3GSM - day 3 (and last for me :-)

Day 3 is a strange day at 3GSM. The first half is fast and furious, then - after the storm - the calm builds in. At noon, the taxi line outside the show is already long. By 2 pm, they are all gone. Therefore, your Wednesday morning agenda becomes absolutely crazy, with ten meetings per hour, since everybody is trying to squeeze in one last meeting. Past lunch time, the wind is gone.

Left alone, in the afternoon I spent some time visiting Hall 8. The hall where the money is. Where the exhibitors are the device manufacturers, who plunk unbelievable amounts of money to look bigger and more successful than the others.

Nokia announced a good amount of devices. Huge booth, an enormous amount of phones, each with a Finnish person ready to help you, if you had any question. A strong angle on music, which is not surprising looking at the competition. Some device updates, but mainly lots of boring phones that give you the impression they are not going in the right direction... Still, I found one that I liked. The E65. The first Nokia E series device in slider format. Nice format, appealing to the Italian eye, also powered with email and "business" features like conference calling and mute/unmute (a business feature? since when?). It supports 3G and wi-fi, but it also sports a 2 megapixel camera, and 50MB built-in memory expandable with microSD cards. A mix of features that should appeal the prosumers, that want advanced features (such as VOIP on wifi in the office) but also a compact format and a good look. I bet it is going to be a winning device for Nokia. At least, it shows something innovative and thought for a precise segment, which is growing fast.

Motorola had a smaller booth and really claustrophobic. Again, a million phones with the feeling they also lost their touch (it is hard to compete in this market...). The MOTORIZR Z8 was supposed to be the star of the show. But with that yellow line, I did not even bother opening it. It is just ugly. Some updates on the Q were pretty cool, but I can't say I felt innovation was there.

The Sony Ericsson booth was full of cool music phones. Still, it wasn't crowded. Although as a company they might not be considered trendy, they are in a fun hip trend and I feel they are creating devices that people want to buy. There is a clear segment for a music - phone convergence and they are hitting it big. Kudos to them, I believe they will keep doing great.

The LG booth was very sophisticated, with the Chocolate everywhere. Classy, almost upscale, it gave you a feeling of wanting in. As in a party where you do not know if you will have to stay outside for an hour to wait or if you will be chosen to join the lucky ones. The superstar was the one LG Prada phone (a.k.a. the iPhone killer or KE850), in the hands of a nice lady who was cleaning it after each use. Sleek, cool, it was screaming "buy me because I will make you look rich and famous". Rich for sure, since it is going to cost north of 600 euros... But I have to say it had a very nice interface, easy to use and attractive. Not having a keyboard or buttons does not prevent a call, but still makes selecting a contact a bit of a challenge. Typing a message is hard, and they offer only a simulated phone keyboard with just numbers (imagine how hard it will be with a full simulated keyboard as in the iPhone). The fact that the lady was cleaning the screen every 5 minutes makes my point on this kind of input interface... If they invent a way for humans not to sweat (Prada could), then it will be perfect. Once again, a niche device like the iPhone but quite innovative. Too bad they were copied by Apple who jumped the gun and make it all look exactly the opposite. Man, I love Steve Jobs!

That's it. I did not visit Samsung and others because I was tired. And I had to catch a flight to leave Barcelona. Tomorrow, the show is only for the exhibitors, who will visit each other since there are no visitors anymore. Enjoy the rest of the show, I am out of here :-)

3GSM - day 2

Day two of 3GSM is usually busier than day one. It does not happen in any other conference I know, but it is common here... Today, it was no different. Our booth was inundated by people, mostly mobile operators and partners. What a difference a year makes: a year ago, people were stopping at our booth, looking at us with a strange face and saying "what do you mean with mobile open source?". This year, they come and already know about us. Strange feeling.

I also found out you can use our cell phone holder also to juggle (works well to attract visitors and you can build on the funambol story), as a soccer ball and even to play catch. Multipurpose cell phone holder...

I had a moment to walk around, talking to Trolltech and Access (both doing mobile open source stuff). They had two nice parties inside the conference. Lots of people and not just for the good wine. Mobile open source is going mainstream. No surprise.

Lastly, I was intrigued by a new device by Neonode, a Swedish company. Extremely small and light, iPhone-sque on the input side (no keyboard, you use your fingers) but based on Windows Mobile. Fully featured, with even too many apps on it. But also open (or so they claim) to accept applications for third parties (Neonode Friends). If it takes off, it could be a cool device for our community to build applications on. Porting our Windows Mobile client on it would be a breeze. Once again, it is just another sign of divergence and segmentation. There will be more, I am sure.

The interesting part, though, was the marketing tactic they used to launch the device. The campaign was built around the actual birth of the device ("a new breed is born"). That included a lot of girls dressed up as nurses... In a male-only environment (3GSM is the only place on the planet where the restroom line is longer on the male side) it is old but working tactics. The traffic on their booth was unbelievable. Lots of cameras and dark suits... It is a sad lesson for marketeers, which repeats itself year after year.

Tomorrow is my last day at 3GSM. I can handle three days but then my body starts complaining. It has been fun so far, let's see what Wednesday has to offer. I haven't seen a shocking announcement since the beginning, but the mood is definitely upbeat. Maybe tomorrow is the day of the iPhone killer...

3GSM - day 1

Busy day in Barcelona, as expected. Lines not as long as in previous events, though. A smoothly organized event, considering the size... The weather is gorgeous, which helps going through the 9 am - 7 pm crazy marathon.

For the first time, mobile entertainment has a big presence. We are used to have it at CTIA, but here it is new. At CTIA, you have Hollywood. At 3GSM, you have Bollywood, with a mobile film premiere. I am sure the Festival people in Cannes are asking themselves why their counterparts in Barcelona had to go all the way to India instead of Europe, but that is another story...

After a good amount of years (when GSM became 3GSM...), today everyone is talking - again - about mobile bandwidth. HSDPA is everywhere. The carriers have to defend themselves from the message Intel is proposing (this year for real, I guess): "WiMAX is here"... In reality, we all know that nobody really needs that much bandwidth. A phone does not really need video... Messaging is going to be light in size because people cannot even type a long message without a keyboard. Who cares about bandwidth? 3G is more than enough...

Lots of announcements about push email as well, both on the enterprise side (e.g. a ton of new Nokia phones, the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 that I played around with, and so on) and - finally - also on the consumer side. I have the feeling our "mobile data for the masses" story is hitting the wires big time and people are noticing it. Competitors are embracing the idea (that's flattering, but I would rather be alone, thanks :-) Mobile 2.0 is happening now. Messaging is a key part of it. Let's get people what they want: a cheap way to send their pictures from their phone to their families at home. Forget bandwidth and movies on phones (please...).

So long from Barcelona, I won't talk about the parties because I am here to work (yeah, right ;-)

A good reason to visit 3GSM

Just in case you are still doubtful if you want to take a flight on Sunday to get to Barcelona, here you have a good reason to visit 3GSM. We are giving away cell phone holders...

They are soft, you can squeeze them to lower your tension, you can throw them to your dog, you can put them on your nose to look like a clown and make your kids laugh, they can even hold a cell phone on your desk.

The ball represents the world, since our downloads are coming from any corner of the planet (212 and counting, the Vatican still missing though...) and the community makes our server tested on every device with every firmware version on every carrier in the world.

Brace yourself, 3GSM is next week

It is that time of the year. The time for 3GSM, the largest conference in mobile. The craziest event in wireless...

As usual, PR people started bombarding us with announcement the week before, to avoid being buried among a million press releases. So you already have Microsoft announcing Windows Mobile 6, Nokia rolling out a free mobile map service and Samsung launching a would-be iPhone beater.

On our side, we announced a preview of our Funambol v6 release, including a very cool Open Source Java Push Email Client for Mass Market Devices (all capital, do not ask me why but that's how marketing works) and a Mobile Email Portal for Consumers. If you want to see them, we are at booth 1J46 in Hall 1 (same as last year, close to the coffee break table ;-)

Barcelona will be flooded by mobile people. Last year, Barcelona did not know what 3GSM was (since it was in Cannes before... BTW, I loved that show). This year, they know. Prices for rooms skyrocketed... A room that normally costs 200 euros (I was in Barcelona around Christmas...) is now well over 1,000 euros... Taxi drivers will try to rip you off, if you do not speak Spanish. Restaurants might follow suit (hey, you want to eat paella, right?).

