MobUser

It’s official, I am now a card carrying member of the exclusive iPhone Developer Program! I just loaded my first iPhone application to my very own iPhone … W00T!

I’ve been spending a lot of time teaching myself Objective-C. The transition has been a challenge coming from the Java world. Relearning how to do things I take for granted in Java/MIDP can be frustrating at times but I must say that the iPhone SDK looks VERY promising.

Let the journey begin!

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we won our category for mobile development tools at this years Jolt awards! Also in our category were some pretty big players.

• Adobe Device Central CS3
• Eclipse Embedded Rich Client Platform
• NetBeans IDE
• SunJava Wireless Tk/Netbeans Mobility
• VirtualLogix VLX

I’ve been preparing for the eventual release of the iPhone SDK by starting to teach myself Objective-C and getting to know the XCode tools. One of the new features of XCode 3.0 is official support of Cocoa-Ruby. Much like the concept behind Cocoa-Java (which is no longer supported), Cocoa-Ruby enables Ruby developers a way to quickly author OSX applications in a language with which they are already familiar. Given that the result is a compiled Universal Binary, it stands to reason that when the iPhone SDK is launched it too will benefit from this extension to the Cocoa Framework.

Coming from a background of creating Mojax, which is essentially a Javascript engine for mobile devices, I get the power of a scripting language as a way to quickly author a mobile application. Ruby is an extremely powerful scripting language (much more so than Javascript) … so the prospect of iPhone supporting Ruby as a first-class citizen is exciting indeed.

My only dilemma at this point is to decided if I should kill two birds with one stone and teach myself Ruby instead of Objective-C!

On Jan 1, 2008 mFoundry has now officially turned four years old. As I sit down and reflect on what we’ve seen and accomplished in 2007 I am amazed at how much farther we have come along in the Mobile Industry.

mFoundry Establishes itself as a Mobile Banking Market Leader

Without a doubt the single biggest business achievement in 2007 was the incredible success we achieved in the Mobile Banking sector. When we committed to mBanking as a vertical we were all hopeful that the gamble would pay off and it certainly has indeed. As we move into 2008 we have tremendous support from leading Banks, Operators, and Strategic Partners.

mFoundry Closes its Series C Financing

One of the most significant business events in 2007 was the closing of our Series C. Compared to previous rounds, this was the easiest. Our story was tight and we had a very clear business strategy that resonated with our investors. Aside from the addition of cash, this Series C brings with it a collection of very powerful strategic partners that will no doubt help to shape our future.

Firethorn is Aquired by Qualcomm

In a surprising move by Qualcomm, Firethorn was purchased in the later part of 2007. Firethorn has been considered by many to be our closest competitor in the Mobile Banking space. The acquisition by Qualcomm galvanized the Mobile Banking vertical and has sparked a wildfire of interest in us from Qualcomm’s competitors. This was perhaps the best thing that could happen to mFoundry (short of being purchased ourselves) as it instantly gave credibility to the Mobile Banking and Payments space.

Mojax Reaches 1.0 on J2ME and BREW

This took longer than I expected but I am very please to say that, after a year of development, we have a candidate release for Mojax 1.0 on both J2ME and BREW. This is due entirely to the excellent team of engineers and QA testers that all helped to bring Mojax to life.

Mojax continues to be what I consider the single most effective way to develop mobile applications. Though we have leveraged the power of Mojax in the pursuit of Mobile Banking, it is my continued vision to also see Mojax powering a myriad of other verticals. Our private Beta in 2007 has grown to almost 500 developers from all around the world. I am looking forward to continuing to grow our developer community and provide a simple and effective way for them to create mobile applications.

Apple iPhone and Google Android Introduced to the Market

One of the greatest strengths of Mojax is the fact that it will work on BREW and J2ME, two platforms that are so completely different from each other that developing or porting any application to them requires at least two development teams. Conversely, a Mojax Moblet created once (in a fraction of the time), will immediately run on both BREW and MIDP without ANY additional work. The introduction of the iPhone and soon Android devices into the market only further adds to the overall entropy in the mobile application space. Android, being Java-based, is the “easier” of the two new platforms to support; but iPhone is likely to be Objective-C based which will again require a separate development team to support. I have put the iPhone and Android on the Mojax roadmap for 2008 along with Windows Mobile.

What Does the Future Hold for mFoundry?

From a company perspective, 2008 will see mFoundry transition from 100% product development into a mix of development and product support. Our company size will grow as we add product solutions and support capabilities as well as ramp up our direct sales efforts. We will also continue to add to our list of mBanking channel partners.

Mojax will be ported to Windows Mobile, Android, and iPhone by the middle to end of 2008. Additionally, support for 3rd party Mojax Plug-in development will also be a priority for the early part of 2008.

