MobUser

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