Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Toktumi’s Peter Sisson asks Is the BlackBerry Doomed? and goes on to compare his recent experience of developing for BlackBerry with his experience as an iPhone developer.  Many of his complaints – non-standard hardware and OS versions in particular – are the same issues we ran into two years ago when we developed and delivered iotum’s Talk-Now  presence application for BlackBerry.  Ultimately we gave up on the BlackBerry, believing the return on investment of developing for the web would be higher.  And, in fact, Calliflower on iPhone is a hybrid web / native application, proving that hypothesis. The bet that we’ve made is that web development will be as powerful on handheld devices as it is on computers. 

RIM is addressing some of the issues that Peter raises already.  In particular, an upgraded web browser is in the works, which will make hybrid development strategies like ours much more appealing. Moreover, the business terms for selling applications through BlackBerry AppWorld are more attractive than Apple’s iPhone App Store. However, there are still holes in RIMs strategy which need to be addressed. 

In particular, the user experience associated with getting an application onto a BlackBerry is a pale shadow of the iPhone user experience.

• Installing an application on iPhone is a process of searching the App Store, clicking a download link, paying if necessary, and then a short wait. 
• Installing an application on BlackBerry is a process of determining where to get the application – AppWorld, another store, or direct from the developer – downloading the application, accepting a bunch of scary but mostly incomprehensible security questions, and frequently accepting an often lengthy license agreement.

Why? When RIM announced the AppWorld, their strategy was to be:

• Carrier friendly, allowing multiple stores, including carrier specific stores.
• Developer friendly, sharing 80% of of the revenue with the developer of an application, and permitting applications to be delivered directly by the developer to the customer, without RIM’s approval.

As a strategy, RIM was attempting to find a position that would allow them to counter the complaints about Apple’s high-handed process. In courting carriers and developers with these concessions, however, RIM has created barriers to adoption of those applications by the customer, which may ultimately cause more harm than benefit.

Adobe’s on a roll, putting flash into all kinds of devices.  Expect lots of announcements this week as the Adobe MAX Conference gets underway.  For example, over the weekend, news reports said that Adobe would extend flash to just about every phone in the market – except iPhone.  The message is that with Flash 10.1, content that had previously only been available to desktop browsers will now be accessible on handheld devices.

The less talked about impact of Adobe’s plans is that Flash is rapidly becoming a de-facto development environment for rapid cross platform development.  Rich enough to support many types of applications, Flash also delivers tangible productivity gains to software developers.

The team at local embedded OS creator QNX Software Systems has released a kit for developing automobile applications – in Flash.  Dubbed QNX CAR, this system lets developers create entertainment systems, and dashboard systems, using Flash as the development environment. Riding on the QNX Neutrino RTOS, these systems are both reliable and easy to get to market quickly because of the Flash environment. And they look pretty darn good as well!

Here’s a sample dashboard, showing turn by turn GPS as well as drawing weather information from a live internet connection.

And here’s a sample entertainment system, showing streaming internet radio via Pandora.

Last week the QNX CAR team was announced as a finalist in the mobile category for the Adobe MAX Award at Adobe’s MAX conference.  Congratulations to the home team, and good luck in the voting.  If you’d like to cast your vote for QNX, simply click here and fill in the form. Hurry though, as tomorrow is the last day to vote.

Montreal based Mobivox announced this afternoon that it had been acquired by Indian / MountainView California startup SabSe Technologies.  The brainchild of Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia, and serial entrepreneur Yogesh Patel, Sabse first launched the Sabsebolo.com conferencing service in India, then acquired Jaxtr in June of this past year, and has now acquired Mobivox.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but one source close to the deal said “It’s good for both parties, and plenty of development will be done out of Montreal.”  That’s welcome, as Bhatia and Patel could have easily shipped the entire operation offshore. 

To date, Sabse has launched a conference calling service, a hosted PBX provider, acquired an international VoIP player, and now they have bought a voice user interface player.  What’s the end game?  In this 2008 interview, Patel says:

We strongly believe Sabsebolo has the potential to be a dominant player in the market. Not only in the audio conferencing but may be the whole voice platform.

Bob Poe began his piece on this acquisition saying “It’s clear that many VoIP companies aren’t meant to be standalone telecom businesses”.  In fact, the market is ripe for a roll-up of VoIP players, and SabSe is clearly taking on this role.  Expect to see other players stepping up to the plate as well, as the market for interesting VoIP technology companies heats up.

And if anyone is counting, Mobivox’ exit to Sabse is the 16th in the last five years by a client of VoIP maven Andy Abramson…

Speculation that Microsoft might replace the IE rendering with WebKit is running high this morning after remarks made by Steve Ballmer in Australia.  Although hardly a ringing endorsement of WebKit, here’s why Steve (and Steve Sinofsky, Mr. Windows) should consider this:

1. The battle to own the presentation layer of the Web was lost long ago.  That presentation layer is controlled by the W3C not by any one company.  The industry, including Microsoft and Netscape, learned how damaging proprietary extensions could be during mid 90’s, and both companies vowed to support standards.
2. Notwithstanding standards, innovation can occur in browsers – rendering speed, add-on features, and so-on.  Apple and Google are proving this.  This is the ripe area for plucking right now, as opposed to spending resources on getting the latest HTML standard to render correctly.
3. Microsoft’s decision to push its own rendering engine is causing it immense harm in mobile.  Speaking as the CEO of a company with a browser based application, and mobile projects underway, the platforms that interest us the most are iPhone, Android and Nokia.  These are the easiest for us to support. What about Microsoft and RIM, both of which have substantial market share? BlackBerry is almost there.  RIM’s choice to build a proprietary browser, however, is working against them.  And Microsoft? Well, we don’t even IE 6 well on a desktop platform, let alone mobile. My bet is that modern mobile browsers are going to win the day.

So give it some more thought Steve (and Steve).  The IE rendering engine holds little strategic value, little opportunity for innovation, and it’s an impediment to developers supporting your mobile platforms.

Image via Wikipedia

 

Phew.  There was no talk of the markets today.  Heading back to technology, our guest this morning was Mike Bartlett, Skype’s product manager for Windows to discuss Beta 2.0 of the Skype 4.0 product.

Skype 4.0 beta 1 was launched June 18th.  Since then, Skype has seen up to 350,000 simultaneous users of beta 1 online at any particular time.  Building from over 50,000 pieces of feedback, the company made choices about what features to include in the new beta. 

Mike told us about the company’s goals for the first beta, the things they learned, some of the key features that they included in the new beta, and why. He also described how the company makes choices about which platforms to support, and alluded to an upcoming Mac release for our long suffering participants on the call who use Macs. 

To download the latest beta of Skype, click here.

On the Calliflower Conference Call today: Mike Bartlett, Dan York, Yusuf Motiwala, Hudson Barton, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, James Body, Phil Wolff, Todd, Steve Sokol, Andrew Hansen, and Sergio Meinardi. 

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 Squawk Box October 1 - Skype 4.0 Beta 2 [35:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download