Microsoft to dominate mobile? They do not think so

I was looking at an article today titled "Microsoft sees fast growth in Windows phones: report" and I started to wonder a bit about "fast growth" and control of the market by Microsoft.

Some people - just the ones that do not know/understand mobile ;-) - are telling me that Microsoft will dominate this market as they dominated the PC market (BTW, I just bought the third Mac laptop for my employees because they asked for it and I could not find one single reason to say no...).

I do not think Microsoft will dominate mobile, sorry. They do not think it either...

Check the numbers: they had 6M devices last year with Windows Mobile. They plan to grow 100% this year. It looks like a big number... That's 12M devices. Maybe they will do 100% next year and the following one. That's 48M devices at the end of 2008. Wow.

In Q3 of this year, there were 245M phones shipped worldwide. We'll have 1B (one billion) phones shipped in 2006, still growing in the next two years.

If Microsoft is right and they make their numbers, they will have about a whopping 3% of the mobile market by the end of 2008. Apple is at 7% today on the PC market... Is Apple dominating the PC market??

Mobile TV and the inevitable lack of bandwidth

As you might remember, I am now a fan of mobile TV. No, I do not believe I will spend hours watching TV on my phone, but I feel I occasionally can spend few minutes watching something I taped before on my TiVo (if it is free). My SlingBox has been helpful for my father too, when we were visiting my younger brother in Washington DC and he could watch live soccer while I was driving from the airport (until my daughter at home started watching Sesame Street, but that's a different story...).

Two stories crossed my path today. The first one: "Video-hungry users could push Net to brink: Nortel". The second one: "TV on Mobile Phones: Heat or Hype?". They made me think (out loud, as usual).

If the net, that has been around for ages, cannot support the YouTube crowd, what makes we think Mobile TV will be different? The bandwidth is scarce... So scarce that, as soon as four people in my network cell have a SlingPlayer going on their mobile phone, the data traffic collapses (and I have EVDO). Unfortunately, the success of mobile TV might simply kill it. And I do not think networks will have more bandwidth that fast. That puts me in the Hype category, for now... I am grateful to be in the low bandwidth world of push email and synchronization ;-)

Please, do not get a SlingBox and, mostly, try to stay away from my network cell. I want to be the only one watching TV on my mobile phone, as long as I can. Thank you.

I want to thank my mom again (but I need you this time)

Ok, you win something and you get greedy. It happens. I want to win the World Cup again, for example, but I have to wait...
I just found out my blog has been nominated in the top 50 by Fierce Wireless "based on editorial quality, site usability and penetration among wireless industry executives". Yeah, right.
Anyway, thanks for reading this. If you want to vote for this blog you can click on the icon on the right, chose "Mobile Open Source" and do your math (that is quite funny, BTW). I do not think the rules allow me to give away t-shirts to everybody voting for me, sorry. But I am Italian, therefore flexible by nature :-))

I want to thank my mom...

Funambol won big at the Mobile Star Awards this week. We won Gold Star (that's the #1 prize ;-) for both our consumer email and our PIM solution. That's very nice and much appreciated. Thanks to all the people that voted for us. And all the crazy ones out there that voted for me and made me a Bright visionary in consumer mobile software. You should not have but I will definitely take it. To show my appreciation, I will spare you the acceptance speech :-)

MySQL, dual licensing and Red Hat

As you might have noticed, MySQL today announced a new offering. In a nutshell, they now have a Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition. The first is free and has external contributions. The second is something you pay for and fully owned by MySQL. That looks a lot like Red Hat, but - in reality - it is still really different. I have been exchanging emails with Marten in the last few days about the topic and I am fully convinced this is a smart move. It actually creates a model which is an improvement over Red Hat, in my opinion.

On the surface, it looks like MySQL is moving into the Red Hat model. The difference is that the source of Red Hat is Linux. They do not control it. There is nothing they can do about it. They then take it and wrap it around as Red Hat Enterprise. It is still GPL (they have no chances, they must release it as GPL, they do not own the IP of Linux) and people can take it even for free and build an identical product (see Centos). The only way Red Hat can defend itself is by enforcing its copyright on the Red Hat logo (and they are really aggressive on it, rightly so). Pretty weak but it seems to be working well for them - for now.

In July, I wrote a post about my way of doing dual licensing. That is working nicely for Funambol, with our Community Edition and our Carrier Edition. Nice separation of church and state. Everybody is happy.

MySQL is doing something similar. MySQL controls and owns its code. They are now opening the Community Edition to the world. They will still control that, though. And decide what goes into the Enterprise edition. That is the product they will sell. They can license it, not just get subscription for it. This can still generate revenues of a different scale (I am still a fan of software licensing and its margins, sorry), way beyond Red Hat (which is a nice business, do not get me wrong). It is a defensible strategy with full control of their future (they can change it when and if they want). The risk is that the move might screw up their ability to do dual licensing, if they are not careful. They won't control the full IP anymore on the Community Edition, so they will have to cherry pick for the Enterprise Edition (or buy out developers, but it did not work out that well with InnoDB...). It is called tight-rope walking (or funambulism), but Marten and Zach are two of the smartest people in the open source world and I know they will make it happen, no matter what.

Go dual licensing. Go MySQL. We just want to see you public before the end of 2007 ;-)

The Holy Grail of Synchronization

Engtech has written a very popular post on his blog, called The Holy Grail of Synchronization: How to synchronize Microsoft Outlook (multiple locations), Google Calendar, Gmail, iPod, and mobile phone with Funambol / ScheduleWorld. If you are using Funambol - or thinking about using Funambol - I would definitely recommend it.

 

What's on my Treo 650

One of Russ best post I remember was his "What's on my Nokia". I think I got more applications to download for my Nokia from that post than from any possible visit to any off-deck site or any Google search.

After so many years spent using a Palm OS, I am about to give up my Treo 650 for good. At Funambol, I had to make the sad choice to bet on different operating systems (as did PalmSource, now moving into my own space with Access Linux Platform --> that's mobile open source ;-) In all these years, I collected a number of applications. I used some for few days and a small subset every day. Those few represent for me the minimum toolkit for anybody using a Palm OS device. Here they are.

1. A PIM sync client
First of all, a smartphone without PIM sync is useless. You need your contacts, calendar, task and notes from your standard email reader (mine is Outlook). There are many choices in this space. First of all, you can sync over cable or bluetooth. That's suboptimal if you have a Treo, but the only choice if you have an old PDA (what for? Get a smartphone! ;-). I have been using Chapura PocketMirror Professional and it never let me down. I use subfolders in Outlook to separate contacts and it worked great on that. If you want over-the-air (OTA) sync, SyncML is your best choice. I know I am biased. You should use the Funambol free portal and a SyncML client. There are many out there. Beside ours, I would recommend the Synthesis SyncML Palm Client.

2. A mobile email client
Once you have synched your address book, you are ready to send emails. As I wrote before, do not attempt to use mobile email without an address book or you will give up fast. Once again, there are many email clients for Palm. Some feel Versamail (which is usually preinstalled) is good enough. I don't. SnapperMail does it for me. I like how you can configure how to get mail. When I am in the US and I have a flat data plan, I do it every 20 mins and I download the entire message (but no attachments). When I am in Europe, I do it manually, I download just 12k and I set "disconnect afterwards". I save money. I like the ability to clean up my folder at night, since my email would fill up my Treo in three days. IMAP support is nice and support for multiple accounts is key for me.