In any case, it will be fun, as usual. Day and night. Mobile is hotter than ever. If you are going there, stop at our booth and let's chat about it. See you in Barcelona.

Hello, Dave!

One of the interesting announcement of DEMO 07 has been DAVE (Digital Audio Video Experience) by Seagate. It is a very small storage drive (credit card size) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support. It boasts up to 14 days of standby power and 10 hours of continuous use, it can be accessed from anywhere up to 30 feet (9.1 meters), it will ship in May/June and it will cost around $150.

What does it mean?

It means you can store 20 Giga of your stuff in it, put it in your bag and access it from your cell phone. Wirelessly.

In theory, it makes a lot of sense. You have a growing need for storage. You want your data always with you. Therefore, you go out with Dave at night. It speaks to your cell phone, PDA, mp3 player, iPhone (yeah, right, like you will be able to write an app on it), your PC at home and so on. DAVE kills the need for synchronization. It is a one-stop-shop for your data storage.

In practice, I do not think the concept will fly. IXI tried something like this with the PMG (Portable Mobile Gateway). Devices that only solve an infrastructure problem, but require no physical interaction with the mobile user, have no appeal. The thing does nothing. No beep, no lights, no tactile feedback, nothing. It is in your bag. Still. It appeals to geeks but not consumers. I can see people showing it off in a coffee place in San Jose, not in a bar of Milan. It is not fashionable, it is geeky (and black).

As you probably know, I am not a fan of mobile convergence. I believe in divergence. DAVE pushes divergence, taking care of a basic task (storage) and adding yet another device. I should like it. However, I just can't see it as a viable mass solution. I believe phone will just add more storage (see the iPod Nano, does it have enough storage in a limited space?). Storage won't be a good reason for divergence. User interfaces will. Usage segmentation will. Multiple devices with local storage, same data, to be synchronized.

One thing I really like about the way Seagate approached the software component of DAVE: open source. The API to access the device will be all open source. That's mobile open source, by the way. That will generate a ton of innovation. Someone very smart will build something we are not even thinking about today. Maybe one day you'll put your DAVE in your car and leave it there. Or it will be strapped to your purse. We'll see. Let open source people take care of it. They know better.

Sexy as in Open Source

Roberto Galoppini has a blog on commercial open source, that I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in the topic (not just because he is Italian or because he interviewed me some weeks ago). Lately, he has been blogging about open source franchising. Very interesting stuff.

His last post is about a presentation he gave at Barcamp, titled "Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition".

He is presenting a few taxonomies to categorize commercial open source projects. We all like taxonomies, since the game is trying to put your own project somewhere (then you should build a quadrant and put yourself in the upper right corner ;-)

I guess Funambol is Hybrid, Symbiotic, Externally Funded. Or maybe not... That's the fun part of taxonomies, you never fit squarely in one category...

There is one sentence in the post, though, that I strongly disagree with. Roberto writes:

Open Source is not sexy yet

Open Source is sexy. The problem might be that we show too much. The code is there, there is nothing we hide. Fully naked. Always. However, I would not go back to proprietary fully clothed software. Code hidden under ten tons of clothes. And you know they will not show you anything, as much as you try to convince them. THAT is not sexy.

Go naked.

Billing, billing, billing...

In my Mobile 2.0 Manifesto, I mentioned that a key element for the success of Mobile 2.0 will be moving everybody in mobile to flat fee (item 4). It is the only possible model for people to embrace data usage on a cellular phone.

Luckily, we are getting closer to this goal in the US. Sprint has a $15/month unlimited plan which is fantastic (too bad is not based on GSM...). T-Mobile has a $5.99 plan with some limitations, but the price is right (and there are ways around the limitations ;-)

It is not all good, unfortunately. Cingular (sorry, at&t) unlimited plan is $49.99, which is a non starter for consumers... If you look at the recent data ARPU from their last quarter, it was $7.19... A number that include SMS, which still represent the largest chunk. I honestly believe they would be better off with a $15 unlimited plan. Higher data ARPU, simpler plans, happier customers. What's wrong with that?

When you look at Europe, it is even worse. Almost everywhere you find only pay-by-kilobyte plans. I wrote it before, but... how the heck do I know how big is a kilobyte? If I am downloading my email, how can I know how much data will I consume? I will not know, because I am not going to use it... And it does not help when you hear horror stories, like the guy who got a €50,000 bill for data usage in a month... It scares people away (rightly so).

There are bright spots, however. 3 in particular (that's Three, like H3G). They have in Italy a €19 plan, with 5 Gigabyte of traffic. I do not know how big is a kilobyte, but I know a Giga is big enough for a lot of emails... In the UK, they launched the X-Series: X-Series Silver at £5 (including Skype calls) and X-Series Gold at £10 (including Sling TV). They call them "unlimited plans", but they are limited (e.g. 1G/month for browsing and 5,000 Skype to Skype minutes per month)... Still, they are a great deal and a great start.

It is funny: Europe had the best SMS plans and SMS exploded. US had the worst SMS plans and SMS never took off (please, I beg you, stop asking me to pay 15 cents for receiving an SMS...). For data plans, it is exactly the opposite. The US is ahead. Therefore, the initial growth will happen in the US. Europe will follow, hopefully fast.

In essence, item 4 of my Mobile 2.0 Manifesto is still a bit far from becoming mainstream. In particular in Europe. But if you look back at a year ago, the jump was impressive. It is getting close to reality. Let's just wait for a few months more and the iPhone is going to crack the data plans market open...

Remote sync your smartphone with SyncML and Funambol

Once again, browsing the web, I found an article on SmallNetBuilder about how to synchronize your smartphone with Funambol. It is quite detailed, so I would recommend it as a must-read for anybody having a smartphone and looking to sync contacts and calendar over-the-air (and, no, it does not talk about the iPhone, sorry).

The article is: Remote sync your smartphone with SyncML and Funambol

Open Source conferences are boring

Yesterday, I spoke at the "Open Source meets Business" conference in Nuremberg. The atmosphere was magic, since it snowed the night before and the city was all white (a bit of a change from the meeting I attended in Miami last week, where we had dinner pool-side). They had to postpone the program for an hour because of the snow, which forced lunch at 2 pm. I am Italian and I adapt easily, but you do not want to talk at 1:59 pm in front of hungry Germans...

Everyone in open source was there. It was amazing how many people they were able to get together. However, it felt kind of boring... Been there, done that. With the addition of 90%+ of the people in a dark suit, the highest percentage I have ever seen. Even more than at 3GSM, where half-naked girls in the booths balance the dark of the just-male visitors. Political incorrectnesses at his highest.

Open source conference smell of deja-vu. Same stories (we are good, they are bad - we are conquering the world, they will all die), same people. All the time. I wrote this before. This conference was flawlessly organized. The place was great. The castle at night was fantastic, as it was the beer (and the bratwurst). The right people were there. All perfect. But still boring...

In open source conferences, the excitement is gone. Open source is mainstream. It is everywhere. It is not news. In particular, when we preach to the choir.

On the contrary, it is still very exciting when you push open source in front of an audience that does not know about it. Such as 3GSM and CTIA for us, coming up in the following weeks. That mobile crowd finds open source interesting. Mobile open source is exciting stuff. They get excited. I get excited.

So... you are all invited to visit our booth at 3GSM in Barcelona next month. And no, sorry, we are not going to have half-naked girls in the booth (however, Daniele will be there). Sorry, we are open source, we do things differently. We are fun. We are not supposed to be boring.

Right?

A port to push

I found out yesterday that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has assigned Funambol an official tcp/udp port. Port 4745 belongs to fmp, a.k.a. Funambol Mobile Push.

What does it mean? I am not totally sure, but I believe it is cool to have a port assigned by IANA, that nobody else can use...

Jokes apart, the port is assigned to our TCP-based push mechanism, to push email (and more) to mobile devices. That is, to notify a device there is email ready to pick up. The famous beep of your BlackBerry: "You got mail!".

We also have an SMS-based push mechanism, which is linked to the OMA standard, but it is sometimes a bit too expensive to use, in particular for enterprises (not a major problem for mobile operators, since the cost for them to send an SMS is pretty much zero). TCP-push is a better solution in some cases and we offer our users to choose the best option suiting them.

This gives me another opportunity to talk about why push is important for mobile email. Some people tell me "I do not really need push, I can pull my email when I want and it will be enough". That is true, but let me tell you a secret: you won't...

