MobUser

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