3. A directory assistant
I have to thank Matt for this, since I can't live without this application. Alone, it gives me a reason to defend my Treo with my wife (who is always about to throw it in the toilet, since it takes a bit too much of my attention). Directory Assistant is a beautiful tool, that allows you to search for a restaurant or a shop (or even one of your friends, since it searches for Residential numbers as well), get the result via the web (fast), call with one click and reserve your table or get directions. It is a beautiful simple application, which uses data from the Yellow Pages web site. Thanks Rick Whitt for saving my day many times.

4. A converter
Ok, this might look a bit too high in the list, but I am a European and I will never ever get used to inches and feet, or fluid ounces. Who is the genius that invented the US standards? How can you create a system where there are a bunch of inches in a feet, a bunch of feet in a yard, a bunch of yards in a mile? None with the same metric? How can you possibly know how long is 3 inches and 5 eights? Sorry for the rant... Kilos, meters and liters are so easy to understand that it kills me on a daily basis (and BTW, zero is freezing, 100 is boiling. It is that simple, I swear). Anyway, I use Matt Marsh's Converter. Easy, simple, free. You can customize it for the units you use more often. This one saved my brain many times, at Home Depot in particular. On a similar note, sometimes I use a stupid app I wrote long time ago, called Spell It!, which converts a word to its NATO alphabet representation. That is: Fabrizio to foxtrot-alfa-bravo-... If you have my first and last name and live in the US, you might see why it could be helpful, in particular opening accounts on the phone.

5. A mobile phone calls redirector
Most likely another one that would not make the top list for many normal people. But I do not like to speak on my cell phone when I am home or in the office. I have a normal phone there (cordless, btw). The quality of the line is much better and it does not get hot while I talk. I use Call Director because you can set phone numbers (such as Home and Office) and it gets activated automatically when you plug your Treo. I come back home, plug the Treo and my mobile calls are redirected to my home phone. I unplug it to go out and my mobile calls are back on my mobile. You can even set times for office vs. home vs. anything else. When I am flying outside the US, I forward it to my SkypeIn. I know, I am weird.

6. An instant messaging client
I know, this should be much higher in the list but I do not use it as often as the converter... VeriChat is a fantastic tool. It supports Yahoo!, ICQ, MSN & AOL chat (I am on YM). It works like a charm. It allows you to transfer files (I used to send pictures taken on the phone in real time). It is full of Bots, small apps that can get interesting data for you, like weather forecast, stocks and so on. What I call mobile widgets. If I could choose, I would not put them inside an IM client, but on the top menu of my device. However, the idea is the same and it works. Highly recommended.

7. A tool to receive up-to-date sport results
If you do not like soccer, you can substitute it with baseball or whatever sport you like. There are few important things in life: sport is one of them. When four years ago I had to choose the first application to use the Funambol server on, I chose the World Cup (there is only one, it is soccer, it is the most viewed event in history, stop asking "of what?"). We had 20,000 downloads in two weeks. Not because I wrote the Palm client, but because the sync capability was a killer. This year (man, what a year!!!) we left someone else write it and Tiny Stocks got money from Palm to do it. Football 2006 (I guess they could not say "World Cup" or FIFA would have called them ;-) was just perfect. Over-the-air updates. Dynamic charts. I would love to have the same for the Italian league, but this year I am on soccer sabbatical. Some biased judge took soccer away from me. I am going to watch the World Cup games over and over, for 12 months. No soccer for me. Just Formula 1 and MotoGP.

8. Some games
I never have time to play games because I am a CEO of a startup and I work very hard (yeah, right). However, sometimes during my long travels for work (yeah, right) I have some spare time and I fill a very limited amount of minutes with games. I am not big on mobile games (this is true) because I feel the limitation of the keyboard and the screen. However, there are some classics that I always have on my Palm, to kill the minutes before boarding on a plane. Minesweeper, tetris, chess, backgammon, pac-man and galaga make my short list. If I just could have some more spare time... Yeah, right.

9. Some random geeky tools
There are some tools on Palm I could not live without. One is FileZ, an open source application to manage files and databases on your Palm. It is a must, if you know what you are trying to accomplish. If you don't, just do not try or you are going to screw up your Palm forever. Another must for me (I would say until I hired a Director Operations) was TuSSH, an SSH client. I was able to jump on any of our machines from my Treo and fix stuff. Not something you do every day but you are really thankful that moment when you really need it (and again, your wife will be chasing you trying to throw the damn thing in the toilet).

10. A way to use your phone as a modem
This should be very easy to do on a smartphone. It has bluetooth, so does your computer. It connects to the Internet, so you would think you can do it easily from your computer, pairing the two. Well, it ain't easy. But you can do it. I spent a few hours to find the right combination to use my Treo with Tmobile (in the US) as a modem for my laptop. I could not find anything online but I managed to make it work (btw, the phone number to dial is *99***1#) and I use my 4.99/month Tzone to download email on my laptop with the phone in my pocket (magic!). If you do not want to spend your life trying the right combination, I suggest PdaNet. No effort, it works really well. Your mobile operator might not like it, but do you really care?

That's it folks. I probably tried one hundred more but they did not manage to stick around and I cannot find them on my Palm anymore. There is usually a reason for that. As there is a reason for me letting Palm OS go. It breaks my heart, but when Palm runs Windows Mobile, Macs have Intel chips and Microsoft shares its source, you have to accept the world is changing and you should not look behind.

Mobile Messaging Webinar tomorrow

I am speaking at a mobile messaging webinar tomorrow (Oct 4th at 8:30 am Pacific).

The topic is quite interesting (if you are a geek :-) : "LEMONADE and SyncML: Key Standards for Mobile Messaging".

Questions Addressed by This Webinar Include:

 - What are LEMONADE and SyncML?
 - Who will use mobile messaging based on these protocols?
 - What are the advantages and disadvantages of the technologies vs. RIM and Windows Mobile?

It is FREE as in beer. So... you should not miss it.

Release by aging

After a good seven months as a beta, Funambol v3 finally last week became General Availability. It is a nice milestone for Funambol and we are all very proud of it. Now the question: isn't that too long? Why did it take seven months?

That's a good question, thanks for asking ;-) The answer lies with the open source nature of our core code.

If you are a proprietary old boring company, you would have a product in beta, give it to a few customers who will give you a very limited feedback (close to zero), then a month later your marketing folks will force you to slap a GA tag on it and you will be shipping and praying your real customers will not find too many bugs. Inevitably - if you ever get customers - they will find a ton of bugs, you will scramble to build version x.z.1 and .2 and .3 and so on, until every customer will be happy (or gone for good). That will take you months and months, while you will not be able to build your next release and your product roadmap will keep slipping.

Open source is different. You throw the code out and you wait for feedback. You get a ton of feedback, sometimes beyond your ability to handle it. Thankfully, many of your beta testers fix the bugs they find themselves (that would be nice, Mr. Proprietary Company, uh?). You are able to release only when the community will stop finding and fixing bugs. There is no marketing GA tag in open source. It is community driven.

I call it release by aging: you leave the product out until it is mature. You cannot force it. It happens by itself. One day you discover that the amount of P1 bugs is dying off, because your community and your internal QA are not finding any. They are all gone, for good. And your customers are still there because they were part of the process.

For Funambol v3, we had over 300,000 downloads between the beta and the GA. That's a heck of a beta testing group. Maybe Microsoft can compete (maybe). Nobody else get close. Nobody else will ever have a product with the same quality that open source can provide. Period. It is the people factor. We are all working together and, as a community, we represent more QA people than any proprietary company can ever dream of. In mobile, that means we can test every phone on the planet (one billion today, going for two billion fast). That we can really address the mass market everybody is talking about. Nobody else can (sorry).

Release by aging. The key for high quality products, happier customers and healthier balance sheets.