You won't check your email often on your phone. You will do it rarely, when you have spare time and you are not going to get close to a PC in the next 30 minutes. When you are mobile, you are most likely about to go home or the office, or you just got out of the home or the office. You have a PC there, you do not really feel the need to check your email on your phone right away. You can wait.

If you are around and your phone beeps, showing a message from your boss (that is, either the one at work or your wife), you will answer. You will not delay a reply. You will react. You have to. You cannot wait.

The usage of a mobile phone is all about reacting, not acting. Pull is acting. Push forces reacting. That's why it works. That's why it is addictive. That's why you use a BlackBerry. That's why you use SMS.

And do not tell me you wait until you get home to answer a SMS from your wife ;-)

Steve Jobs blew it?

The day after the the launch of the iPhone I really felt alone... I wrote a negative post about it (actually, two), while everyone else was writing great reviews. Now the pendulum has swung...

In one comment on Computerworld, Mike Elgan went all the way. The journalist simply said "Steve Jobs blew it". Here are his reasons:

1. Jobs raised buyer expectations too high.
2. Jobs raised Wall Street expectations too high.
3. Jobs gave competitors a head start.
4. Jobs undermined Apple TV hype.
5. Jobs put iPod sales at risk.
6. Jobs wrecked Cisco talks.

I believe it counts as heresy, punishable with a life with Zune...

Top forty under 40

America Venture Magazine named forty "Leaders in the Emerging Growth Technology Industry" under 40 years. Somehow, I made the list. It is quite funny to read what they say about the other 39 people:

Call it 2006’s most promising young guns. The top 40 under 40 list is our remarkable selection of those talented young leaders who, with deep understanding of today’s fast changing technology, had the extraordinary ability to develop a new variety of business models with a vision for the future and community involvement. The incredible part, that each of them made their dreams come true at a very young age. In the selection process, American Venture Magazine considered the nominees' achievements and ground-breaking efforts in the following areas: vision, leadership, development strategies, innovation and achievement. [...]
Through their passion, they embrace risks and commit to what they believe in. They are definitely doing something right.

This is a bit too much, even for my big ego. Anyway, let me focus on one good thing: I am still considered young despite the gray hair I saw this morning looking in the mirror :-))

Two principles of successful open source businesses [InfoWorld blog]

I met with Matt in Salt Lake City over the weekend (yep, I went skiing at negative Fahrenheit temperatures...) and we talked during a nice dinner. He blogged about things I wrote here in the past. It is funny to see that other people are better than you at explaining your own thoughts...

I would therefore suggest you to check his post clicking here.

I just want to add a comment to "Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source". Selling to someone that does not like/trust/use you is nothing new. Skype does it. They make money because people do not use Skype (that is, calling a landline). If everybody had Skype, they would be out of business. That's an interesting tought for eBay ;-)

Apple, please do not forget the developers (again)!

I wrote my last post on the iPhone at midnight in Europe, right after "watching" the launch, then I went to bed. I woke up and I found out I was the only idiot who wrote something negative on the iPhone... It is sad to be alone... Since I am currently alone at home in California with family 10,000 miles away, it is even worst...

Jokes apart, I thought about it a bit more and I did not change my mind (double idiot). It is a smartphone, it has a limited market, you are going to sweat on the good looking screen while calling someone (I know you sweat as well, Steve) and it is nothing terribly new (check this image about an LG phone and let me know how different it looks... If LG had Steve Jobs, it would be a cool company ;-)

Probably, it is a great Video iPod with network connectivity. A cool looking PDA. A small networked tablet PC. Three niches. It is going to be all over Silicon Valley (and I am going to get one) but I stick with the idea that is never ever going to challenge the RAZR, until they have a mini or a nano.

That said, one thing is really bothering me, if it is true (never trust Apple rumors...): they plan to lock the phone completely, so that nobody will be able to add any application. According to the NYT, Steve Jobs said:

“We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC.[...] These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them"

I beg to differ.

A locked device works well for single-purpose ones. Like an iPod. Multi-purpose devices (also known as smartphones, like the iPhone) do many things and letting the user decide what to do is key. We are quite different out there. The ability to add third party apps has been the reason why Palm has been successful (together with the synching capability). You can't lock a smartphone or people will develop for different platforms and innovation will go elsewhere.

Since I sort of represent the largest development community in mobile (we are getting close to one million downloads...), what I am reading is: go away, we do not want you. We won't be able to have the Funambol plug-in on the iPhone. No open source push-email. No open source PIM synching. No way to put all the apps that people built on our platform on the iPhone.

That is stupid. Where will our community go? To OpenMoko, first. To Microsoft Windows Mobile, second. If you are a startup and you have a cool app in mind, where will you develop it first? On Windows. Same happened for the Mac. If you have the next killer VOIP client, you will build it for Windows Mobile, not the iPhone. There, you will be stuck with whatever Apple gives to you. Even if it sucks or you do not want to get locked on iMac... Innovation will go elsewhere.

Outside developers are a phenomenal resource. Look at Google. They have the brightest people on the planet but the coolest products were written by non-Google people (then they bought them). Innovation came elsewhere. It is not different for Apple.

Apple, you chose to build a smartphone, not me. I was not expecting it. Now it is much better for you to let us develop for it... Niche smartphone with no developers is a niche of a niche. Lock the iPhone nano, which will do just two things well, it will be fast, small and supercool. Not that smartphone.

Man, I feel alone...

Yikes, it is a smartphone!

As you certainly know, Apple launched the iPhone today. Great show by Steve Jobs, as usual. And surprising announcement, at least for me. Everybody is excited about the device (the stock market for sure, with AAPL up 7% and RIM down 7%...), I am not that much. Obviously, I need to get my hands on it and play with it, but one thing is clear: it is a smartphone!!!

It is funny how nobody noticed it with surprise. I was not expecting a smartphone... Apple is a great consumer company... Smartphones represent a minuscule size of the mobile market. The smartphone market is not even considered "consumer". It is an enterprise market, prosumer at best. Apple target is 1% of the entire device market in 2008. That's nothing. That will be a rounding error in Nokia or Motorola or even Samsung market share... The iPhone is not a RAZR, not by a mile.

Moreover, the iPhone does not even look like an enterprise device. It just looks like a smartphone for geeks (and I love geeks, do not get me wrong, but we are not the majority out there...).

On top of it, it is pricey... At $499, you need to be a wealthy geek... Did anyone notice that the BlackBerry Pearl is much smaller, looks pretty cool and cost you $199?? When I saw it for the first time I thought "wow, that might get into the hands of consumers". I have a hard time thinking the same for the iPhone...

When it comes to the UI, I am happy to hear from Steve that our fingers are designed for interacting... But touching something requires a tactile feedback. If I touch a screen, there is no feedback. When I touch buttons, I get it. Did anybody notice a difference between the buttons in a BlackBerry, Treo, Q or E61? I do. They feel different when I touch them or push them. You are going to miss it with the iPhone... Look at the iPod: it is all about tactile feedback. The wheel is just perfect. It feels perfect. A screen won't. Never. It is cold and flat.

How innovative is it? Well, have you looked at the OpenMoko device? Gulp, it is a smartphone and it does not have a keyboard as well. It is based on the same idea. Steve said they patented everything about the iPhone. Good for them... If you are a geek developer and you have to choose between a fully proprietary solution and a fully open source device, what would you choose? They are both based on a Unix derivative... I would go with OpenMoko, where you can freely build any kind of application without paying a toll to Apple.

Lastly, and this is for geeks, it does not support 3G. No UMTS, only EDGE. That's slooooow for a geek. I am happy about the wi-fi support, but this is a device that is supposed to change the way I interact with the world when I am mobile (and I do not have wi-fi everywhere today). It is going to be sloooooooooow!!

Ok, I believe I have been a bit too harsh on this one. I really want to play with it and say I was wrong. But I won't be able to do it for the next six months... That's an eternity in mobile. Where is the Apple that announced a device and it was available in store the same day???

In a nutshell:

1. It is just a smartphone
2. It is a smartphone for geeks only
   
3. It is pricey even for a geek
   
4. Input is going to be clumsy
5. It is not that innovative
   
6. It is slow
   
7. It is going to take six months before we see it

I might be wrong on everything, and I hope to be. I am an Apple fan. I bought dozens of iPod Shuffle before Christmas, after all... If I look at it with a positive angle, the iPhone is very similar to the first iPod. That one was for geeks only, as well. Heavy and big. Then they made the mini and the nano and the last shuffle. Fantastic devices for the masses. Everybody got one.

