Three Days with a Phone

Hoora! I can’t believe we’re finally here! vufone is launched!

Before we begin with vufone, let me first catch my breath. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start where it all began and tell you what brought us to this point.

About 2 years ago, 716 days ago to be exact, I bought a new mobile phone. After nearly 20 years of Nokia addiction I decided to jump back in the water and I got the new (at that time, of course) Sony Ericsson k800i. The walkman capabilities, 3.2MB camera and slick interface just did it for me.

Excitement turned to dismay as the next few days were hard to imagine. The phone itself was great, don’t get me wrong, but I just couldn’t get my old data on it. Imagine the ultimate black book, my mobile contact list, after all these years. The ringtones, some of them cut specifically for me by a DJ prodigy who also happens to be my sister in law, were they all destined to be gone? and what about my messages? could they ever be salvaged? I was sweating bullets!

For the first couple of days I juggled PC suites, Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson’s respectively. I couldn’t get them to communicate with each other. I then pulled my bluetooth capabilities to the max. Finally, I registered to 3 different internet services that asked me to master guru terms like SyncML and forced me to dig deeply into my phone settings. In the end, I managed to transfer most of my contacts, some of my ringtones and none of my messages.

It sucked, it was cumbersome, it was tiring, it was frustrating and in the bottom line it was a failure. Then came a wonderful moment of Eureka. And we sat down, rolled our sleeves and decided to solve it.

2 years and later vufone.com finally opens to the general public. Vufone was primarily designed so you won’t have to go through what I went through, but we realized it can actually do much more. You don’t need to learn any technical term, just register and follow the instructions. The rest is up to you.

So what exactly can you do with vufone? Well, to start with you can back up, restore and manage all of your contacts, meetings, pics, clips, tracks, ringtones and messages. This means you can switch phones without losing a single bit of information. You can manage your appointments and meetings from our web or using our MS Outlook plugin. In addition, you can upload your pics and clips on an ongoing basis and share them with your friends via your favorite social networks. You can also synch your music tracks with your phone and play them on the go. Come to think of it, you can actually manage your phone using a friendly web based interface.

You may say “these guys probably support only a handful Windows mobile device” - well, No. Our focus was on mass-market phones. Sure, the service supports Windows Mobile and Symbian, but more importantly, it also supports your standard feature phones such as Nokia S40, SonyEricsson, Motorola and others. Take a look at the Supported Devices page to see a full list of supported phones. Don’t see your phone there? drop us a note in the support forum. Supporting many languages was also a priority for us, realizing that as weird as it may sound, there are other spoken languages other than English. So, we launched the service in the following languages: English, French, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian.

Oh yeah, we realize our service ain’t perfect yet and we appreciate your support in making it such. For the next 3 months we offer it absolutely for free. For the lifetime of your phone that is. That’s right, join vufone now and get it all for free for the lifetime of your phone. 100% FREE. Guaranteed.

Happy to be here and thankful for your support and feedback, both good and bad (good is fun to hear, bad helps us improve).

I just got 2 new phones from SonyEricsson: C702 and C902. Both are based on the new JP-8 Java platform. What I found very interesting in these phones is that SonyEricsson simplified the way the user sets permissions to Java applications.

Instead of setting the different permissions for network access, user data access etc. All that is needed is to set the application’s permission to “Trusted” and that’s all. The application is automatically assigned the most trusted settings to all permissions.

This is definitely a step forward with user experience when using Java applications and way better from what we are used to with Nokia S40 phones.

I’ve been involved in mobile service development for quite a while now. I can’t escape comparing the huge leap Internet and PC applications have made compared with mobile services. Not that mobile applications did not progress over the past years but surprisingly mobile data services did not manage to reach the mass market – the average user who doesn’t want to be bothered with configuration, certification, permissions etc. The average user just wants an application that works on a standard mid-range device.

The key to accessing the mass market of mobile users is providing your application on a J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) platform (such as Nokia S40 and SonyEricsson JP-x phones) not Symbian or Windows Mobile which represent anywhere between 5% and 10% of the Worldwide phone market. Okay, you may say, what is the problem here? Just develop an application on J2ME, allow everyone to download it and distribute it like any other application on the Internet.

Here is the major problem of mobile application development – J2ME applications require to be signed in order to be downloaded and activated on the phone. Moreover, you need also the right signature to access various data on the phone.

There are 3 main levels of signing:

1. Handset Vendor or Mobile Operator signature – allows access to all the applicable APIs and allows setting permissions so they do not interfere with the normal application flow;
2. Trusted Third Party signature – allows limited access to the phone’s API, requires the user to manually confirm various permissions on the device for the application;
3. Non-Trusted Third party – very limited access to the APIs and really annoying permission set.

If I want to develop a really seamless application with full access to the phone, I need either a Handset Vendor signature or a Mobile Operator signature. Both signatures are unobtainable for anyone who just wants to develop an application and distribute it over the net.

Moreover, even if I sell my service or application to mobile operators I have a problem since about 50% of the devices on any given network are NOT bought through the mobile operator but from 3^rd party stores who do not have the root certificates of the operator on the devices they sell.

As a result, no application developer can ever address the full potential of the market without a signature from the handset vendor. Just one “small” problem here – no one can get this signature other than the handset vendors themselves.

The outcome is that the handset vendors have an unfair advantage over anyone (including the mobile network operators) with mobile service development. Interestingly enough, with the more advanced mobile phone platforms such as Symbian there is a simple way to receive equivalent signature through a process called “Symbian Signed” – so why not with J2ME?

Just imagine if this was not Nokia, SonyEricsson or Motorola but Microsoft. Can you imagine the world wide response if Microsoft were telling you “you can develop an application for Windows, but if we were to develop the application, it would ork just a tad better, smoother and more efficiently”.

This article was published in the December 2007 edition of IVCJ - The Israel Venture Capital and Private Equity Journal on NewACT.

For more information about IVCJ, check out the IVC website at www.ivc-online.com.