Italy

The Mobile Email conference in London has been great. I should have brought the entire company and a chunk of our 600k downloads there. Lots to learn. I will post about it later.

I landed in Italy last night. I am speaking at "Congresso AICA 2006" today. Very interesting event (for Italian people only...) where we will talk about research, being competitive in the market and high tech. They even have a track on open source ("risk and opportunities of open source"), which tells me something. The Italian Minister of Innovation will be there, so I better put on a tie for once :-)

London

I am flying to old Europe tonight. I will be speaking at the Informa Telecoms & Media Mobile E-mail 2006 in London on Wednesday at 14:45 (going with the European standard here ;-)

The topic is "Responding to Consumers Anxieties and Requirements in Order to Accelerate Mass Market Adoption". Are consumers really anxious about having mobile email on their devices?? I do not think so... I believe they are anxiously waiting for an easy-to-use low-cost technology... Anyway, I guess we'll find it out soon.

As usual, if you live and/or are around London, just give me a buzz.

HPL version 1.0 is here

A month ago, I proposed a new license, called the Honest Public License (HPL). It is GPL v2 with an additional paragraph, clarifying that distribution of software as a service is exactly the same as distribution of software in a floppy. Therefore, GPL applies also when the software is used to provide a service to the public.

I left the license out for review for a month. I received a ton of comments on this blog and in many blogs and articles around the net. Evidently, I touched a nerve ;-) The feedback has been universally positive (and I have to admit I have been quite surprised). The only real negative comment I heard has been "yet another license". It is true, it is yet another license. But it changes the most important element of computing that was not covered in GPL, because it was written in 1991 when software was distributed in floppies and nobody knew what SaaS meant. For everything else, GPL is just fine. SaaS is the future of computing: HPL is just another incredibly important license ;-)

Anyway, here you find HPL 1.0 and here you find the diff between HPL and GPL v2. As I wrote a month ago, our next step is to have HPL disappear within GPL v3. That process is ongoing and I have no control on, so let's wait and see.

Regarding Funambol, we have decided to leave the clients on GPL v2 (no reason to change them to HPL, since there is no SaaS on clients). HPL will clearly end up in the incompatibility list of GPL, as AGPL before it (a license that tried to fix the same issue, but in a pretty "strong" way), so we would prefer people to be able to link clients based on GPL code. On the server side, to build SyncSources, you will have to use HPL. HPL affects every SyncSource, but it does not affect the product you are connecting the SyncSource to (if you talk to it with a separate protocol). Therefore, the impact should be minimal. Because of dual licensing, Funambol could also grant a special waiver for open source projects that cannot switch the SyncSource to HPL. Just give us a buzz. More to come in the new site after the launch of v 3.0 GA (very soon!).

I want to thank Patrick, Markus, Tomasz and Kari for the precious help in the review process. I just do not know what I would do without a community of people working on the project (wait, I know, I would be doing something else like opening a restaurant in Maui, probably called Funambol Italian Restaurant. THAT would be fun :-)

CTIA - Los Angeles

For those that might be going there, I am flying tomorrow to CTIA in Los Angeles. I will be speaking at the SmartPhone Summit on Monday at 4 pm, track Mobile Messaging and Gaming. I'll be around on Tuesday, flying back on Tuesday night. My schedule is pretty much overbooked, but if you are around and you want to say hi, just drop me a note and I'll find some time. See you in the city of angels.

The road to push email goes through address book sync

It is funny how small things sometimes prevent big changes from happening. There is one that prevents the potential explosion of push email on mobile devices: the lack of address book synchronization.

If you have a cell phone, you have received and sent at least a message in your life. A short text message or SMS, but still a message. You are ready for push email. Today. You are ready to receive messages a bit longer pushed to your device and to send short messages (no, I am not a believer of a long messages typed with a keyboard installed on every phone on the planet, sorry. I like dumb phones because they look cooler and - guess what - the phone is mostly a fashion item, trust an Italian on that).

When you send a SMS today, you send it to a phone number. That's what you have in your phone address book today.

If you want to send an email, you have to send it to an email address. Would you type myfirstname.mylastname@funambol.com on your cell phone? No. Believe someone with a long first name and last name... You will not do it.

So... you will not use push email unless you have my email address on your phone. Since you are not going to type it, it must get on your phone from somewhere else (your Outlook, your Yahoo address book, your Skype address book and so on). You need address book synchronization, possibly pushed on your device when something changes.

Without address book sync, there is no push email. It is a small thing, but it is small blocking thing.

Thankfully, SyncML solves that, if paired with the right solution on the server side that actually works with your phone (warning: small advertisement here ;-)

The road to push email goes through address book sync.

The Community Code Sniper Program

Jason, our smart and creative Community Manager, just launched a new great program, called Community Code Sniper.

The idea is pretty simple: we asked the community which clients or connectors they wanted with a survey, then we looked at our resources and we realized we could do only some internally. Others would be left out waiting for us to get more resources. Or we could ask the community to contribute to the effort. The tightrope walker in us suggested we should contribute back with cash, giving back to the community something we received because of them (thanks). All the code developed with the bounties will go back in open source for everyone to share, which will be very cool.

Some people picked up the news, and I really liked Dana blog on ZDNet (in particular, because Funambol comes before Red Hat :-)

Anyway, this is a great opportunity for all the people out there that are sending us resumes: if you think you are good, just prove it. You will even make money. And it will be fun. Having your address book synched between your Nokia or RAZR phone, your iPod, your Gmail or Yahoo address, Skype will be very interesting for millions of people (not just you). If you have a Mac, just take our client API and build an iSync plug-in, so we finally can sync our cell phones over-the-air with our Mac (and yes, I believe Steve Jobs will announce the iPod phone on Tuesday...).

 

(yep, I know, we are having fun at Funambol... "Code Sniper"... What a name... It shows we have a new VP Marketing :-))

Off topic On vacation

I am writing this post from beautiful Maui, Hawaii. Mobile and Open Source are not really on my radar, these days... I am just enjoying the beaches and the great people. Vacation is the only thing I care about...

When it comes to vacation, I am in an interesting position: I run a company with a third of the people in Silicon Valley and two thirds in old Europe. That's the two extremes... 

For those not living in the USA, you would be surprised to know that people joining a company here normally get two (2) weeks of vacation a year. For a European moving to Silicon Valley, it is a shock. You have to take the two weeks to visit home for Christmas and then you have the other 50 weeks ahead of you... It is even more shocking that paying for receiving calls or SMS on a mobile phone, from someone who dialed the wrong number. American employers - I believe - are convinced that having you work for 50 weeks in a row keeps productivity high. What US employees do is working for two/three years in a company, then take two months off to recharge. They even have a word ("burnout") to describe how you can get exhausted, physically and emotionally. It happens to everybody in Silicon Valley, working for a startup. It is just stupid: the productivity of your employees is 100% the first six months, then goes to 70% the second year, then 40% the third. What's the benefit of having employees with low productivity??

In Europe, I never understood how people could take four weeks of vacation in a row without totally destroying what they did before. If you work for a startup, you come back after a month and the company is totally different ;-) It is just insane, from an employer standpoint. If I am out of the office for more than a week, when I get back I feel the stress of the work which piled up...

"In medio stat virtus" said the Latin: I believe you should take a week off every quarter. You actually must take a week off every quarter. I kinda enforce that on our tightrope walkers (and my wife enforces it on me...). Funambol gives four weeks of vacation to every employee, which is unheard off in the Valley... For me, it is just necessary to keep productivity levels at 100% all the time (and walk in an office where people are in a good mood most of the time, remembering that Funambol starts with Fun). I might be someone who generally does not like to swim in the mainstream (is snorkeling the mainstream?) but I am convinced to be right - at least on this one.