I guess I will have to wait for the iPhone nano...

Five things

I promised myself and my family that I would not work during the holidays. That included this blog (which is more fun than work, but...). I have been good and maintained the promise (although I still checked my email few times a day on my mobile since I am addicted to my own software). Now it is time to start writing again...

When I was about to go on vacation, my friend Mike Olson at Oracle (a.k.a. Mr. Sleepycat) tagged me with the "Five Things" game. It is a pyramid scheme. I am supposed to write five things you do not know about me and tag five more people to do the same. Pyramid schemes are interesting because are social phenomena, like open source, where a group of people get together with a goal in mind (or just for fun). They die because of party poopers, killing the chain. I'll be happily one of them.

FIVE THINGS YOU DO NOT KNOW ABOUT ME

1. I lived in a mental institution for three years. Actually, not as a patient... My parents are both shrinks and worked there. It was easier for them to live in a apartment inside the hospital for the night shifts. Therefore, I spent the first three years of my life in a mental institution. It was a great experience, although I do not remember it, and it might explain a lot of things about me...
   
2. My high school was a "Liceo Classico". That is, I studied a lot of Ancient Greek and Latin and pretty much zero math. My grandma, a Greek and Latin teacher, always told me that classical studies "open your mind". I really hope so. It seemed not very helpful while moving into high tech, but it gives me a good amount of topics for boring social dinners.
3. I hate carrots, of any shape or form.
4. The girl I married attended my same kindergarten and was sitting in front of me for five years in high school. She was one of my preferred target for spitting paper balls with my pen during not-so-interesting lessons.
   
5. I am the only Italian on the planet who is crazy about baseball. It resembles soccer, after all. It is slow, there is a lot of strategy, it is all about episodes. The difference is that you can munch cracker jacks and talk as much as you want, knowing you are not going to lose the key moment: when you hear the crack of the bat, you have time to turn your head and watch the ball land in McCovey Cove. When the ball is in the net, it is too late... You need to wait until you are home to see the game again (yes, I do that as well).
   

That's it, I am not going to write the other 45 for now...

BAIA invited post on the Funambol model

The guys at BAIA - Business Association Italy America - asked me to write a post on their blog ("The Voice of the Italian & American Business Community") to explain the Funambol model and how I feel it could be replicated.

BAIA is an independent, nonprofit, member-based network whose mission is to create tangible business value by establishing a professional forum through which information, knowledge and opportunities can openly and effectively be exchanged between the business communities operating in the United States and Italian business interests. BAIA's new approach to business networking is based on an Open Source Governance model. BAIA aims to enjoy the support of anyone who shares the BAIA vision of an open exchange network.

I share the vision and I like the people running it (and I am not really a shy individual...), so here you have my post.

The Funambol model: US capital and Italian heart

Life as an emigrant is tough... You look back at your native country and you struggle between love and hate. Emigrants flee home because they go looking for something they could not find where they were born. They leave their heart in their home country, hoping to come back one day to find that everything has changed.

I left Italy for California in '99 and I go back home quite often. Not that much has changed, but I am not planning to give up that fast...

After founding a couple of companies in Italy and working for a public US company, I founded Funambol in 2002. Funambol is the mobile open source company, bringing BlackBerry-like capabilities to the masses. A Red Herring 100 company and the largest open source project in mobile with almost one million of downloads, Funambol has been funded mainly by US Venture Capitalist. The headquarter is in Silicon Valley, but the R&D is in Italy. In Pavia, close to the local university.

US capital and Italian heart.

Italy is a beautiful country, but in a state of crisis. The economy is suffering. Globalization is killing our small manufacturing companies. Competing with China in these markets is simply not doable. Protectionism attempt will fail. We need to move on.

Italy can compete on high tech and software in particular. Our labor cost in this sector is highly competitive. It might sound strange to many, but Italy has the lowest cost of software in Europe (35K/year Euro per engineer). That's extremely competitive with respect to Silicon Valley (the weather is still better here, sorry) and also with India or China, where wages keep appreciating every year.

In particular, if you compare the Intellectual Property protection Italy enjoys. I know of a few examples of outsourcing companies in India, where a group of employees took a product they were developing for a third party and started a new company... Outsourcing saves money and it is necessary, but can be risky in a country where the legal system does not support you. On top of it, Italy is the best with respect to loyalty of the employees (a key element in software, which is all about people)

When it comes to education, Italy ranks high. In my experience, the competence of Italian engineers is comparable if not better than American peers. Italy is the country of creativity. It is in our DNA. Software is creativity. Add some rigorous engineering and you have Ferrari, the most beautiful car on the planet, but also a technological jewel.

Software is great for Italy. It requires limited capital to start. If you use open source as a distribution model, it is even better. You can take advantage of globalization and reach markets anywhere on the planet.

When you are ready to go to the next step, however, risk capital is missing in Italy. The ability to manage risks of Silicon Valley VCs is unrivalled. All your connections are here, if you want to grow your company or find an exit via M&A. This is the place to be if you want to go big. Not just for cash, but for the mentality. Things move at a different speed in the Valley. And I do not believe it is going to change any time soon.

For now, I see a great opportunity for Italy to be a center of excellence for software outsourcing. Becoming a new Silicon Valley is the next step. We are not ready for that yet, but the Funambol model is a start. US capital and Italian heart. I hope many more companies will follow. It is simply the best of both worlds.

About Palm and buying back your own OS

I have tried to analyze the last move from Palm for a few days and I have found it an interesting challenge...

The story is quite complex, if you are not a Palm follower. Palm spun off PalmSource (their operating system) some time ago and launched a Treo with Windows Mobile. Then Access bought PalmSource for $324 million and pushed it even further towards Mobile Linux. Now Palm is paying Access $44 million for the license of Palm OS Garnet (the old version 5, the one that was supposed to be a transition to the version 6 that never saw the light of day, nothing to do with Mobile Linux).

So... You own an OS that everybody loves. You throw it into a separate company. You embrace a different OS that everybody hates (but you still launch a lot of devices on Palm OS, like the recently announced 680). Now you buy back an OS that is pretty much dead...

It sounds stupid, however:

1. $44M is a steal if you look at the $324M Access paid for PalmSource (THAT was crazy)
   
2. It protects your investment on the Palm OS Treo (650 and 680) and buys you time to move to a full Mobile Linux (which is a must to survive)
   
3. It puts you in a better position to negotiate with evil Microsoft if you are thinking to add another Windows Mobile device (please don't ;-)

Overall, I personally believe it was a smart move from Palm. However, the more I look at this and the more I am getting convinced that the need to get rid of Access means something: they can't work together. Therefore, I am ready to bet that Palm will announce a Mobile Linux device in the near future BUT it won't be based on ALP, the Access Linux Platform.

That's quite interesting. I look forward to seeing where they go with this...

The next SMS

I read an interesting article about text messaging today. For the lazy web link clickers out there (I subscribe to that list), here's a summary of the content:

Text messages sent to and from mobile phones will more than double over the next five years to 2.3 trillion messages sent by 2010, a survey said on Tuesday. [..] Total revenues from text messaging is forecast to grow to $72.5 billion in 2010 from $39.5 billion in 2005. [..] Gartner predicts the level of SMS messages will top 1.8 trillion in 2010" [adding that] "Wireless messaging is the most successful mainstream mobile data service to have emerged during the 30-year history of the cellular telecoms industry"

In a nutshell: mobile messaging rules when it comes to data and it will keep ruling for the next five years. Forget about mobile TV, games, picture sharing and such. Messaging is king.

I have a small question, though. If messaging is the driver of future data revenues, is SMS going to be adequate for the user needs? My answer is no...

1. SMS is limited in size of messages. It is not a problem when sending (people send Short Messages... fast and long SMS-typers are rare, although amazing to watch) but more when receiving. Screens are getting bigger, reading is not a problem. You can easily read a message sent from a PC on a mobile phone. Not with the current SMS. Combining more than one SMS is a horrible solution.
2. SMS just allows a single recipient. You cannot send a message to more than one person (and you pay for each message...). You cannot do reply-all (although there are some cool companies working on it). That's very limiting in this new age of social networking.
3. SMS does not support attachments. I am not talking PowerPoint here. That's power users. I am talking pictures... Every phone now has a camera. People want to send the pictures out. MMS has been a failure for the cost, configuration and clumsiness (in this order). The concept is still very valid. And a clear need is there.