By the end of 2008 I expect mFoundry’s product stack to be the most pervasive Mobile Banking platform in the US and for Mojax to be used by 3rd parties to create new exciting mobile verticals. 2007 was an exciting year but I expect 2008 to exceed our expectations.

Best wishes to everyone and to all a prosperous New Year!

- Rodney Aiglstorfer

I’ve finally gotten some time to really sit down and look at Android. I continue to get a lot of questions about what impact Android has on Mojax and how they compare; that I thought it was high time to dig in and really understand what Android is all about.

First Impressions?

In a word … “WOW!” … I’ve been in the mobile software development world since Motorola first released a J2ME device on Nextel and I must say that Android is by far the most interesting application framework with the greatest potential for innovation than any other operating system or application framework in the market. It has all the strengths of Danger’s all-Java-all-the-time approach combined with a set of libraries and tools that make developing solutions fun and accessible to a very large developer audience.

My greatest fear is that most of the really interesting features will eventually get “nerfed” by Operators who restrict access to libraries for Multimedia, Camera, SMS, and GPS; as they have done to J2ME for years. My only hope is that a compromise will be reached wherein an application may become “trusted” in a way that is accessible to anyone that is willing to get a certificate from a trusted 3rd party and not be at the sole discretion of the Operators to “award” only approved applications with a trusted status.

What is the Impact of Android on Mojax?

What should be understood right away is that Android is as much an Operating System as it is an application framework. This is an important distinction to make as it gets right to the heart of what Mojax is all about and ultimately the most important differentiation. Mojax is all about running across multiple Operating Systems and devices, Android applications will only run on Android devices. Mojax is currently running on J2ME/MIDP2, BREW, and soon Windows Mobile. Android, from a Mojax strategy point of view, is just another device platform we will support. I really don’t see Android as a competing platform any more than I would consider .Net CF or the iPhone SDK a competitive platform. If anything, the introduction of Android (and the iPhone for that matter) will only add to the overall chaos in the mobile market … and further re-enforce the value of Mojax as a true write-once-run-everywhere application framework.

In the final analysis, I am very much looking forward to porting Mojax to Android … given our roots in Java / MIDP this should be a relatively easy task to perform. I’m also curious to see how our approach may make Android more accessible to AJAX developers and not only Java developers. In future posts I hope to explore more about Android as we go through the porting process and share my findings.

According to the Associated Press, Spring Nextel Agrees to Unlock Phones. This could be a big deal for the J2ME community if a Sprint phone, with MIDP support, were unlocked and then used on the Verizon network. BREW and Qualcomm is the biggest bottle neck to getting free software onto handsets … this could be the first step to breaking down the Verizon “walled-garden”. This also begs the question “Will I be able to buy an unlocked Java capable phone from a 3rd party and use it on Verizon?”. Very interesting indeed!

By now news of the closing of our Series C round of financing is out. This time around was a very different experience from previous rounds. The biggest difference was the fact that all of our investors in this round were “strategic” investors and not traditional VCs. Some of the key strategic investors in the round are NCR, Motorola, and PayPal (yeah no kidding … wow!).

This round will give us the “endurance” to fully play out the Mobile Financial market here in United States as well as to push into Europe. However what really makes me excited is the potential all this has for Mojax. 2008 is going to be a very exciting year!

By now I’m sure you have heard that Apple will be releasing an iPhone SDK that will enable 3rd parties to create native applications. This is a pretty interesting development. Many of the investors that we presented Mojax to had concerns that our platform would be irrelevant as mobile phone browsers became more powerful and supported full AJAX. The iPhone is the first device that has all the requirements to run a full-fledged AJAX application. Apple even tried to “encourage” developers to create web-applications by telling developers that they had no other option. In spite of this, developers complained loudly about being restricted to the browser and did everything they could to “hack” the iPhone.

This confirms what I’ve always known … the browser is NOT a “silver bullet” for application development. It is quite amazing how far the limits have been pushed on the desktop, but even there some solutions are better handled as a native application. Why would this not also be true for a mobile device?

The future is bright for mobile applications … and you know Mojax will be there helping make it all possible!

It has been a roller-coaster ride these last couple of months. We’ve made some amazing progress on our Mojax platform. I feel confident that we will be releasing Mojax v1.0 sometime during the month of November. Our first release of Mojax will include support for MIDP 2.0 devices as well as Blackberry. A BREW version is extremely close and will be released to the public sometime in December. The Windows Mobile version is delayed until Q1 next year.