Now let me go back to vacation :-)

Italy Wins World Cup Of Programming

Today I received a link to an article describing how Italy won the World Cup of Programming. I am not surprised, but I am certainly very glad :-) Maybe I will not be the only one in the world saying that "Italians do IT better". By the way, the t-shirt is about ready, if you want one just let me know. You just have to prove me to have Italian heritage and be somehow related to Information Technology...

Got DSL?

An update for all the people that were so kind to share my pain about my DSL: it took me exactly 26 days, but I finally have DSL at home. It does not download big files (not sure why) and they have been charging me for the service for the entire month, but I am so happy to be back in the broadband world ;-)

Mobile Ajax?

For my entire life, the word Ajax meant for me either a cleaning product my mom used or a pretty good soccer team in the Netherlands. Nowadays, it means Asynchronous Javascript and XML.

As Wikipedia would describe it: "intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability".

This week I hosted a panel at LinuxWorld, called "Got mobile?" and I invited Scott Dietzen, the CTO of Zimbra (and formerly of BEA). Zimbra is the poster child of Ajax and Web 2.0. Scott is the best person on the planet to talk about it.

When I was writing alpha Java code at HP Labs in 1995, I thought Java was going to be the language to make the browser more interactive, going beyond the concept of hypertext navigation. It did not happen, partially because Microsoft killed it (and Netscape) and partially because Sun never made true the statement "write once, run everywhere".

Many years later, DHTML and Ajax might be the way to make it happen. I still have doubts it make sense, because with Ajax you destroy the concept of hypertext navigation and the Back and Forward buttons on your browser become meaningless. However, the browser is an ubiquitous way to distribute software, people know how to use it... so I guess I can take it the drawbacks (I am a pragmatic individual).

During the panel, I asked the a couple of questions:

 - Where do you see mobile apps go, towards stored application and data with push capabilities or browser-based dynamic apps?
 - How much data would you store on the device? Is storage going to be always cheaper and bandwidth always more expensive or the trend will change?

The questions were targeted at understanding the future paradigm for mobile applications. Will we have stored apps on the device with local data or will we move the browser paradigm on devices?

I wrote time ago that I believe in the concept of mobile widgets. Maybe mobile Ajax could be the tool to make it happen. You could have applications cached on your device, that use asynchronous calls to the web, using the same tools developers utilize on desktops. Opera is already working on it. It might be what kills Java once again...

Scott did not seem much convinced we are close to mobile Ajax. He said we are not even at Web 1.0 on mobile, that the experience sucks when browsing on a device, that the devices are not powerful enough for the Ajax engine... Let alone thinking about Web 2.0 on mobile. However, he seemed quite sure it will be the way to go, eventually.

I have a doubt, which I expressed during the panel. The paradigm of browsing is user-initiated. You open the browser, you click. That works on PCs.  Your monitor is in front of you, turned on. You interact.

On mobile, it is different. In most cases, you just react. The phone is idle, then it rings: you answer. It beeps: you check the SMS your received.

You do not leave your monitor idle, but you do it with a cell phone. Actually, I would guess 90% of the time your phone is with you, it is in stand-by. Apart from people spending 4 hours a day on a train (which are the vast minority of people on the planet, let's not forget it), we use the phone to react to events. That's when it is useful. When I get off my car, I need that information right there. I turn the phone on, I read it, I do something about it (maybe just curse, if Ajax scored against Juventus).

Now, what is different? That's push. Push technology is the key for mobile applications to be useful. You need information to be pushed to you. Not just email. Everything. From weather updates to purchase orders to tickets to news to stock prices and exchange rates. You need push on devices that are mostly idle. You might not need it on your PC (remember Marimba?) because you are in front of it all the time. You react sometimes (e.g. when you get an email) but that's about it. You NEED push for mobile.

Scott, if we can mix together push and Ajax, we might be golden. Local data storage and apps plus a simple async mechanism to get updates, triggered via push. Push Ajax? PAjax? p-Ajax? Pajax? I am ready ;-)

 

 

The Honest Public License

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my way of doing dual licensing, keeping myself honest with the open source community. Today, I would like to turn the table and ask the community to be honest with itself.

The problem I am addressing is the famous "ASP loophole" of the GPL v2. Famous because everybody in the industry talks about it, but nobody has ever done anything about it ;-) The loophole is easy to explain: GPL v2 talks about distribution of software and includes a copyleft clause that triggers when you distribute your code (that is, everything around the code becomes GPL as well). In 1991, we used floppies to distribute software. I still remember booting Linux with the boot and root floppies and getting the network piece of the OS with N1, N2, etc. Nowadays, the world of software is seeing a shift to distributing software as a service (SaaS). I believe 90% of the software will be distributed as SaaS in the coming years.

What's the ASP loophole? Some people interpret distribution of software as a service not as distribution of software (because GPL v2 was created before web services were on the horizon and therefore did not address them in the license). They believe that they can use open source software to offer services to the public, without returning anything to the community. That's taking open source software as free beer. It is just not being honest with the community, to the people who sweat to write the code to see someone running away with it and not contributing anything back. That's totally against the spirit of free software and the GPL. You have the freedom to use it for yourself or internally in your organization, but when you distribute it to the public, you have to give back to the community. It is that simple. That's the spirit of GPL. That's why open source will take over the world of software: it creates great software and phenomenal support.

I have always included distribution of software as a service in my interpretation of the GPL, but I am not a lawyer. And lawyers always find a way around something, if it is not spelled out in a clear way (I am talking about my brother, mostly ;-) Therefore, for my interpretation to be valid, a brief clarification of the GPL v2 is needed.

That's why we created the first draft of the Honest Public License, a slight modification of GPL v2 with just an additional paragraph (here you can see the diff between HPL and GPL v2). We took that paragraph from the latest draft of GPL v3, relaxing it a bit (what's in GPL v3 was taken from AGPL, but I feel it to be too strong, since it is not based on trust -> I trust my community, I do not need to force them to open a service for me to suck up their code). The goal is to make HPL upward compatible with GPL v3 as much as possible (one note: the FSF is thinking about the ASP loophole, not just Affero or me ;-) We sent it to the FSF for review (I would love to keep the preamble, if they allow me to do it), to lots of open source luminaries (that gave it the thumbs up) and intend to submit it to the OSI.

The goal of HPL is to keep the community honest with itself. The use of the name "Honest" is ABSOLUTELY not intended to mean that GPL or any other licenses are dishonest. It is quite the opposite, actually. But some people are taking advantage of a GPL legal loophole and are defeating the spirit of the GPL. HPL is just GPL extended to cover the distribution of software as a service to the public. It does not take away any freedom (i.e. you can use it internally in your corporation), it just covers when someone distributes the code to the public (whether with a floppy or as a service). It is meant to keep people honest with their community.

What motivated this new license now? We have a general availability version of Funambol coming out in September. I already know there are commercial companies that are live with our code and do not return anything. More than two years ago, we did something similar, switching Sync4j from BSD to GPL. There were companies taking our code and running away with it, without returning anything. One even managed to get public with software based on our code, and our community never saw a line of their modifications. Now is no different. On top of this, I followed a discussion on Matt's blog, which made me think that nobody has ever done anything about the loophole because large interests are at stake (I really would love to see the improvements to the Linux file system that have been made, I could use them for my open source project ;-)

In any case, this is a battle for open source, not against anyone in particular. It is a fight to keep the spirit of open source alive, more than anything else. We'll keep the license open for comments for thirty days (please click on comments below to leave your opinion) and then we will finalize it. My hope is that HPL one day will disappear because GPL v3 will supersede it. I plan to work hard to make it happen in the upcoming months.