We need messaging and SMS is not adequate. But it is pre-installed AND a standard working on every phone. That's the beauty of it. If you are in Europe, you know that half of the phones in a carrier network were not bought through that carrier. You take a SIM card, put it in. What works right away? Voice and SMS. Pre-installation and standard-based messaging is necessary.

So... that leaves you with the only option: the next SMS. Push-messaging (yep, SMS is push) based on standards, pre-installed on devices, capable of supporting attachments, reply-all and receiving your email. Your mobile life integrated with your web life. It's a SyncML client, or p-Imap or Lemonade. I do not really care. But I am convinced that is the future of mobile messaging for the three billion mobile users out there.

Not really a novelty, I know, but "Wireless messaging is the most successful mainstream mobile data service to have emerged during the 30-year history of the cellular telecoms industry". The funny thing is that it is not going to change any time soon...

It's the usability, stupid

In one of my past lives (I have plenty), I did a Ph.D. in usability. Since then, I can't resist from looking and playing with things, asking myself: why? Why are you asking me to do this? Why? Who designed this thing? How many real people (engineers belong to a peculiar species) ever looked at this stuff? Why?

A few weeks ago, my TiVo froze while playing. I called DirectTV and they made me re-format it. It froze again. They told me they were going to send me a new one for free.

They sent me the new DirecTV DVR instead.

I decided to give it a try. Although it was not built on open source as TiVo, all TiVo features were there. Actually, they even had a few more than TiVo. It was perfect from the requirements standpoint. The product manager checked all the boxes, QA did not find any bugs.

However, from a usability standpoint, it just sucks.

Nobody at DirectTV ever used it to watch a game. It is slow to respond to commands. It does not jump from one speed to another smoothly. You can just use it to watch a program as you would watch a tape on a VCR. Do not try to move around the program... All the features are there, but the consumer experience is just plainly bad.

What's the story here? The usability factor is key. Always key. Forever key. If you do not look at things with the eye of the user, you will build a perfect product that nobody will like to use. Emotions are everything.

When you look at mobile, the usability factor goes up an order of magnitude. You are dealing with a very small thing, that you carry around with you. Your attention span is measured in fraction of seconds, not minutes. You are not sitting on a couch or on a comfortable chair waiting. You are standing. You have people around you. It rains...

Still, so many products fail the usability test. Companies keep pushing the web paradigm to mobile users and complain about the network or the operators when their applications fail. They can't be used, they won't be used. Give me WAP a million times faster, I won't use it. Do not ask me to scroll and click. I won't. It should be simple but it is not. How many failures are we going to need for people to realize this?

I tried to send this message to DirecTV. I called them and told them their DVR sucked and I wanted my TiVo back. They said "Sorry, Sir, we do not have them anymore. And you just signed up for two additional years with us because you requested a new DVR. If you want, you can return it." That's interesting... My TiVo breaks. They send me a fake replacement "for free" and I am signed up for two more years... Or I can go back to VCR.

I went online, found a hacker TiVo site. Ordered a replacement hard drive. Assembled it. Put the TiVo back with double capacity. Sent the DirecTV DVR back to them.

I am back in TiVo heaven, smiling at how quick it is to respond to my commands and how well thought it is from the consumer standpoint. And I am now ready to move away from DirecTV directly to their competitors...

So much for usability. Believe me, I am not alone.

Bill Gates for President, good for Open Source?

I know some will be surprised, but I have always been a Bill Gates fan. It might sound bizarre, since I am an open source guy at heart, but if you look at the business Mr. Gates founded, it is hard not to admire his creation. A bit evil, for sure, but grandiose. Mostly late on innovation, but always using his unfair advantage at its best.

At the same time, I do not think there has ever been a moment in my life when I disliked Microsoft as now. Today, I would never buy anything Microsoft, not a game console, not an MP3 player, not software. I would avoid them with all my forces, from using Firefox to push the entire Funambol people to use OpenOffice. It was not like this in the past, although I never cheered for Microsoft in my life.

I asked myself why. Maybe because Apple looks so cool, maybe because the Zune sucks, maybe because of the Novell-Microsoft pact, maybe because of ActiveSync. I think I found the answer: Bill Gates is not there anymore. He is doing other stuff. Microsoft looks stale without him, including today the depressing launch of Vista (an Italian name BTW ;-)

What is Bill Gates doing these days? My younger brother works for the World Bank. His life, including his work at Unicef and WHO in Africa, has been dedicated to helping people in need. He told me once that what Bill Gates is doing for Africa with his foundation is incredible. He has a real admiration for Bill Gates, which is hard to believe since I would not consider my brother a capitalist. So, Bill Gates is using his money (a lot) to help people (a lot). He even got a load more cash from Warren Buffett recently... I trust my brother: Bill Gates is clearly doing a great job there.

A few weeks ago, reading the Scott Adams blog (I know, I am a geek, but I met him once when I was at the HP Labs and I got hooked), he proposed Bill Gates for President. Today, he did it again. I always find it hard to disagree with Dilbert.

What benefit would open source get from President Bill Gates? I have no idea, but he will definitely be forced to balance between his evil past and his current job. Somehow, I feel Open Source will benefit since it is good for the people. Because of it, he will have to push it. Cut him loose from Microsoft and he will come to the light side.

I know it sounds bizarre, but it is an interesting idea. Too bad I can't vote in this country yet...

Mobile Linux going up the stack with Trolltech Greensuite

Today Trolltech announced the Greensuite Initiative with the support of some nice companies (among them, Funambol). The idea is simple: move Mobile Linux up the stack.

If you have been following Mobile Linux and the various initiatives, you know the bulk of the discussion is still on how to make the power management work... Trolltech moves the discussion a bit up the stack, integrating solutions from multiple vendors and providing what they call a "menu of technologies". In their words:

The Qtopia Greensuite initiative gives customers the ability to select from a menu of technology choices enabling them to build a device specific to their requirements and target market they wish to address. The Initiative brings the leading Linux-based application platform, Qtopia Phone Edition; a hardware development device, Qtopia Greenphone; and a set of partner technologies together giving customers a pre-integrated software solution.

The idea is smart. You take a Linux OS and you build a GUI around it, but you still missing some components that are key for operators (such as push email from Funambol, which the world is really in needs of ;-). The variety of demands from consumers in this market is unbelievable. You cannot cover all the bases. Therefore, you partner with software vendors and have them build something on top of your "client middleware".

The Greenphone and this initiative are not that far away from OpenMoko and our agreement with FIC. The difference is that Trolltech is not a device manufacturer, so they cannot build unlocked devices and flood the market. However, they have relationships with carriers and device manufacturer, which helps a lot.

In any way you look at it, it is another great step for open source in mobile. Mobile Linux is enjoying a lot of momentum lately. If you read the recent Vodafone announcement about standardizing on three operating systems (Linux, Symbian, Windows Mobile), which one will cover the extreme vast majority of their devices, which are consumer oriented?

I guessed so. Long life to Mobile Linux.

Palm and lessons from Apple

Today, I happened to be at the Stanford Shopping Center for lunch. I stopped by the Palm store to see the Palm 680. The Palm store in Palo Alto should be their flagship store, I guess. It is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, after all. It should be shiny and inviting.

Instead, it is such a depressing place... The front window displays only PDAs, not even one Treo. Who in the world is still buying PDAs??? You walk in, the colors are bleak. Few Treos on two tables. Nobody inside but a guy talking to his phone (at least, that was a Treo). Since there was no 680 around, I asked him about it and he said "we do not have it, but I can put you on the waiting list". On the waiting list?? You announced it on October 12th and today you announced it is available on Cingular!! You do not even have ONE phone on display??

I walked out and I thought "man, this sucks, how in the world can they attract consumers?". So I walked few steps and I entered the Apple store. No windows. Full of people playing with devices. I looked around a bit lost for three seconds and a friendly guy asked me if I needed help. Actually, I was looking for the new iPod shuffle. It was on the table. I could not see it because it was so small. But he had one attached to his t-shirt and he gave it to me... I played with it for a minute. I loved it. I will definitely buy one (or maybe way more, we'll see). I walked out smiling.

That's a consumer experience. Apple announces a product, the same morning you walk in any Apple store and you play with it. My daughter wants to go to the Apple store because she wants to play with the videogames they have there. I am forced there. I ended up buying an iPod and an iBook for my wife, although I have never been a Mac person. I might become one, though...

