User interfaces and user experience. From social and user-generated content software before it was called that, to SMS, LBS, personal data and proximity before it was cool and/or massively used. Lots of other things as well. I remember ‘predicting’ that enterprise would drive mobile adoption, but boy, I was wrong — consumers did! I predicted that by 2006-2007 or so mobile would become what we all have been talking about, and off I was, but not as bad.

…and we are still not there but we are getting there!

During the last decade I started companies, and joined others; both small and large. From agentGO/AGEA, Aligo, Artemis Wireless Werks, to eZee and Motive/ALU. From helping raise millions of dollars in VC money, bringing software products to market, some very successful, to creating partnerships and relationships, almost getting acquired by BEA, to selling the company assets or dissolving the company, the last decade was a hell of a ride.

With Artemis Wireless Werks (my mobile services company) alone helped dozens of companies including Skyfire, AMF Ventures, OMTP.org, MediaSourcery, RGL Forensic Accountants & Consultants, Arrowhead Electronic Healthcare, Edioma, NAKA Media, Blim Law, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, Motorola Metrowerks, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, The Burton Group, Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Santa Fe, Aligo, Datamaxx, IBM, Mobile Candy Disk, mLoc8, Salsa.Net, PodCast Ready and Kenosia. Thanks to all for the business!

Got the opportunity to speak on many conferences and wrote hundreds of technical articles on mobile and one book, and thousands of entries on my blog and other blogs. Contributed directly or indirectly to a few other books and wrote the foreword for one. Started 3 other books but didn’t finish them, and I owe book reviews to a number of friends, all great writers; sorry guys! I will review all the pending books! and should at least finish one of those books that I had started.

During the last decade I met wonderful and super smart Mobilists, some in person and others virtually, from all around the world, many becoming good friends even though some of them I’ve never met in person. Others who started in mobile at the same time as I did are still going strong on mobile — way to go! I also helped a number of students, some local but most from around the world, thanks again to the power of the Internet, some even throughout from their Bachelor to their PhD. I’m proud of them.

The space shuttle — my first job out of college in the 90s went through very hard times and a fatal accident losing all crewmen and the vehicle Columbia — glad am I to see the program continue, even though its end of life is to occur on 2010, to move forward into the next phase of the manned space program.

Also during the past decade (in 2005) founded MobileMonday Austin which today has close to 350 members and continues strong, and also was a founding member of the Austin Wireless Alliance and the Carnival of the Mobilists which also continue strong. Helping companies is a passion of mine and throughout the decade I helped dozen of companies with software to pure advice. Got involved with SXSW Interactive as an advisory board member focused on mobile which continues in 2010; hope to see you there.

During the same decade I spent a lot of time helping evolve J2ME by helping with the specs and APIs, writing about it, evangelizing, helping with the JCP and JavaOne and with the Mobile & Embedded Community. In 2009 I was nominated for the 2009 JCP Program Participant of the Year. It is sad for me that J2ME stalled towards the end of the decade (long story) but it is not dead and I think it will (should) live as the preferred development platform for Feature-phones.

Towards the end of the decade I co-founded eZee inc. a mobile marketing and interactive advertising company and joined the UT Austin Technology Incubator (ATI). I’m a proud alumni of the ATI with which I continue having a strong relationship. eZee’s technology was based on my vision of mobile with interactions between the physical and digital worlds and the user (and the analysis of such interactions), and the mobile user context while keeping the technology and adoption as practical to the times as possible — very interesting as in 2000 when I joined agentGO I focused on the importance of user-context and agent software and data as key ingredients to a successful mobile experience. So in many ways, eZee inc was the culmination of the previous 8 years of mobile vision and experience. And that vision is not dead!

And I ended-up the decade at Motive, which was later acquired by Alcatel-Lucent, where I work on software for Telcos in the areas of device management and call-center software and network stuff; things that typically happen “behind the scenes”.

The decade was hell of a ride, as I wrote before. I’m sure I’ve missed a number of things but the above is a good summary — I ended up writing much more that what I had anticipated.

2000-2009 was a decade of vision on things mobile, with lots of research, and partnerships, with some real deployments, with lots excitements and some disappointments. The mobile industry has taken a long time to evolve, mainly because of the operators, and as a consequence the technology took long to evolve and become adopted.

But it is happening now. I see it. I feel it. From the mobile lifestyle, to the ecosystem, from the operator to the developer, from the network to the devices. And as we enter the new decade, mobility will be even *more* pervasive. The technology, the devices and networks are catching up, and we will be able to bring to market all those product concepts that we have been talking about/researching over the last decade. For one, the users are ready with a next generation of users that if you think you and me are connected today, think again. Voice? Nah, only 1% of usage will be voice, and apps/data/messaging/social/media will be the other 99%, always-on/connected. Where 80% of the devices will be Smart-phones and Feature-phones will have 80% of Smart-phone capabilities/functionality. Hybrid apps (80% local/native and 20% web-based) will rule for the first half of the decade, and by the 2nd half, mobile web should rival local/native apps and/or complement them in ways that it is almost transparent when jumping from one to the other and back. The next decade will see Augmented Reality and digital/physical world convergence become a common tool, with the mobile handset right in the middle, and AR it will be standardized and absorbed into the browser as a view — similar to the “street vs. map view”. The mobile handset will also serve as the personal gateway to the Internet, providing the computing power to simple sensors and to the new 5th screen — AR visors/eye-glasses powered by the mobile handset.