The mobile time warp

I spoke at a very nice event in San Francisco on Thursday, organized by BAIA at Adobe. The title was "Mobile Platforms: The New Frontier for Software and Services". It was organized as a panel. Great attendance, lots of smart people, phenomenal gelato (you must trust an Italian when you hear good things about pizza and gelato ;-)

We all talked about the new frontier of mobile and - at times - I felt we were trapped in the mobile time warp. It is an interesting phenomenon that I observed in the last six years. Time is frozen in mobile.

We talked about m-commerce and people buying books with their phone, the phone as a wallet and paying for parking with your cell, the third screen and TV coming to your mobile device, the "look at how they use it in Japan" thing. I was on the same panel six years ago and I heard the same exact statements. Maybe the gelato was different, but everything else was exactly the same. That's the mobile time warp.

I tried to get out of the mobile time warp, saying that I feel the phone is mostly a messaging device (that's voice and text), that Japanese people spend four hours a day on a train with their phone in their hands (and I am lucky if I have 30 seconds when I get out of my car before entering the office) and that I need my couch to watch TV, that the phone will be perfect to receive tickets and get you in the opera and the stadium and on the train or even buy coke at the vending machine, because its value is the location and the fact you always carry with you. I even said that any uptake will simply be based on how carriers bill the services (it usually helps to get people out of the warp).

I failed, I got trapped in the mobile time warp. We have heavily marketed this thing for six years and people are still waiting for the dream to materialize. The reality is that the phone will be used by many different people to do million different things (but the killer app will boringly be messaging, anything else will be a niche). The phone won't replace my PC, my TV, and probably not even my iPod nano (which is the perfect specialized device). When will be able to get out of pure marketing, segment the market based on age and location, understand usability patterns (I bet all I had that launching 3G for videocalls in Italy would not have worked, and they actually made it thanks to lower voice tariffs) and listen to the users?

Will we ever break the mobile time warp?

Got Mobile? LinuxWorld Panel coming up next week...

If you are going to LinuxWorld in San Francisco next week, you can't miss this one (you could, but the three panelist I invited are really cool people that you should listen to...).

What: LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Panel
Got Mobile: Extending your project's mobile capabilities

Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco will moderate a panel of other
open source leaders about their projects' mobile strategies.

To register for the event, please visit
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/register .

When: Thursday, August 17, 2006
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Where: Moscone Convention Center North
800 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Room # 305

Why: Open source applications are increasingly being deployed in the
enterprise, but many lack the mobility that is demanded in today's
business environment. Executives from companies Funambol,
Motorola, SugarCRM and Zimbra will share how they are giving
customers the flexibility to access and use applications anywhere,
anytime. Attendees will get new information that will help them to
easily and quickly extend the mobile capabilities of their
projects.

Who: Panel moderator
-- Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol

Panelists
-- Scott Dietzen, CTO of Zimbra
-- William Maggs, director, Technology and Developer Ecosystem, at
Motorola
-- John Roberts, CEO and cofounder of SugarCRM

See you next week at LinuxWorld!

My AT&T DSL nightmare

I am not sure how related this is to mobile open source, but it is pissing me off, so I would like to write about it (that's the beauty of having a blog, I guess). This blog is getting quite popular (I do not know why, but the stats are astonishing), therefore it might help solving my problem :-)

Few years ago, I moved from Silicon Valley back to Italy. In the new house, I requested phone and DSL to Telecom Italia. It was just after Christmas. It took them 2 weeks (two) to connect my phone line (it had the dialtone since day one) and over a month to get DSL. I thought "welcome back to the third world of technology". I moved back to the US quite fast, after setting up the development office in Pavia and the business office in Milan.

Last week, I moved from my house in Menlo Park to a bigger house in Menlo Park (I needed a family room all for myself to accommodate my SlingBox). I called AT&T to move phone line and DSL (AT&T Yahoo). The phone moved overnight, with the same number. I was amazed. At 7 am sharp, it ringed to tell me it was ready (it actually woke me up, but who cares?). Wow. That's great technology at work. See ya Telecom Italia.

The same night, AT&T called saying they had some issues with the DSL. I replied that it was strange, since I had DSL two miles away and the guy in the house had DSL up to the day before I moved in. They said "yep, we know, but...".

After a week of looking at my DSL router with the blinking red light, I called. The lady said that it was not their fault, it was the fault of the "phone company". Who the hell is the phone company, when I am calling AT&T? Telecom Italia?? Anyway, apparently they do not have enough capacity for my DSL. Once it was disconnected, they gave it to someone else. Now I just have to wait, but they sort of assure me it is going to be connected by August 25th (that's three weeks from now...).

I am checking email in the morning and night with dial-up. It is a step forward since Italy, because there I could not even do that for two weeks (I was going berserk). But this is Silicon Valley. Menlo Park is the center of capital for every technology company in the world. I live at the border with Atherton, where the rich people are. This is supposed to be the first world. It is not. I should have guessed looking at the poles carrying electricity, phone and DSL, falling down at the first rain. Does anybody else find that bizarre? I guess we removed our last electricity pole in the fifties in Italy :-)

 

Welcome back to the third world of technology, Silicon Valley.

 

A nice Red Herring article

This week, Red Herring has a nice article on Funambol in the print edition. Unfortunately, the online version of the article is missing the most important piece, the picture of the Sync4j Bug ("the only Sync4j bug you can't catch"). I have no idea how the photographer managed to make it look so shiny, but I guess he is a magician. My bug really could use a car wash...

My Honest Dual Licensing

I have been an open source person for as long as I remember, at least since I met Alessandro Rubini in the late eighties. He was writing the mouse device driver for Linux and I had the fortune to spend a good amount of years in the same dorm and then lab, where he was going around with a Linux PC in a wooden box.

In the last five years, I spent almost every day thinking about a business model that could allow open source to become a viable alternative to proprietary software. I do not believe the Linux model can be replicable. You cannot build a project hoping it will get big and some IBM or HP will throw in a ton of money. If you want to get a salary doing what you love, you need to come up with a better model. A sustainable model for open source. A honest way to create value for your community, while generating enough cash to make it work. With Alberto Onetti, I wrote a paper some time ago on how it works for Funambol.

The guiding principle for me has always been "Just be honest" with your open source community.

My epiphany with dual licensing happened in London some years ago. I met Marten Mickos and I decided that was the way to go. I loved the "quid pro quo" concept (albeit it means "a misunderstanding" in Italy... We would use "do ut des"): you either give back code to the project or you give back cash, so we can put it back in the project itself. That's being honest.

The problem with dual licensing starts when your product is not meant to be embedded. There, the trigger to open source everything around your code is clear. When you have an application, it gets tricky. Therefore, many open source companies decided to split open source from commercial based on features. That is, you get an open source product that does 70% of what you need. If you need the other 30%, you have to pay. The risk is that your product manager will have to think where to put every new single feature, with your investors and sales people telling him/her "close" and the community shouting "open". It creates tension in the community ("why did you put THAT feature in the commercial product? We need it! We'll build it ourselves"). When Marc Fleury says that who adds commercial extensions to open source code is not really open source, I believe he goes overboard (he likes to be controversial, I guess ;-) But he is not totally off base. Dual licensing with commercial extensions targeted to the open source crowd (all enterprises, for example) will aways create tension. In the long run, I believe it won't be sustainable for us. Many have noticed it, such as Alfresco and others, switching to a 100% service-based model and sort of giving up dual licensing (maybe because it was not working for them as it does for others ;-)

Now, how do I build My Honest Dual Licensing? How do I keep the concept of quid pro quo, without creating a gigantic bait and switch? How can I be honest to your open source community, while generating cash to sustain the project via licenses?