Funny enough, I came to the office and I saw an article on the Mercury News about Palm and Apple where the CEO of Palm says "What, me worry" about Apple? Naaahhh.

Well, I do not think Palm should be worried about Apple. They should simply learn from what they do. They do it simply great. I am on THAT waiting list, the one of the people waiting for the iPod phone. It will be an awesome device and it will change the way we look at mobile. I am ready to bet on it. They will not do a deal with a carrier. They will go around them, with an unlocked device or an Apple MVNO. It will have messaging, beyond SMS (something between IM and email). They will open this market up and shake it.

I am looking forward to it, so should be Palm, if they are really thinking about consumers.

Motorola buys Good: the Palm opportunity

Motorola buying Good has been a strange transaction.

Two things pop up, in my opinion:
1. It was announced on a Friday
2. It was announced with an undisclosed amount

Every PR agent on the planet will tell you that you do NOT announce anything on Friday. You are not going to get press or move the stock price. When you spend 500 millions on a company (as later reported), you are supposed to be proud of your acquisition and make a big deal out of it. Why would you not disclose the amount? Because you feel it was too expensive and you signed a bad deal?

I am not sure if we'll ever know, but it sounds to me like someone in Motorola was not really convinced about this acquisition. How would you? Good was getting crashed by Microsoft on the server side (zero dollars is hard to fight), with Palm OS disappearing (it was the only thing they had left to make money). They were about to disappear... And they got bought for 500 millions. Looks like a good deal for the investors in Good, which poured 200+ millions in it. They must be so relieved ;-)

The acquisition has been clearly a reaction to Nokia Enterprise buying Intellisync. Moto had to show something in the enterprise as well, they went with Symbol first and Good second. They were kinda forced to.

Motorola is not an enterprise company. The are a consumer company. Symbol and Good will not help them selling more RAZR. They will help them to have an enterprise story (a "story", not a business, since I will be surprised if they will get 10% of the revenues from enterprises compared to what they are getting from consumers...). Same for Nokia, where the acquisition of Intellisync has not really been a great success... The goal (for both)? Make sure Microsoft does not eat the entire smartphone market.

Here lies the only good reason for Motorola I could come up with: avoid Microsoft to control their destiny in the enterprise (Motorola is shipping the Q, with Windows Smartphone on it), to then protect their consumer business. Which is the only one they really care about.

Now, would you spend 500M for something you really do not care about? Yes, if you have a lot of cash ;-) But you will not make a big deal out of it. You keep it quiet as much as you can.

Next step, if they are smart: you make sure to avoid the mistake to move Symbol and Good into the consumer space. They do not get it. They will never get it. They are close protocol, closed source, close everything... All the people in those companies just get enterprises only. You better keep them separated from your core consumer business.

If Moto is thinking about using Good for a consumer push email and multimedia sync play, they are setting themselves up for a big failure. If they plan to migrate the Good client on Mobile Linux, I just hope they target it to enterprises only. The consumer market is going to be open. It must be open as in SMS open, as in Voice open. Carriers need it to make money... Interoperability is the only way to move data on mass market mobile devices to the next level. You do not do it with a proprietary approach. You do not do it with the Good protocol.

In any way you look at this market, you see four big silos appearing: RIM, Microsoft, Nokia/Intellisync, Motorola/Good. All proprietary. All closed. All enterprise focused. Anybody trying to go horizontally on the mass market (supporting a billion devices) with a proprietary approach will be crushed (and acquired). Honestly, I will be surprised if Seven and Visto will be around at the end of 2007. The only possible approach for the mass market is going with open standards and a leveled play field. And open source, if I might add ;-)

Now, what about Palm? They are not a silo. They do not have a server, no push-email, no multimedia over-the-air synching. They could have been RIM but they missed it, because they never developed a server component. Their entire story around push email was Good, now gone to a competitor... It must be tough to be on Palm's board these days...

However, this actually might be a great opportunity for Palm.

If I can suggest a strategy (I am a Palm fan, after all): go open source. From the device (with Mobile Linux: throw away the Treo 700w that is a piece of #!#@) to the server. Forget the enterprise market and focus on consumers, moving smartphones to the rest of us. When I look at the Treo 680, it points to the right direction. Cut a niche for yourself, move out from Palm OS to Mobile Linux. Embrace open source on the server side (no suggestions here ;-) and remember why you made it initially.

It was HotSync who made Palm. Synching your data with your PC via a cable was the reason for using a Palm. The next level is over-the-air synching. Your PC becomes a server in the cloud, powered by Palm (who once was a MVNO, if you remember...). You sync your email, PIM, pictures and music over-the-air, with multiple devices. It is your consumer mobile hub. Powered by Palm. Do it open, with SyncML, and you'll be a player. Stay the course, support Microsoft and proprietary approaches and you'll be another Symbol, bought by a silo.

I know I am biased, but this looks like a good opportunity to me...

An Ironman for open source

In my post about "How to create a successful open source company", I mentioned "Think IRONMAN" as one of the key elements:

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.

Clearly, I was thinking about Daniele, when I wrote this ;-) You might have met him at LinuxWorld, OSCON, 3GSM and other conferences (or online). He just represented Italy (and Funambol, and the open source movement in general) at the Ironman World Championship in Florida. He made it to the end. Strong and patient as an open source guy. You need stamina in this world...

Why open source: viral marketing and visibility

The second most asked question I get, when I talk about Funambol, is "why open source" (the first one being "how do you make money?"...).

I believe I have spent few posts writing about the value of a community-driven development and, in particular, QA effort. The former being the best way to innovate and keep up with the unbelievable speed of the mobile market (linked to the Code Sniper program). The latter being the crucial element for a successful company in mobile, because it is simply impossible to test every phone on the market, if you are a proprietary company (this one linked to the Phone Sniper program).

Speed of development and innovation, combined with the widest device compatibility, high quality and support are not the only positive of open source. The other one is marketing and visibility.

Open Source is viral. If you build an open protocol open platform product with open source code (a GOOD one) and you are honest with your community, you will have a large audience. The audience will be a mix of developers and users. They will enhance it, create derivative products or simply use it. In all cases, they will simply talk about it. Blog about it. Whisper about it.

Below you see the graph taken from Alexa (which measures web sites traffic rankings) about the Funambol site, compared to the one of our competitors (although some of them are not really competitors, since they are focused on enterprises). We are the blue line...



We are a small company of 40+ people, which raised 5M in Venture Capital. Some of those in the graph are public, some raised 250M+, all have been around for ages. How can we be that much more popular than them?

It is called viral marketing. It is a phenomenal added benefit of open source. It will never stop, as long as you remain true to your open source roots and do not screw up your community. You can be public and spend millions in marketing, but you will never get that. You get it if you create a successful open source project. And it will cost you zero dollars.

Believe me, it is not easy. But once you get there, it feels good to look at that graph every morning and at our balance sheet at night ;-)

NewsForge: "open source software makes business sense"

Nice article today by Nathan Willis on NewsForge on Funambol and our tight-rope walk. In particular, I like the closing statement:

But Funambol's efforts so far are impressive, and the availability of its free PIM synchronization server is a big win, particularly given how locked-down and vendor-controlled the mobile device market is today.

We are upgrading the Funambol Portal this weekend to v3 and we have great ideas for the next version in January. We are trying to make the Portal another good example on how a commercial open source company can return some of its revenues to the community. For us, it will be a free PIM and push email portal, for starters. A great service for the community, another QA, development and innovation tool for Funambol. I like win-win...

Sun opensourcing Java: it is all about mobile

I have a privileged point of view, when it comes to Sun and Motorola, since I often talk to both. It is interesting how the press really missed the point on Sun opensourcing Java and the reason for them to choose GPL.

It is all about mobile (open source).

Let me go back in time. At OSBC, in April 2005, I heard Jonathan Schwartz say that GPL was really bad and CDDL was the way to go. At Java One 2006, he said that they were ready to open source Java but set no timeframe. On October 23rd, Rich Green said that "All of Java SE and all of Java ME should be completed, in terms of open source availability, by the end of the first quarter of calendar ’07". Two days later (two!), his boss Jonathan Schwartz said "by the end of the year". Three weeks later, it is all done, all open source and GPL. What prompted Sun to move that fast? And why GPL and not CDDL?

