State0 Blog

Tom Sheahan just moved to Austin from Australia. He is the founder of Red Oxygen which is an enterprise text messaging company. He is looking to slowly move his headquarters here to Austin. Red Oxygen delivers messages for many major brands already and is hoping to expand its US customer base by setting up shop here. This is a step above the email TXT that many websites take advantage of currently. If you are interested in doing some TXTing to your customers, they have an API that makes things easy.

I have decided one of the best things I can do to connect to and promote Austin is to interview people doing cool things here. I figure I should start with what I do and so I interviewed my bosses. I have been working with Lee and Carrie Little here in Austin for 3 years. They founded and run BarZ Adventures, a GPS tour guide and gaming solution company. They are great to work with and for. I forced them to let me put them on camera yesterday and I have put it up for your viewing pleasure. I may at some point attempt to transcribe these interviews, but for now I will let you just enjoy the raw footage. Please forgive my lack of interview/camera skills. (Doing this threw me off a bit. It is kind of like hearing yourself on someone’s answering machine.) Hopefully, I will improve with time. If you are starting something cool in Austin, I would love to interview you. Hit me up. I am hoping to post a few more of these types of interviews while I am here at SXSW.

At the Texas Wireless Summit, John Donovan, CTO of AT&T, gave a keynote at the end of the conference. It was a sit down interview given by Richard Schwartz of Openwave. Most of the conversation was about how AT&T takes a strategy of weaving together technologies to deliver an unified “experience.” John talked about both the mobile domain and the home area network environment. At the end of it all, I got the chance to ask a question. I asked him, “What verticals need better mobile applications?” He actually answered the question I wanted to ask which was, “What apps will net the most profit?” I know that I am not the only person interested in what it takes to create the best iPhone apps. So, I thought I would reproduce some of what I wrote in my notes here.

Focus on:

• Individuals of HIGH value. Folks who’s time is worth too much for them to open a laptop or call someone for info. These users need applications that can save them time. They also have the money to spend. A good example would be an application that enabled high value sales team members to better utilize SalesForce.
• Companies that manage and maintain a huge number of laptops. There are scenarios where those laptops could be replaced with or supplemented by mobile devices. It reduces costs and headache for those IT departments. It also makes the employees more mobile. This point can be generalized to replacing any extra piece of hardware such as an analog monitor or bar code scanner.
• Anything that is necessarily mobile, mapping for example. Loopt is a good example and has had success on the iPhone.
• Low security risk applications. This seemed to be more of a suggestion to avoid heartache. There are certainly big opportunities in the banking and finance industries. However, that is more sensitive data and will result in slower adoption and more ridicule.

I thought for a while about what app I would like to build that would meet many of those criterion. Then I went looking for it. Here it is: TripIt. I knew someone would have created it by now. It is a travel organizer. If they can successfully help executives and executive secretaries, they will be a money app. I called Loopt early on; I look forward to seeing how TripIt does.

Photo taken by Gaetan Lee

I spent the last couple of days at the Texas Wireless Summit. Great event with numerous industry leaders and entrepreneurs. My company BarZ Adventures was kind enough to sponsor me to go. I attended once before in 2004. The event has grown quite a bit since then. The general theme this year was Open: Open Networks, Open Platforms, Open Operating Systems… Every session started with a different definition of the term open and was followed by conversations of the market’s movement toward openness. Here are the areas where I see real change toward openness:

• Open Networks: Wednesday was highlighted by a keynote given by Tony Lewis. He is the VP of Open Development at Verizon Wireless. He made some very aggressive claims about where they were planning to take Verizon. He repeated a number of times that the focus was on the network. Then he presented plans to allow manufacturers and OEMs to certify devices for use on their networks within a 4 week time frame. That process would drastically reduce the time to market for new technology in the wireless space. It would also give access to a powerful network. Combining this kind of model with the advent of LTE will blow the roof off of a wide range of applications. Yesterday, John Donovan, CTO of AT&T made allusions to similar plans but made no concrete claims to an Open LTE.
• Open Operating Systems: Google’s Android is the obvious leader and is causing a market shift. Nokia has followed close behind by purchasing the rest of Symbian and opening up the Symbian Foundation. Mark Louison, President of Nokia Inc., gave a keynote yesterday at the summit and explained that he felt the half billion dollar purchase was a smart move because advancing the industry would necessarily advance Nokia. It is certainly true that when you own the OS, you own the market, even if you have to open source to do it.
• Open Platforms: Iphone is the big winner here. They have created the perfect platform for developers. Donovan did not make many comments to this effect because he had no need to. However, Mark Louison was eager to point out that Symbian had many more applications and a larger number of developers worldwide. Across the board, there is a definitive move towards letting developers in. The greatest hurdle here is going to be enabling developers to develop across the 5+ major platforms more easily.

Of everything I soaked up from the gathering, this one point was, pleasingly, most apparent: The time has come for application developers to reign in the mobile space! Everyone from every panel agreed that the day has gone where networks control the market. They are no longer the lone value provider. There were many who were skeptical about how the shift would play out. The most common flaw cited was support structures. How will networks shift support costs to application developers? My thought is that networks need to help application developers create brands and own customers. This will be best for everyone. Whatever the case is, the change will happen whether the support structures are ready or not. Clearly, it is time for innovation to come from the venture laborists!