It is quite simple, actually: we will not segment your product based on features, we will segment our user base. On one side, we build a phenomenal open source product targeted to your open source community, pure and honest. On the other side, we build a commercial product based on the same core BUT targeted to someone else. If "someone else" is not in your open source community, you are golden. Your community grows happy giving back the code to the project, your "someone else" pays for it and gets back what it needs (quid pro quo).

Ok, now the issue is finding that someone else ;-) In the Funambol case, the community is everybody in the world, including individuals, universities AND enterprises. "Someone else" is the carriers. The carriers have totally different needs than enterprises. They target millions of users. They target consumers. It is the same core but with some different features (probably still 70% vs. 30%). Features, though, that the open source community does not care about. That's the trick. No tension when adding features. Clear separation between open source and commercial. Segmentation based on your user base, no bait and switch. My Honest Dual Licensing.

Just be honest.

Middleware can protect your company's e-mail

Last week I wrote an article for CommsDesign around mobile security and how using a middleware would solve some of the issues. I hope you will find it interesting.

Podcast about Funambol

Mobile Computing Authority interviewed me just an hour after the last penalty kick on Sunday. I was almost out of voice but they were nice enough to listen.

If you are interested, here you have the podcast.

Off topic: a-la-matt

My friend Matt writes an off-topic post on soccer once in a while. He is a real soccer fan, who grew up in the wrong country. Therefore, he chose to root for an English team (Arsenal) and France (where he spent some of his life) as his national team. He often writes analogies between open source companies (mainly Alfresco lately ;-) and soccer.
Matt was the reason for me to start this blog and I like him. Unfortunately for him, he is just bad at picking soccer teams. His Arsenal was crashed in the Champions League final (nobody remembers who you beat to get there, people just remember the winner), France was crashed today in the World Cup final by Italy.
This is a day for some analogy for me as well, I guess. Italy won showing passion, creativity and talent. A phenomenal defense, beat only by a penalty kick and an own goal. Lots of goals, still. What I would call smart playing. Fabio Grosso is the image of this team. A not-so-young guy who played for Perugia and Palermo (not really top teams) so far, but who was instrumental for us to get to the semifinal with a great run on the left that ended in a penalty kick, who scored in the semifinal against Germany and shot the last penalty kick today. Heart and talent, but mostly passion and a never-give-up attitude.
I guess you know which open source company I feel looks like Italy... so I will leave the analogy for Matt's next post.

How do you create a successful open source company?

This is a question I hear quite often: how did you manage to bring Funambol to profitability, push the open source project to 500,000 downloads and get your company included in the Red Herring 100? I have no clue, really, so my standard answer is: "I am a lucky guy"...

Since my answer usually ignites another question ("no, really...") and I usually look stupid, I decided to put together a few ideas on what I would do if I had to start an open source company from scratch. Here they are.

1. Think BIG: open source is a game of volumes. You need a BIG community for all the positive effects to show (quality, support, contribution, viral marketing, quick sales cycles, international reach, ...). The only way to get a big community is to attack a large market. If you build an open source project for a niche, your community will never get really big and your company will always stay small. I know I am killing half of the open source companies that VCs have funded in the last year or so, but ...

2. Think STANDARDS: standards have been key for a lot of successful open source projects. HTTP for Apache, SQL for MySQL, J2EE for JBoss, SyncML for Funambol (not in that league yet, but we are working on it...). I am not saying that being the open source implementation of an open standard is the only way to create a big open source project (I feel SugarCRM might make it without it), but it certainly helps. A lot. In particular, if the standard is successful.

3. Think COMMODITY: this goes with the BIG argument above. Open source is the winning strategy for commodity markets. It is a game of volumes. Price is key in commodity markets. If you choose something that will become a commodity, at the end you will come on top because nobody can compete with open source companies on price. Not because it is free (it is not), but because our companies are built on different cost structures than proprietary companies. Our marketing, sales, business development and QA costs are a fraction of those of proprietary companies. In a commodity market, it really matters.

4. Think PRICE CUSHION: if you want to create a big open source project, you do not need it. If you want to create a big open source company, you need a price cushion. You have to go after some big proprietary company which set a very high price. Being open source, the price for your product will always be perceived as a little bit more than zero. How much over zero makes all the difference. If you have someone big that set a high price, you'll crash that price slowly until the market becomes a commodity and volumes are there. If you are thinking about attacking a large market where there is no price cushion and no big player charging a ton, you are going to create a big open source project but zero dollars for your shareholders. Think MySQL with Oracle, JBoss with BEA, SugarCRM with Salesforce.com, Funambol with RIM (that's $50/user/month...). Once again, I know I am killing the other half of the open source companies that VCs have funded in the last year or so, but ...

5. Think IRONMAN: most people that went public with a proprietary company will tell you "it was a marathon". Open source companies are in the Ironman category. That is "SWIM 2.4 MILES! BIKE 112 MILES! RUN 26.2 MILES". The race ends with a marathon, but you have to swim a lot and bike a ton before you even start the marathon. Aggregating a large community takes years, there is nothing money can do to accelerate the process. It is a natural long process with phenomenal fruits at the end. But you have to be patient. MySQL was first released internally on May 23, 1995... That's eleven years ago and they might go public this year or next (go Marten!). Do not think starting an open source company will be a quick race, gear up for the long long haul. The Funambol project was started in 2001 as Sync4j, and we reached 500,000 downloads in 2006. The Ironman cap was the first company gift we ever produced. One of our key employee is an Ironman competitor (just won the 12 hours of Cesate, go Daniele!). When people ask me where do you think your company is in its life, I answer "we just got out of the water after the swim fraction, we are biking downhill, but I am bit worried about the marathon that we'll have to start in a few years".

 

I hope I finally answered the question: it is really tough and I AM a lucky guy.

Open Source for the masses

The goal of Funambol is to create a platform that will bring mobile applications to the masses, starting with push email. Obviously, via open source.

Bringing open source to the masses requires a bit of explanation. If you work in this space, I know you tried to tell your mom what you do for a living and failed. She does not understand what open source is. In my experience, the problem started with her not understanding with "source" means.

Some time ago, I have been asked to hold a seminar around mobile open source and dual licensing to college students. The crowd was a mix of people with engineering and economic backgrounds. The first group, techies enough. The second group, a bit more techies than my mom (with all due respect) but still not enough.

The key is that you have to explain "source" first: non techies do not understand the concept of source and binaries, let alone compiling. We grew up with that. It looks simple but it is not an easy concept to grasp for the masses.

Hence, here is how I explained open source to them:

- how does Coke produce its final product (the beverage you like)? They start from a very secret recipe (the "source"). Based on that, they produce your Coke. The recipe is not available to anybody, it is totally proprietary. Nobody can improve it, but Coke. That's what Microsoft does with Excel.

- if you want to make Tiramisu, the recipe is public. It is not proprietary. The "source" is open, available out there on the Internet. Anybody can improve it and make a better Tiramisu than the person who first invented it (which I trust is not my wife, though her Tiramisu is great). Many today share their modified recipes on the Internet. Most do not and keep their changes secret (proprietary) to impress new boyfriends. Wouldn't be great if anybody who improved the Tiramisu recipe would be forced to share it on the Internet?

- THAT is what is behind Open Source. The recipe is public and open and available on the Internet. Everyone that changes it must share it with the world. The concept is called copyleft, which is something different than copyright (yep, engineers might love compiling source code into binary code, but are also funny people). Copyleft is the basis of the GPL, the most used open source license. You change something in the source, or bundle the source to distribute it with your code, and you have to open source everything. That is what makes open source software incredibly better than proprietary software.