New Features

• Numerous Security Enhancements
• Full Support for Modularized Moblets
• Animated GIF Support
• Full Branding Control (Load Screens, Application Icons, etc.)
• Performance Enhancements
• Fine Grained Error Handling
• Added “onTimeout” Event
• Added “onClear” Event
• Added “onReset” Event
• Screen Transitions
• Full Cookie Support
• Configurable Loading Screen
• Enhanced Resource Management
• Access to Containing Screen from Any Child Box
• Ability to Pass Parameters between Moblet Modules
• XML Entity Support

mFoundry has just been selected as one of Bank Technology News’ 10 Tech Companies to Watch. This is a huge honor in the banking space as it is a respected publication. What is even more awesome is that we are the only mobile company on the list!

The real story of Citi Mobile’s launch in April is not in its bill pay or funds transfer features, but how it’s delivered. Citi’s mobile offering is a downloadable mobile application built through a development toolkit from mFoundry that comes from the bank, rather than within the service container of a carrier’s menu. “Citi has taken a longer, harder look at long-term strategy” TowerGroup’s Bob Egan says, “and they’ve made a decision they want to own the infrastructure.” Most of the major m-banking intros in 2007 have centered around the managed services platform offering of Firethorn Holdings, an Atlanta developer that stoked regional deals with BancorpSouth, Regions, Wachovia and SunTrust Banks with an exclusive platform arrangement with AT&T, the wireless carrier with the largest subscriber base.

But mFoundry, with the Citi Mobile experience as the driver, may be better positioned to land forthcoming deals with national institutions focusing on adaptability for long-term shakeout in the mobile banking space. How will payments be handled? Will the database players shake the business model at some point?

mFoundry’s Spotlight provides control of the endpoint look-and-feel, adaptability to a bank’s online authentication, and has a head start in other key payments areas: it is already developing an integrated contactless payments platform with ViVOtech and has a formal relationship with First Data to handle money movement. “I believe you have to have an open ecosystem,” says mFoundry CEO and co-founder Drew Sievers. Some have likened the mFoundry/Firethorn rivalry as a replay of the Corillian/Digital Insight battle: DI with its plug-n-play templates, and Corillian’s customizable platform that large banks coveted. While the future is far from clear on mobile banking, any future will have to include the ability for a mobile solution to work within the lifetime value cycle of a customer. That’s going to take a major shift in the relationship with telcos. “Banks are moving to reengineer a lot of their architecture for things like SOA,” he says. “They’re not going to want to spend the equivalent of $1,000 a user to get mobile banking people developed as another delivery channel.” - GF

Technorati Tags: Banking, Business, mFoundry, mobile, moblet, mojax, Spotlight

I am pleased to announce that John Muchow has just joined the Mojax team! John is the author of Core J2ME and the blogger behind 360Mobile. John will be assuming the role of managing the Mojax developer community and in this role will provide Mojax developers with the resources and tools to quickly get up and running with Mojax. With John’s help, we hope to create a first class developer community around the Mojax platform … welcome John!

Technorati Tags: mojax

Last week mFoundry announced that Spotlight, which runs on Mojax, would support the iPhone. The question of how we would enable a Mojax Moblet to run on an iPhone has been a discussion topic around the expresso machine for several months. Mojax as a language is comprised of an XML based markup, CSS, Javascript, and a “Mobile” object model. By design, there is substantial overlap between the Mojax language and standard AJAX. As a result, the task of supporting iPhone will be the task of “transcoding” Mojax AJAX into standard AJAX.

Many approaches to transcoding Mojax were considered, but at the end of the day we decided that we would use OpenLaszlo as the target for the transcoder instead of directly transcoding MJX files into DHTML. I could list many reasons why OpenLaszlo is the better method of generating DHTML, but at the end of the day it came down to the fact that we all really hate working with HTML. OpenLaszlo’s language constructs and object model is pretty close to our own which will make the task of transcoding much simpler. An additional benefit to creating an OpenLaszlo transcoder is the fact that the Moblet, once transcoded, could also run as a Flash application.

It should be noted that by having a DHTML/AJAX transcoder for your Moblet also means that, in addition to running on an iPhone, your Moblets could also:

• Run within an iFrame on your website
• Run as a Gadget on your iGoogle home page
• Run as a portlet in Netvibes
• Run as a Widget on your Mac

Pretty cool stuff!

Technorati Tags: AJAX, mFoundry, mobile, mojax, OpenLaszlo, transcoding

Sorry for “going dark” these last few days. We have been working to finalize the feature list for the Mojax 1.0 Release. We are down to about 38 known issues and have recently brought on additional resources to help us with device testing.

Over the next four weeks I will be posting updates on our progress and device coverage. By the end of that time we should begin to have a good understanding of when we will be able to launch Mojax.

Mojax will be initially launched as a public beta that will be hosted by us and will continue to be free to use. I suspect we will keep the product in public beta until the Windows Mobile and BREW ports are finalized.

