MobUser

We are kicking ass and taking numbers.  BTN (www.banktechnews.com) has named us top technology company to watch for the second year running … and this time we made the top of the list.  Its an honor to make the list and we are absolutely stoked!

mFoundry has been selected as one of the Fierce Wireless “Fierce 15″ of 2008. The editors review hundreds of companies and look for leaders and innovators in the field.

Why it’s fierce: mFoundry is winning over the mobile banking market one financial institution at a time: Last year it worked with Citibank to take its services to the mobile platform and this year will bring mFoundry’s total up to 15 or 20 banks. It’s no wonder mFoundry is becoming the platform for mobile banking: Motorola and PayPal are among its investors. The startup’s partnership with PayPal puts it in position to take on the peer-to-peer money transfer market in the U.S. with carrier partners like Sprint Nextel. mFoundry is also one of the few companies in the mobile financial services sector to offer up a software development kit (SDK) for developers looking to leverage its platform.

What to look for: National Cash Registers (NCR) is another key investor for mFoundry-and one that signals the next big market for the startup: near field communications. NCR will be instrumental in helping mFoundry break into the near field communications game because NCR is one of the biggest hardware providers for point-of-sale terminals. mFoundry, however, has no plans to go for an initial public offering, but expect any company looking to compete with Qualcomm, which recently acquired mFoundry competitor Firethorn, to snap up mFoundry.

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!

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

Well, its been a year in the making, but I am happy to report that the Citi Mobile application has finally launched. Citi was the first step in a larger mFoundry strategy to provide Financial Institutions with a cost effective way to extend their web-based banking services to the mobile device that was both feature rich and easy to use. Powered by mWorks, the Citi Mobile application is extremely user-friendly and enables you to do most online banking tasks from virtually any device sold in the United States.

Congratz to the mFoundry crew that pulled this together! In particular, kudo’s to Bjorn Hildahl and Pat Middleton for going above and beyond the call of duty. This is a big day for mFoundry!

Shortly, there will be a video of the application posted at PRNewsWire (http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/citimobile/27674/).

Technorati Tags: mFoundry, mobile, mworks, Banking

On Jan 1 2007 mFoundry will officially be three years old. I am amazed at how quickly 2006 has come and gone. It seems like only yesterday that we were just a bunch of guys that got together on Thursday nights for beer and pizza.

2006 was a pivotal year for mFoundry. Looking back on 2006 I can see how much we all accomplished and learned. Going into 2006, mFoundry struggled to find the right business application for its technology. mWorks, our flagship product, was a mature platform upon which mobile applications were being quickly and cost-effectively developed and deployed across a broad range of J2ME and BREW devices. However, we realized early on that without a strong business vertical or “killer-app” to put the platform into context, it would be difficult to build a sustainable business around just the mWorks platform itself.

The following is an account of what strategies and markets we went after and their results …

“Premium” Mobile Application Revenues Sucked
The biggest disappointment of 2006 were Sold-to-Consumer or “Premium” mobile applications. Luckily, we discovered early in the year, that premium mobile content was a terrible business for anyone except the Carrier. Carriers took a hefty chunk of the revenue and the rest was split between us and the content owner. Consumer adoption of a premium application was heavily dependent on promotion by Carriers as well as by the Content providers. Carriers would not promote to the degree necessary to generate an interesting amount of adoption; and in the case of the Content providers, the Mobile application was a small part of their overall service and were not motivated enough to promote it heavily either.

None of us at mFoundry much cared for the concept of “Premium” applications but saw that it was the only way to get into the carriers and so did what was necessary. The one positive result from our escapades in “Premium” Mobile Applications was that we were able to create some lasting relationships with carriers and demonstrate to the world that mWorks was a real solution that worked … and worked well.

Free “Ad-Based” Mobile Applications Show Promise
Much later in the year, we created a very cool Moblet for Sprint called the “Sprint Mobile News Stand”. It is distributed for Free and promoted by the Carrier heavily. It contains some advertising and some sponsored content. Adoption of the Free content was SIGNIFICANTLY higher than any of the premium applications (not surprisingly) and the retention was better as well. It is a little early to tell … but this continues to be an area of interest to me and I look forward to seeing more Ad-Based/Free mobile applications in the future. In fact, I have created a small company called CellShift to explore how social networking, the Web, and mobile could be combined to create a compelling Free-To-Consumer/Ad-Based business.

Mobile Applications for Work Groups are a Proven Success
Some might rather refer to Mobile Applications for Work Groups as Mobile Application for the Enterprise, but I disagree. As it relates to a Business, most useful mobile applications enable smaller work groups rather than entire enterprises. mWorks is ideally suited to enabling specific tasks that are better served in the field where a laptop is impractical to too expensive. In 2006 we created some compelling mobile solutions for Work Groups that save their companies millions of dollars in costs that were eliminated as a result of the moblet. Success in this area has spurred other companies to license mWorks directly and build solutions for themselves. Mobile solutions for Work Groups is uniquely suited to mWorks because it can be licensed very cheaply and need not have massive adoption to be financially interesting to mFoundry.

Banking, Banking, Banking
In early 2006 Citi selected mWorks as the platform for their mobile banking product. This opportunity taught us much about the mobile banking space and by the end of 2006 we had a fully crafted offering called mBanking that we are now actively selling. mBanking will likely become the most significant solution developed using mWorks. Point in fact, it has opened opportunities and partnerships that would not have been possible had we been only a platform company. I can’t disclose the specifics of these partnership at this time but we will be making several announcements early this year.

mojax, The Next Generation
As compelling as mWorks is, I wanted to do more with mobile. As early as November 2005 I started to design a new platform called mojax. mojax is one of the worlds first Mobile AJAX Application Frameworks. Unlike traditional AJAX Web Frameworks, mojax Moblets do not run within a browser and are not subject to the availability and quality of a network connection. Also, unlike a web application running on a mobile device, a mojax moblet has access to lower level device features such as Camera API, Push Messaging, Bluetooth, Location Services, Contacts and more. Unlike mWorks, mojax is an extremely open system that leverages existing open standards such as XML, CSS, and Javascript to enable developers to create applications with even greater functionality that before but still maintain all the benefits of mWorks (e.g. Device agnostic, Easy to develop, and extremely cost effective to deploy). Mojax is nearing the end of its beta phase and we should start to see deployments of mojax as soon as Q1 of this year.

As you can see it really has been an exciting year. I can’t begin to imagine what 2007 holds in store for us. Best wishes to everyone and to all a prosperous New Year!

- Rodney Aiglstorfer

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

I was happy to see that I made the 2006 JavaOne Conference Rock Stars list for my presentation “Troubleshooting Java ME Technology: Tips from the Pros“. It is an honor to be included in a list of speakers like Josh Bloch, from Google, who did an excellent session titled “Effective Java Reloaded” and Dion Almaer, founder of Ajaxian who did a really nice Introduction to AJAX.