An interesting news hit two weeks ago. Few talked about it but it was really big. On November 1st, Motorola announced plans to build an open-source version of Java Mobile adopting the Apache License. They simply dropped a bomb inside Sun...

The amount of revenues Sun gets from Java ME is absolutely significant. I would bet it is the #1 software revenue stream at Sun. Motorola moving to its own open source Java ME means taking out 23% of those revenues (that's Moto market share on device shipments). If Nokia follows suit, there it goes another 34% of those revenues... That's almost 60% of a significant revenue stream down the drain, thanks to someone else doing what Sun was supposed to do months (years?) ago.

Sun moved fast. It might be too late but they really stepped up to the plate. I fully appreciate it. They had to send a shock and they went with GPL, not CDDL. Great choice, in my opinion. Where does GPL matters? In mobile, of course.

Java ME GPL means dual licensing. It triggers when embedded (who embeds Java SE?). It is the same model of Funambol, MySQL, Sleepycat and others (in alphabetical order, of course). The only possible commercial open source model, in my opinion, after the devastation of the services-only model by Oracle. With CDDL, they would have lost the virality of GPL. They would have lost the chance to still make money licensing their VM, while attracting the largest possible community. It is a smart move, and another testament of dual licensing. It is the model that works, in particular in mobile.

In summary, Sun opensourcing Java is all driven by mobile. The timing came from mobile. The license is due to mobile. Motorola, in my opinion, was the target, not IBM. I am a Java fan and I always will be. They were clearly late but maybe not too late. Let's see what happens next. This market is moving so fast, it will be interesting to watch... Once again, though, one thing is clear to me: mobile open source is king and it is gaining momentum every day.

My Mobile 2.0 Manifesto

Last week I was invited to speak at the Mobile2.0 event in San Francisco. It had all the right elements for a starting point of a revolution: a not-too-perfect organization but with the right people at the right time. I feel it will define the start of a new era. Turning points are defined by simple things, for example a mobile conference that happens in a basement of a hotel, where there is no cellular reception... People that cannot show demos. Just talk. And talk. Guys on the stage with a gazillion boring PowerPoint presentations and everybody that just wait for the discussion to start. Everything happening in the coffee break.

I know Mike did not do it on purpose (see his comment after the conference to believe me), but the result was just perfect. Read all the blogs that it generated. Check Brian's comment in particular. Something is boiling here.

As Steve Bratt noticed in the keynote, this looks like 1994. That was the year I founded Internet Graffiti. Connection to the web was slow and difficult (via modem, paying per minutes). It was all proprietary with some few good standards emerging (HTML and HTTP). Web clients were crappy and you had to develop the same page for each of them (remember Mozilla 2 and IE 2?). There were walled gardens everywhere. I launched Internet Graffiti because I noticed one simple thing: the world needed the web badly. Therefore, I thought, it will happen. Nothing could stop it. Walled gardens collapses, technology improves, standards emerge, speed goes up and cost goes down.

Now, it is just the same in mobile. Everybody is talking about Web 2.0, but they are missing the real revolution. Mobile is the next big thing. The web is just evolving and maturing. The Web was 1.0 in 1994. It is probably at version 7.0 now, following the versions of IE... Mobile is really moving into 2.0 now. And it will represent the biggest paradigm shift of this decade, as the web in the nineties.

Now, I have seen just one attempt to define what Mobile 2.0 means, from Dan (the other organizer of the conference). Although my friend Peter had the best comment during the conference: "It is Mobile 2.0 because we say so", let me try to give a concise summary of what I expect Mobile 2.0 to be.


My Mobile 2.0 Manifesto

1. Mobile 2.0 is NOT a mobile version of Web 2.0. We made that mistake before, please let's avoid it this time. WAP was a failure because the hypertext paradigm (with links and clicks) requires a mouse. No mouse in mobile. Forget the web. Let's look at mobile apps on devices, that are available when you turn the device on, that store local data, that react to push messages. Call them mobile widgets and have them use HTTP to communicate, or AJAX. But let's forget the browser paradigm or we'll be targeting a WAP 2.0 failure.

2. Mobile 2.0 is all about open standards and open platforms. Same as Web 1.0. It all happens when standards get into the mainstream. Let's forget ActiveSync, BlackBerry, Good and the like. Standards are here and will make this big. It is SyncML and others. They are on 800,000,000 phones today.

3. Mobile 2.0 is driven by open source. Open source is the center element of Mobile 2.0. Developers drive it. It is an unstoppable force. Look at what we are doing with OpenMoko and Mobile Linux. Look at Java ME going open source today or the announcement of Motorola a couple of weeks ago. We are pushing big companies to change and move towards open source. It is an unstoppable process.

4. Mobile 2.0 happens with flat fee billing. It is the same as Web 1.0, which exploded with flat fees after starting with modems. Same here. People using Mobile 2.0 will come from enterprises first (as in Web 1.0), then will move mainstream when flat fee billing will be available and cheap enough for everybody. Let's all push the carriers to understand this. They might risk to become a dumb pipe, but they will make money with it. And it is inevitable, with Wi-Max and the like coming into the picture. Better to move now than when it is too late.

5. Mobile 2.0 is centered on content and messaging. This one is easy. The phone is a device you react to, when content is pushed to you (your email, RSS feeds, soccer results, music, ...) or you push it to someone else (when you take a picture or a video, and you send it around). It is not about standalone games.

That's it, five rules I will follow working with our Funambol community. I know we'll represent a big element of Mobile 2.0 and I am excited about it. If we are at 1994 now, the next five years will be a lot of fun.

After election day...

Thanks to everyone who voted for this blog and made it in the Top 20 Wireless Industry Blogs ("that certainly represent the crème de la crème in industry coverage", yeah right). Being a Fierce Favorite "after thousands of votes" is nice, although I know I made it only because some of you hackers managed to write a script to circumvent the sum trick and voted a thousand times. Nice to have the hackers on my side. Let's all get together and crack the BlackBerry protocol now ;-)

OpenMoko: how you change the game in mobile

At the Open Source in Mobile conference, today Sean finally announced OpenMoko. He was the "mystery speaker" at the conference. Slashdot picked up the news, which usually means it is big.

IT IS BIG.

It is a truly mobile open source phone, from the bottom up. As you can see from the press release, Funambol happens to be the thing powering the top of the stack, push email and PIM for starters, so I am superexcited.

We are not talking about an academic effort here. We are talking about the largest ODM on the planet (FIC, the Taiwanese company that makes the phone, a sister company of HTC) putting its weight behind a mobile open source phone. They can crank up millions of phones... And the largest open source community in mobile (that's us ;-) is already on it. I am expecting our developers to start building any sort of app on that phone, from enterprise verticals to consumer stuff. Super super super cool.

As the Inquirer wrote:

"This is the first phone in a long time to get us really interested in what it is, what it isn't, and the philosophy behind it. The philosophy is the thing that makes Linux great... it is really open."

The world is changing... Mobile Open Source is the way to go. Join the revolution.

I am a Linus Fonero

A few days ago, it was Freedom Friday in San Francisco. The FON guys were giving away their routers for free. Good marketing stunt. At least, it attracted my attention... What is FON?

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.

It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

I love communities and this one looked interesting. I just need La Fonera router in my house, I offer Wi-Fi to people passing by (I got plenty of bandwidth I do not use, and you can limit the public one) and I get free access to any other Fonera on the planet (here you have the map, check your town, there are even five in Pavia, Italy). I have been preaching to my daughter about the value of sharing. THIS is sharing. And I have the feeling I am getting back way more than I give, which is my favorite sharing :-)

How do they make money? If you are just passing by and you do not own and share a Fonero router, you pay. Just 3 dollars per day. FON takes it, or shares with you as a Fonero owner. Yep, you can make money with this... There are three kind of Foneros: Alien (do not own a router, just suck your network paying), Linus (sharing the router and accessing every other router for free) and Bill (making money from sharing their router).

What do you guess did I choose between Linus and Bill?

Correct answer ;-) I bought the router online (for five dollars five), plugged in and I am good to go. I have two networks, one private and one public. I can even give free access to five friends (even if they are not Foneros). Move fast, because the price will raise to 29.95 on Wednesday.

This is a nice community, backed by good money (sorry, I live in Silicon Valley, communities are cool but when Index Ventures and Sequoia are involved, they grow faster. See Skype, Google, YouTube and so on). It is a big play and very challenging, but if it takes off, it might be huge.