… which brings me to the next update … Craig has been able to get an alpha version of Mojax running natively on .Net CF devices. Performance is pretty good. There are only some small issues to resolve, but progress is excellent and I expect we will be providing access to a Windows Mobile version of Mojax within the next month and a half.

That’s all for now … have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Technorati Tags: Business, mFoundry, mobile, moblet, mojax

John Muchow, author of Core J2ME and blogger recently interviewed me about Mojax and mFoundry. We explored how Mojax came to be, the origins of mFoundry, and a myriad of personal factoids that were fun to compile.

I was originally drawn to mobile because it was a highly personalize experience that, with the right software, could greatly impact our daily lifestyle and the way we interact with the world. But the promise is still far from a reality … Device browsers are deficient, devices are inconsistent, standards are rarely observed, performance is unpredictable, operators discourage innovation, application development is cumbersome, SMS is expensive … DOING ANYTHING FOR MOBILE IS FRUSTRATING, DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE … after three years of dealing with all these challenges; I can tell you that I am am ready to do something about it. It is time for a technology that doesn’t add to the problem but instead starts to make a difference. I want Mojax to be that difference.

To that end I make the following promises …

Mojax Will Be Free to Use
Some of the most innovative ideas will come from individual engineers and small companies that cannot afford another technology investment. We will never charge for the use of Mojax. Instead we will provide value added services around Mojax … all of which will be entirely optional.

Mojax Will Be Pervasive
Mojax will run on all mobile device platforms. Before the end of this year you will already see support for J2ME, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, BREW, and WIPI; with support for a Native Symbian and Palm runtime sometime next year. You will never have to know *ANYTHING* about individual devices, you will never have to “port” your application or test on every device you want to run on … its the closest thing to “write once, run everywhere” you will likely ever get.

Mojax Will Download OTA
The Mojax runtimes are extremely small and are designed to be downloaded “Over the Air” (OTA). These runtimes will not need to be pre-installed by Operators or Device Manufacturers.

Mojax Will Always Be About the Mobile Device
I have no desire to see Mojax running on set-top boxes, toasters, desktops, or any appliance for that matter that is not a mobile device. Mojax will be highly specialize for mobile devices and will always strive to expose all aspects and features of the mobile device to the moblet developer.

Mojax Applications Will Be Easy to Develop
No one has the time to learn yet another development language and methodology. Mojax will leverage all the standards and concepts that have become standard in the Web development world (e.g. Javascript, CSS, XML, XPath).

Mojax Applications Will Be Easy to Deploy
If you have a Web Server, you will have everything you need to deploy a Mojax application.

Mojax Will Be Extensible by 3rd Parties
Mojax was built from the ground up to support plugins (or components as we call them). This extensibility will be available to more advanced developers that want to incorporate specific mobile technologies into Mojax.

Mojax Will Be Business Friendly
For as many problems as there are with mobile, there are just as many business models. “On-Deck”, “Off-Deck”, Ad-Funded, Subscriptions, One-time-fees, and the list goes on … Mojax will be licensed in such a way as to not preclude any business model. If you can find a way to make money off of your Moblet … GO FOR IT!

Technorati Tags: mFoundry, mobile, mojax, Business

W00t! … finally the press release is out! We’ve just inked a deal with Sprint to provide their users with the ability to access their financial institutions using their Java enabled mobile devices. Branded “Spotlight”, our mobile banking solution has got all the bells and whistles. Using this application you will be able to not only check your balance, but also quickly pay bills, transfer money between accounts, pay off your credit card, and more! I can’t begin to tell you how handy this little moblet will be!

Technorati Tags: Banking, j2me, mFoundry, mworks

While technically only 15hrs later, I am going to call it a night. The Jaiku app is looking pretty sexy. I’ve posted all my notes and progress so far in the mojax Wiki

Cheers,
Rodney

Technorati Tags: AJAX, j2me, mashup, mFoundry, mobile, moblet, mojax

For anyone that is interested I am starting to build a Jaiku Moblet using mojax. To demonstrate how easy it is to develop in mojax I will be cranking this puppy out in less than 24 hours. If you are interested in following along I will be posting my progress as I go on my Jaiku presence stream. Feel free to follow along!

I am very happy to announce that Mojax Beta 11 has been released and it is FULL of new features, performance enhancements, stability enhancements and support for several new devices (including Blackberry). For the ugly details, take a look at the release notes on the mojax site. Over the next week I will be writing about many of the new features in more detail!

We are running extremely well on a lot of devices now. Over the next week I will also be updating the Wiki with a new Device Support list. The target families that have been tested so far are: Sony Ericssons, Nokia S60v3, KRAZR, RAZR, Samsung SGH-D Series Devices, Sanyo MM Devices, and Blackberry.

Thanks for everyone’s help. The feedback has been great. Keep it coming!

Cheers,
Rodney