- if you do not like the idea of open sourcing your code (you want to create the uber-Tiramisu) and behind the project there is a company with a dual licensing model, then you can license the code (in exchange for cash) and get rid of the copyleft requirement. That's how Funambol makes money and puts it back into the community to improve the product even more.

Lately, I found out that this explanations brings my point home. My mom knows what I do (and still calls me every time there is a problem with her computer). I am not sure if it will work for you as well, but if you try, it works and you are grateful, I accept Tiramisu as a gift.

Open Source and the Mobile Market (InfoWorld post)

This is a recent post that appeared on the InfoWorld blog "Open Sources by Dave Rosenberg and Matt Asay".

 

--- cut here --- cut here --- cut here --- cut here ---

 

We recently had the pleasure of hearing Dave rant about his mobile phone and BlackBerry death-spiral. Fortunately, he won't have to start rubbing sticks together to send out smoke signals any time soon - I promise.

RIM is starting to target the consumer space by inking deals with operators. The latest: Cingular in the U.S. In theory, this should make email easily integrated with cell phones... and RIM does have a pretty good email solution. Problem is, RIM's solution -- and their business model -- has depended on their proprietary hardware. They are stretching a device built just for the enterprise to adapt it to consumers. So far, only lowering the cost... That is not the way to do it. Consumers need a different type of device. Do you believe my father will ever use a QWERTY phone? I do not think so. However, he uses SMS today. And he receives emails on his desktop. One life, two separate worlds (mobile and web). I does not have to be that way. Good news: it is already changing.

How are RIM going to make their business work with all the phones from dozens of vendors in the consumer market? How do they extend functionality and interoperability to address this myriad of devices with proprietary software? They're smart enough to know that email is the killer app for mobile... reaching the mass market handsets (like your Razr) with email (or SmartSMS ;-) has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with open source and open standards.

Open source software can do more for the mobile market than any other market it's disrupted to date. Why? Because there are 750 million phones in the world that are compatible with an open standard for PIM and, soon, mobile email (it is called SyncML). And because the only way to test all those phones (with the variations of software builds and network operators) is to harness the power of an open source community. The lousy customer service you were getting from the operators? Open source communities provide better support than that because of natural incentives for cooperation -- look how fast Linux fixes happen and the Linux device drivers history.

The trick is making sure operators "get" the idea of open source software as a real business value both on the cost and revenue side. It's not a religion or philosophy. We have some work to do but I know Dave can hang in there. Hold on -- we're nearly there. With open source and open standard your mobile life will change (and it will be finally integrated with your web life).

Is SyncML slow? Who cares ;-)

Last week another person asked me: "is SyncML slow?". This is a question I get often, due to a campaign launched by some that claim to have a proprietary protocol 20% faster than SyncML.

Let me start answering the question with a couple of questions:

1. Is HTML the best language to design pages? I do not think so... It is actually pretty bad and it was even worst at the beginning. Though, it is easy to read, and learn. And it is a standard. It created the Internet phenomenon that changed our lives. AJAX has been invented to go around it and kick off Web 2.0 (not sure what it is, but it appears to be a cool thing).

2. Is HTTP the best protocol to transmit data? I do not think so... It is actually fairly limited, not fast but easy to read and learn. And it is a standard. Millions of users use it every day.

Now, what about SyncML? Well, it is based on XML. It has some overhead. That makes it easy to read and learn, exactly as HTML and HTTP. Is it a standard? You bet. It is installed today on some 700 millions devices.

Just because of it, I am starting to feel better about that 20% difference. I would go with an open standard over a proprietary standard any day. I would bet Stefano could write a protocol 20% faster than HTTP overnight. Unfortunately, it would not be likely that 700M people would use it. So we stick with the standard as we did in 1994, when we decided to go with HTML and HTTP.

One more thing about SyncML and, in particular, version 1.2 with push email: this is not browsing. You are not waiting for a page to download. You hear beep when your email is already on your device. The 20% difference means you will hear beep a few milliseconds before me. Big deal. SyncML might be slower than a proprietary protocol, but it is easy to read and learn, it is a standard available on almost every device on the planet and you do not even notice the difference in speed. Who cares about proprietary protocols? I certainly don't.

 

500,000 downloads

This morning I checked on the ObjectWeb website the official number of downloads of the Funambol project and I saw we passed 500,000. Wow. Half a million downloads. Sometimes it is hard to believe even for me. In particular, when I see that more than half of them came in this year alone (and we have been alive and kicking since 2001...). The power of the community, a sign of good timing and a testament of mobile open source being the next big thing: I really believe we'll be the engine of the mobile Internet. Scary ;-)

ActiveSync, SyncML and the evil empire

I have always admired Microsoft. I guess I am one of the few open source people with sincere admiration for Microsoft. Not really for the quality of their software (you need open source for that), but because they have been able to hold on a cash cow while they could afford to make a lot of mistakes to find the new revenue stream. When they have been successful, they have made it with a Trojan horse.

What is the last success of Microsoft? I would say Internet Explorer. It was ten years ago. And it was free (as in beer) software. Mediocre quality, never improved for lack of competition (now it is coming, so they are moving again). But it was its Trojan horse to control the web. And they still control it (even if Google is putting up a good fight).

The cash cow are Windows, Office and Exchange. Period. Enough to create a monopoly of insane magnitude.

What's next? Mobile, of course. There is a paradigm shift to mobile, they cannot miss it.

What is their Trojan horse there? ActiveSync. Forget about Windows Mobile, they know they will not be able to control the mobile OS market, as they did with the desktop market. They tried with the server market and failed. Nobody will allow them to succeed in it. I heard a nice story once: "I told my daughter not to use the hammer because she could get hurt. She used anyway. She got hurt. She cried. She came back and said she won't do it again. I know she won't." Mobile device manufacturer will not allow Microsoft to do what they did to PC manufacturers.

So... why ActiveSync? Because it is the link between the mobile and the fixed world. It is the glue that ties the two worlds, which cannot live separately. Because data synchronization is for mobile what the browser is for the Internet.

On ActiveSync, you move your PIM data (contacts, calendar, etc.), you do messaging (Pocket Outlook), you move files, you move applications, you develop the new crop of mobile software. Applications will be resident on devices. ActiveSync is the trick that Microsoft is using to power the mobile Internet, based on mobile widgets.

ActiveSync is not only on Windows Mobile devices. They are licensing it around like crazy. Symbian has licensed it. Nokia has licensed it. It is on Palm. They are playing with the hammer in their hands...

How good is ActiveSync? Mediocre, as usual. It has been built for desktop synchronization over serial and USB. They extended it to over-the-air synchronization but it was not built for it. It is ugly. The Microsoft Direct Push technology is even worse. It drains the battery on the device and requires an IT Manager to expose Exchange on the Internet. Though, it is getting everywhere. Monopolies have some power.

Now, who is fighting ActiveSync? Is Sun doing it? Is Google doing it? Is IBM doing it? Is Red Hat doing it? Is Oracle doing it? Nope. They haven't seen it coming. The only alternative in the market is SyncML, an open standard by the Open Mobile Alliance. It is installed on 700 million phones, 80% of the devices sold last year. It does what ActiveSync does and much better (built for over-the-air sync from day one). It is a grass root movement, probably also because of Funambol with our huge community and our 500,000 downloads. It is a phenomenal success. We are fighting the evil empire on its new battle. We discovered the Trojan horse. We are pointing to it. However, we do not have the marketing power of Microsoft... I guess we could use some help ;-)

Do not let ActiveSync get into your network...It is the new Trojan horse of the evil empire. Go with SyncML. Do not let them lock you in once again. Man, they are good!!