One issue for them to solve: how do you get access to the FON Maps when you are traveling and you do not have access to your computer (since you first need to find another Fonero...)? You need it on your mobile, possibly with GPS and directions on where the closest active one is. I am sure our community can help here... FONambol anyone?

Thin and Fat (clients)

An article caught my attention today. It talks about Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO. I already expressed my admiration for him in a previous post (and now that he added also when to if and how Java will be open source, I even like him more). In the article, one answer - in my opinion - stands out:

Schwartz panned thin clients as an end-all, be-all solution: "I just don't believe in thin clients. Right there, I said it." Even iPods are thick clients, he said.

It looks like a simple comment, but it is simply going against the entire world of Web 2.0 ;-) That is like saying "a web browser is only meant to browse the web". Unheard of. Blasphemy.

Well, I agree with Jonathan. I do not buy the idea of Web 2.0 around doing Word Processing, Email and stuff inside a browser. Maybe because, when I started Internet Graffiti in 1994, I was forced to develop sites thinking about the concept of the hypertext, the links and the Back and Forward buttons. The last three items are the basis for web browsing. If you run an app inside a browser and you screw everything up clicking on Back or Forward, why are you running it inside the browser?? Why don't you have a downloaded app on your PC, that updates automatically? Just because Google say so??

Ok, enough with the PC Web 2.0. When it comes to mobile (not just the iPod hardware as a thick client, but also the software inside the iPod) I just do not see the thin client paradigm work at all. I thought about Mobile Ajax, but I do not seem to get convinced about it. I want a mobile widget pre-installed (the music player). I want the data there when I turn it on (my music stored locally). I want an iPod (actually, I like the new shuffle, in case you do not know which present to buy me for Christmas).

T-shirt idea of the month:

FAT IS COOL
IN MOBILE

BTW, if you happen to be at Mobile2.0 in San Francisco on Monday, I'll be there giving a demo of our Phone Sniper tool during the Launch Pad session ("showcasing cutting edge start-ups in the mobile space"). If you are around, give me a buzz.

It is raining...

Today it is raining in Silicon Valley. For us living here, it is a major disappointment. We pay very high rents to stay here. We pay for the sun. When it rains, I just want my money back.

On a different note, we won another award today. It is raining awards, lately, but these are not disappointing. In particular, I like this one a lot. It is the Editor's Choice 2006, by the Linux Journal. The category is "Mobile Device".

Funambol isn't actually a mobile device, but we chose to give it the Editors' Choice if for no other reason than to avoid plugging the Nokia 770 yet again. Funambol is an open-source SyncML server that acts as a middleware between groupware servers and mobile devices. It supports the most popular PDAs and commodity mobile phones. It's great, and the community is finally coming up with a solution that rivals the best commercial competition.

What amazes me is the list of the other products there: Firefox, OpenOffice, Asterisk, Apache, Eclipse, Ubuntu, Postgres, Ruby, Quake (that's my favorite)... Not bad. I am starting to believe we are onto something here... Let the rain continue!

Tales from a user

I was browsing around sites and I found one comment titled "How to do over the air sync with your own server" that matches nicely my stance on ActiveSync and Microsoft. I thought you might enjoy it ;-)

Thanks to someone here, I took a look at funambol (an open source SyncML server with associated client plugins for Outlook, Smartphones etc).

I have to say that so far it RULES. I am going to delete active sync from my machines. Ding-dong the witch is dead !

Funambol just works (except for encryption, presumably a bug
in the version I'm using). It syncs notes, tasks, contacts and
calendar over TCP/IP. It will use either WiFi or CDMA on the
VX6700. You install a server (I have it on our linux mail server),
and clients for all your devices (I use two PCs with outlook,
an iPAQ PDA and the XV6700). Each client pushes and pulls
its changes to the server. They all stay in sync, all done over
the network.

This is exactly the product that Microsoft should have made
but did not. Activesync is the spawn of the devil by comparison.

This makes the VX6700 so much nicer to use because I can
keep it my pocket at all times (never forget it when I go
to a meeting, plugged into the cradle). But yet it can keep in
sync.

Phone Sniper launched: "You give them cash???"

A few weeks ago, we launched a program called Code Sniper. The goal was to accelerate development of open source code from the community, giving a cash incentive (1,000 to 3,000 dollars). Last week we launched Phone Sniper. The goal here is to formalize the unbelievable amount of input we get every day about phones working with our platform and the development of "Synclets", small pieces of code that make a particular phone (with a certain firmware version, on a specific carrier on the planet) work with Funambol. If you do it and share it, we pay you 25 dollars.

Now the question: wait, are you giving them cash??? Isn't this open source, where everybody works for free, you love each other and just want to topple Micro$oft because it is evil?

Yes, this is open source. The source is open. Everybody benefits from it. We love each other because of this.

Nope, not everybody works for free. Some need food on the table for their kids. And we do not care about Microsoft, we are just building the best platform possible for mobile. Actually, we would love to work with Microsoft (although they might not like our open standard approach, because they might actually trying to be the evil empire afterall...)

With our honest dual licensing approach, we are not upselling to our community. We are building the best platform possible, together. The community is us. Many make money bundling the solution and giving it to their customers, with the professional services around it. Some do not, they are single individuals just helping for the sake of it. Funambol though keeps making money with the Carrier Edition, selling it to mobile operators. Our customers are giving us cash (not Playstations). Why should we keep it all for ourselves or give the community yet-another-gadget?

Therefore, yes, we are giving them cash. There is nothing evil in that. It helps us making cash. Some comes back. The software improves even more. We make more cash. More comes back. Is that simple. There is nothing dirty in cash. Cash is great.

And, by the way, it works phenomenally. Code Sniper attracted developers now building a Google Calendar and Address Book connector, a Yahoo one, a Symbian one, a DB4O integration and so on. Phone Sniper got to 50 phones in two days. Good luck to any proprietary company trying to do this. Open source rules.

In case you are interested to hear more, I wrote about Balancing Open Source and Commerce in the Enterprise Open Source Magazine which is out this week (I believe). It is a long article, I warn you. But it might give you the entire story of the tight-rope walk in a single piece. So you could stop follow my blog and save some time ;-)

Red Hat, Oracle and (again) dual licensing

A week ago I was writing about RedHat... Quoting myself (I feel can do it, since just a week passed, otherwise I would look like a old grumpy man ;-) "They [Red Hat] do not control it [Linux]. 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."

Well, pretty weak it was a week ago... Working well - for now - a week ago... Today Centos became Oracle... Red Hat price collapsed (their market cap is half of what it was six months ago). Oracle has a bigger support organization than Red Hat... They will support the same exact identical precise code. At half the price (!). Now it is very weak and not working well... That's scary stuff if you are an investor in Red Hat.

Honestly, I am not convinced Oracle can really do it. Taking a product from someone else and support it is not an easy task (although this is what Red Hat is doing with Linux...). My bet is that Mr. Ellison is going to let Red Hat stock price slip a little bit more, than buy it with another hostile takeover. That will make him quasi-Microsoft, which has always been his goal. And he will buy JBoss in it, which would be a nice revenge.

Anyway, my point is that - once again - dual licensing is the only viable option to build a defensible business with open source. Anybody can take Funambol Community Edition, but I can give mobile operators my Carrier Edition and be sure that nobody will hijack my business. The mobile operators will get the source code, not my competitors. It is licensing, not just support.

As Marten once said (I guess it was him, I have a veneration for Marten so anything smart must come from him), my mobile operators want the source code of my product as much as they want the airbag in their car. It must be there (who would buy a car without airbag?), but they hope they will never use it. What's the point to give them the instructions to build the car? Just give them the airbag, which is what they want. And your competitor will not benefit from the instructions to build the car...

Let me just be clear. That does NOT apply for the Community Edition. There, the source code is everything. We are building the city car together, the one that everybody needs, cheap but reliable. On top of it, we are taking that design and we are building a race car for the mobile operators. That's what they need. They race cars. They do not build them. They do not care about building them. They want the fastest, most affordable, most secure, most reliable race car. They will pay top dollars for it. Our community is different from our customers. That's my honest dual licensing. Not weak and working well (hopefully for a while ;-)

Walking the tight-rope walk in open source is everything. Building a defensible business model is the only way to get open source companies to the famous billion dollars in revenues. Being disruptive is cool, but being smartly disruptive is better. That is, I guess, what Mr. Ellison is all about.