And many thanks to all the companies such as Apple and Google and RIM and Nokia and Symbian and the other hundreds of super innovative small companies and people who made the difference during the last decade; while some made it and others failed, they all have a part and made important contributions.

So welcome to the year 2010 and the new decade… Let’s see what the new decade will bring us.

Let’s make it happen! Bring it on!

ceo

With this post I would like to wish you and your family a peaceful and happy Christmas holidays and an awesome, full of health and prosperity 2010!

ceo

Yes, cloud computing has in theory a great potential to reach great number of users because of the complex ecosystem that it involves - it is not only about end-users, but all the intermediaries as well, reaching all, working together.

The statement that mobile applications are tied to a carrier is a “yes and no” answer — if I’ve application A running on Android and iPhone, is that the same app ported to two platforms, or two different apps? There is no single answer as you may decide to track it as a single application on two platforms, or track each platform as its own application. And if I have a mobile web app, is that tied to a specified network provider? The answer is no.

One thing that caught my eye on Ajit’s essay was “the phrase ‘Mobile Cloud Computing’ itself has meaning only from an access standpoint. For instance, the ‘backup’ could work for any server (fixed or mobile).” But there are different views to (mobile) cloud computing in general and to better understand and rationalize (mobile) cloud computing in general — its benefits, drivers and economics, we must look at all its angles. Below I take a short stab at it, where we have:

1. Applications vs. Services or the combination.
2. The network of Constituents:
   • The PROVIDER of cloud computing infrastructure

     Provides hardware (HW) and software (SW) infrastructure, or applications and services, and/or all the above. Example are Amazon and Google and Rackspace, where latter is more on the HW side of the infrastructure while Amazon is both. Providers absorb most of the Capex behind powering (mobile) cloud computing.

     From the provider perspective it is about being competitive and win the business by offering pricing models that makes it attractive to their consumers. Attractive to customers is cheaper but reliable, and this is possible via hosted/SaaS/cloud-based approaches by deploying their own infrastructure or leveraging others.

   • The APPLICATION/SERVICES PROVIDER or (1st tier consumer) of cloud computing

     Are typically businesses consumers of cloud computing infrastructure and providers of applications and/or services. Examples like Google are both providers of cloud computing infrastructure and of applications and services. But the majority are providers of apps and services running on top of infrastructure provided by others (see PROVIDER above).

     From this tier-1 customer perspective is about minimizing IT Capex by moving such Capex costs to Opex. These customers look for pricing models based on number of seats and/or devices while minimizing their investment on expensive hardware and software and even IT operational investments; it helps them minimize risk ($) with respect to unknowns. They drive the Providers with requirements on scalability, high availability, multi-tenancy and security, to mention a few.

   • The DEVELOPER (2nd tier consumer) of cloud computing

     Are developers of applications and services. These applications are typically hosted on the cloud (see Provider above). Even client-based applications are increasingly consuming services on the cloud.Developers look to leverage the services which are hard to build but easier and cheaper to consume that gives them richness for their apps, with examples that include Maps and location, photos and storage. These developers offer their applications and services on the web via SaaS models running on other’s HW and SW infrastructure (see above).

   • The END-USER (3rd tier consumer) of cloud computing

     Are the typical end-users of applications. They don’t consumer services directly, but consume applications that in turn consume services on the cloud. These level of consumers really don’t care if the app is hosted or not. They only care that the app works WELL when needed with things such as security and high-availability and well usage experiences and etc, all being part of the package.

The following illustrates an example of this complex network of and between cloud computing participants:

Different constituents drive the requirements on different parts of cloud computing and in different ways. But at the end, cloud computing is mainly about economics and driven by providers and their Tier-1 customers, the application/services providers who in turn are driven by end-users and developers. At the end it is a network of application/services providers consuming other application/services providers via many infrastructure providers, and levels of providers and end-users and developers. SLAs are so important in this “new” world and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are probably one of the most important aspects to make all this work; does SLA equal trust?

From the Mobile Network Operator (MNO) cloud-based / hosting is becoming increasingly important, especially when doing initial deployments of new technologies as it helps them minimize risk with respect to unknowns. From the developer’s perspective their dependencies on services on the web continues to increase (i.e. connected apps); even their local/native connected applications are big users of services on the web.

From the mobile perspective, consumption of centralized applications (mobile web) and services (both mobile web and local apps) will continue to be the trend i.e. consumption of software and services as a service on the web/cloud. The idea of mobile handsets as “servers” or provider of services is a very interesting one indeed, but we are not there yet and it will take longer to get there.

ceo