Funambol named a Red Herring 100 company

Pretty cool news today. We have been named one of the top "100 Private North American Firms Driving the Future of Technology" by Red Herring. Looking at the list, I am very glad to be in with Sling Media, Zimbra, Jajah and Mozilla. Red Herring claims they picked Google and eBay in the past and they are good at this: let's hope they are right :-)

One thing I noticed on the list: there is a pretty good amount of companies building solution around open source. Together wth Funambol, there is Zimbra, Pentaho, EnterpriseDB, Mozilla, BlackDuck, Collabnet. Probably even more that I never heard about. Or at least, I would guess that 99 out of 100 are using open source software. I should put a prize up for the person who finds the one not using open source...

My 2c on Sun, Java and (mobile) open source

JavaOne is in town. Everybody is excited about the announcement that Java will be open source. "It is not a matter of if, just how", said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun new CEO. I actually feel "when" matters even more than "if and how" these days, but that's a different story and many are writing about it ;-)

When I look at Sun, I see a big hole. They have the greatest tool of all time (Java), both on the server side (JavaEE) and the mobile side (JavaME). The JavaEE application servers are the backbone of the Internet. JavaME commands a 60% market on the device side. That's a lot of devices, considering we are close to sell one billion a year. Sun is potentially the Microsoft of both backend infrastructure and mobile. Sadly, they are not... Where is the hole? There is nothing in their product line to get data from a JavaEE server and put it on a JavaME device. Nothing that makes JavaME really useful and bridges it with the world of the JavaEE application servers.

Forget Java open source, this is way more interesting. You own two markets and you do not take advantage of that.  This is juicy stuff.

Obviously, I am biased. Funambol is the missing link in the Sun product offering. We have a JavaEE backend and we move data to JavaME devices. One day, someone called our product a J2ME server. I found it bizarre then, but it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Without data, a J2ME app is close to useless. If the future is in mobile widgets, as I believe, you need to pump data to a JavaME app. We have it all, we can get everything from a JavaEE server to a JavaME app. Funambol is the mobile open source application server with the largest mobile development community. We can make the strategy of Sun a reality... Scary, we can help them become Microsoft :-)

Anyway, I love Sun. I always did. I was one of the dumb people that developed code with Java alpha back at HP Labs. That screamed when beta came out and had nothing to do with alpha... I sold Sun boxes in Italy and I was heavily involved in an agreement with Sun while at Reuters, when we were selling E10K to financial institutions like they were lollipops (good old 2000 :-)

I heard Jonathan Schwartz for the first time at JavaOne, back in 2002 (I guess, I am getting old...). I was in a room for a press conference, faking to be a journalist since I had a monthly column on a wireless magazine. Scott McNealy was silent, Jonathan was doing all the talking. Crisp vision, great message. I thought: "this guy with the ponytail will be the next CEO, he is too good". I rooted for him since that day. It took him some years and he made it. Give him some time and he will figure out the hole. I just hope he will give me a call to plug it :-)

WAP client or mobile widget?

The talk before mine at MobileMonday Global Summit was given by Christian Lindholm, a VP in Mobile at Yahoo. I met Christian a year ago in Helsinki for the first time, when he was still working at Nokia on Lifeblog (a very cool product, using SyncML). He then moved to Yahoo and is coming to live in the Bay Area, the coolest place on earth when the weather is good.

His talk was full of Yahoo!, but still interesting. In particular, he outlined Yahoo plans to bring to mobile phones the Soccer World Cup (the most watched sport event on the planet). They are going to have a WAP site and a J2ME app. The Java app will include live stream of results, but looked less rich in content. It is targeted to the hard-core fan.

As you might know, at Funambol we built a mobile World Cup application in 2002. Built for Palm OS, it allowed people to get updates on scores and standings, while HotSyncing. It was a phenomenal success and our first large deployment of Sync4j. It was a fat client, obviously. Today, I would call it a mobile widget.

I find the decision of Yahoo to build a WAP site quite interesting. They have a fat client (collection of widgets) for the Yahoo experience, but they still decided to go with WAP in this case. We all know browsing on a mobile phone sucks. However, when you have a ton of content ready, going with WAP makes your life much easier. You can transcode or use mobile CSS. I suspect this was their main reason (the other one was serving the non-J2ME market, which is still a good chunk of the market, but they could have chosen to build separate clients for Brew, Windows Mobile and PalmOS).

They built a mobile widget with J2ME. I would bet the Funambol server I am delivering to Alfresco that the user experience on that client will be much better. Real time updates being one reason. Local storage of results, instead of download at every click, being the other reason. Instant access to content, without the need of downloading it from the web. However, they might not have spent the necessary amount of time to build a proper app, since it is not an easy task.

The tradeoff between a WAP client or a mobile widget is clear. One is easy to develop, only requires to adapt existing web content easily but delivers a horrible user experience. The other one is harder to develop, requires a way to import pieces of existing web content (easy to do, if the web content is well designed...) but can deliver a great user experience.

My feeling is that company will try to go for the easy route. We will have tons of seldom-used mobile web content. At the end, the companies that will make it in mobile will be the ones that will take the time to build widgets and deliver a great experience (not WAP crap). Google and Yahoo started big in this category. All the others will follow. Stay tuned, it is going to happen fast.

Entiva Group report on Funambol

Entiva Group has recently published a report on Funambol. It is very nice. If I were not the CEO of Funambol, I would guess Funambol paid them to write it. We did not. It is totally independent. They really wrote what they think about the mobile open source company. Looking at the conclusions, obviously I totally subscribe to what they say :-)

MobileMonday Global Summit

I am in Helsinki today, speaking at the MobileMonday Global Summit about how open source changes the game in mobile email. Very interesting crowd. Very international. I keep picking up a very good vibe, every time I am at a mobile conference. We had some tough years, but we have definitely turned the corner.

Russ and Mike are not here, though there is a picture of them on the wall... I guess I am representing the Silicon Valley MobileMonday and I am doing my best. But it is not the same thing without them...

Italians do IT better

I am speaking at an interesting event in Italy today. We are talking about University and Entrepreneurship. Carlo De Benedetti, formerly CEO of Olivetti, is giving the keynote. We are discussing about education and how to apply what you learn, in order to create a great company.

Italy is a great country. Not just for art, food and fashion. We had and have great minds, but we are missing the attitude to use them to export our technology. Ferrari being an exception (that's actually the best example of great Italian fashion and fantastic technology combined). I started Funambol to create another exception, exporting Italian software to the world. Software is creativity. That's the best characteristic of Italians. The problem has always been how to distribute it worldwide. Open source is the answer. Open source destroys any barrier for distribution. It allows European software to show its competence in software, for the first time in history (SAP excluded).

Think about Open Source. Linus is Finnish. MySQL is Swedish. Marc Fleury (JBoss founder) is French. SUSE was German. Funambol started in Italy. The best open source stories are European. Then we all moved to the US to create commercial open source companies. But this is a different story. The technology started in Europe and open source allowed us to distribute it worldwide and make it known.

Open source also contributes to dispel myths and legends (a.k.a. common sense). I heard once a person say about his public company in the Valley: "we have an Italian CTO, it is like having a German chef" (two countries insulted in one sentence ;-) I better do not talk about German food, but the great thing about open source is that the code is out there. Everybody can see it. If it is good, people use it. If it sucks, nobody uses it. Funambol has been downloaded half a million times. It has to be good. Italians must be good at software and IT, after all.

My next t-shirt is going to have "Italians do IT better" on the front. If you work in IT and have an Italian ancestor, give me a buzz and I will send you one. Girls might look at you and think you are not just a geek :-)