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!

• 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!

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.

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!

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!