"Mobisy's Spam Manager" ROCKS!!

Well, last some days we were really excited to find out response to our first product, i.e. "Mobisy's Spam Manager". Every single morning we used to check our mails, for the number of downloads that happened last nite. It feels great to share with you all, that the response has been simply "awsome":). Till now,Spam Manager has been downloaded for more than 300 times, and that too only from "Handango".
If we sum up downloads from other sites, it can simply be doubled(i.e.600 downloads in just 3 weeks).

We also have uploaded "Spam Manager Ver 1.0 for S60 3rd Edition Devices" at following places:
1. "Nokia Software Market"
2. "MobiHand"

We got nice reviews, another reason to feel proud. We were also contacted by a reporter from 'Selular Magazine', Indonesia. It seems there's going to be an article on our "Spam Manager" in their October Edition.

Do go out, and try "Call and SMS Spam Manager for S60 3rd Edition" from Mobisy. I bet, its 'The Cheapest' and 'The Best'.

Mobisy's Call/Sms Spam Manager is Alive n Kickin!!!

We@ Mobisy are proud to annouce the release of our first application, "Spam Manager Ver 1.0 for S60 3rd Edition Devices". Its a nice application to keep spam callers/smsers at bay. Now stopping junk marketing calls and smses is in your own hands. Just add that annoying 'Number' in Spam Manager's Spam List.We will take care of the rest. Peace at last!!!

Lets download "Spam Manager(Trial Version)".

For more info, have a look "here".

Mobisy's Head Shoulder and Foot

I came across this extremely good blog today. It basically tells you how important it is for a start-up to find a Wise Head to question everything, a Broad shoulder to weep and generally to support you when you need, and a strong foot to kick you in the butt when you need it !!

I agree with almost everything mike says here. It matches quite well with my own experience. It got me thinking about who would be the head , shoulder and foot of Mobisy if we have one and turns out we already have those positions filled ..:-).

Chhavi and sometimes Bhupender act like our wise heads, they want us to cross check everything and assume nothing !! Also we have some nice advisers from the industry who help us keep our own head on the shoulder.
The shoulder job is more divided and is done by all of us from time to time. Obviously it helps that in addition to being co-founders of Mobisy we are firstly great friends of each other and that chemistry helps to pull each other up when things do not look as well as they should.
As far as foot is concerned, similar to mike, our respective spouses do that job extremely well. They will not let us fail or accept failure.

iPhone, Google gears and Mobisy

Last few weeks have been sort of turning point for Mobile Internet.

iPhone is phenomenal for us in Mobile Industry. I feel it would be awesome for consumers as well.
You may have already heard the hype
1.iPhone means tail wagging the dog
2.it means a completely new era in Mobile industry,
3.It is special since it's a laptop convergence device running a full OS X
All of above is true but from our point of view the biggest impact iPhone will have on mobile industry will be as an internet device running a full web browser. A first mobile phone vendor which dares 3rd party developers to develop applications 'only' based on their Safari browser.
“Safari” is the key. BTW like many other innovations in iPhone, iPhone is not the first device running full Safari browser on a mobile device. Nokia has been doing it for more than a year now, what's more they have even open sourced their Symbian port. Steve Jobs declaration in Apple WWDC really changes the rules of the game. To give you an idea, we in Mobile Industry struggled with following application development environments till now

1.Native (Symbian, Microsoft Pocket PC, BREW etc) :- These are extremely powerful in terms of technology but completely un-portable across devices and operating systems
2.Java/J2ME :- This is moderately powerful and moderately portable.
3.Flashlite :- A new entrant in the area and a good competitor for J2ME in games development area.
4.Micro browser based :- These have very limited functionality but are portable provided you do not use any AJAX/ Web 2.0 technologies.

iPhone promises that today we can develop all the AJAX applications we want with the hope that tomorrow Apple will make the browser based environment more powerful by giving it device access.

This brings me to second life changing event in Mobile internet area, advent of Google Gears. Google gears basically enhances your PC browser environment by enabling developers to give cool features like off-line access to application data. And bringing this development to Mobile phones has excited many analysts in the world as you can see here and here. I feel it's only matter of time.

I still haven't talked about how does it all affects Mobisy, I mean why the hell am I ranting about it?
Hmm.. if you don't know us probably you may not know, we started talking about Mobisy with a vision of reinventing Mobile Internet around an year ago. Our whole idea is of a scripting based fully customizable and personalized simple User Interface platform for Mobile Phones(Mobile Easy). No wonder the product we are working on is also in the same area !!! iPhone and Google gear validate our concept today. And that's why we take this opportunity to talk about our product publicly. Not to mention, it also saves us some effort of explaining basics ..:-)
We are working on a product which complements the visions of Apple, Nokia , Google to the core. We are building an application development platform for mobile phones which will enable developers to develop internet applications with capabilities of a native environment with off-line access!! Sounds impossible? Not quite.. We already have some private demos and proof of concepts working, so watch this space for more details in future.. If you can't wait to know more, feel free to drop me a line.

The iPhone vs Infineon

Here is a nice post about how iPhone will impact our ex company Infineon in a positive way. A good read as always from Sramana Mitra.
Main points to be taken are :-
iPhone and it's nearest competitor PRADA are both based on Infineon chips and hence its money for Infineon on both sides of the fence no matter who wins. I find it a little difficult to believe the revenue numbers for Infineon since I do not think modem chips can be sold for that much in today's market. All the same, fact remains that Infineon seems to be turning a corner with iPhone.

Hurray !!!

Our first application is ready for Alpha testing. It is the coolest way to keep marketing calls and SMSs at bay.
Here is the link to the demo of the application. So any of you / your friends family etc have a GPRS enabled Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phone, please get in touch with me. It's completely free !!(At least for the time being)
This link may help you find the device compatibility.

Technology vs Business Case

Coming from technical background we all tend to think with our technological spectacles. When someone asks us simple questions like btw who is your customer and how are you going to sell this thing, we tend to fumble. Our thoughts start from cool things we can achieve with technology at hand and tend to end with how users will benefit from it. Which means user perspective is sometimes the last thought on our mind. After talking to plenty of people in the industry I came to realise that this phenomenon is not only limited to us technical people, we have been able to successfully infect all the marketing ,sales and finance guys who work with us as well. You know what if you look at some funded companies in India you may get the feeling that VCs love cool technologies too. (see all the funded companies in the area of IMS, WiMax, and so on...)

BTW here is a nice article explaining the advantages of ignorance in start-ups.(wink)

As usual there is other school of thought from people coming from non technical backgrounds like finance, marketing, sales or people who have really seen the world and know many things.These guys tend to believe that an idea should start from a business case, we need to know what is the market, whom and how we can sell our product and eventually how we can make money from it from the beginning. Like someone told me the other day, you can do a start-up in two ways first, where you do what you love to do and believe in it, this way you may succeed but chances are low. Other way is where you try to know as much as possible in advance and then be flexible enough to start loving something which you know will sell, this way you may not be an outright success, but the chances are more that you will not fail completely.

Now with time, I have come to realise that the later kind of people do have a valid point after all. It is eventually how you want to do your start-up. If you do it as a business, you should listen to these guys and should create something which you know will sell from the beginning. But if you are doing it for your own pleasure, you can have a luxury of venturing in to something completely unknown.Here is a nice read about mindset of current bunch of entrepreneurs from Sramana Mitra.

Obviously the best case scenario is that these two kind of people converge on something they are both really convinced about and that's when you get the Woz and Jobs combination.