It’s All Good and It’s All Mobile!

The mobile apps arena is hot – red hot.  Here’s a snapshot of the last 6 months to see how fast the landscape is changing and growing:

September 2009: Gartner sees PC shipments declining 2%, being outpaced by laptops, smartphones and other mobile devices, and in a similar vein, an RBC analyst estimates that smartphones are on rapid clip to outpace PCs by 2011.  The biggest news comes out of Apple, announcing 2 billion apps downloaded from its iTunes app store.

October 2009: Verizon announces plans to carry Motorola’s Droid, bringing the total number of Google Android-powered mobile devices available on the market to more than a dozen. In lockstep, Gartner forecasts that Android will leapfrog Apple’s iPhone OS for the no. 2 spot by 2012.

November 2009: Apple counts more than 100,000 apps in its iTunes app store. Pizza Hut generates $1 million in sales with its iPhone app and eBay rakes in nearly $400 million from mobile buyers.

December 2009: Nearly 54 million smartphones were sold in Q4 2009, up over 40% from the same period in 2008.  Wall Street Journal shares a survey finding that nearly 1/3 of consumers are using, or considering using, mobile financial services in 2010.

January 2010: Apple unveils the long awaited iPad, setting the stage to completely transform mobile computing, and to boot, announces 140,000 apps and 300 million downloads from the iTunes app store.

February 2010: 50,000 descend upon Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Demand for mobile developers grows 180% with the hottest growth happening in mobile software and services.

In less than 6 months, consumers, business and power users alike downloaded more than 1 million mobile apps from the iTunes app store alone.  The International Telecommunications Union reported the number of mobile phone subscriptions is on pace to pass 5 billion in 2010, representing a penetration rate of 67% worldwide (closer to 100% in developed countries).

It’s no wonder why developers and businesses are jumping at the opportunity to extend their web-based apps to mobile devices and cash in on this mobile Gold Rush.  Some of Ignite’s clients are taking advantage of the emerging market opportunities in the mobile apps arena and are well positioned to become leaders in their spaces.

Appcelerator is a growing player in the one of the hottest mobile areas of growth: application development.  With Appcelerator’s Titanium platform, web developers, ad agencies, ISVs, and enterprises can take advantage of the explosive growth in mobile, desktop, and tablet applications.  Appcelerator’s community of 25,000+ developers and growing are using Titanium to quickly build cross-platform desktop and mobile apps using standard technologies and by leveraging the open source developer community. Incidentally, since Appcelerator formally announced its support for Apple’s iPad less than one month ago, more than 7,000 new developers have signed up to use its highly-regarded Titanium platform.

Last month, Appcelerator polled its developer community on the impact and implications of Apple’s iPad in a survey about how Apple iPad Developers will radically transform computing.  Here’s just a smattering of news and blogger coverage that Ignite PR secured around Appcelerator’s report findings in business and trade press, as well as some of the most influential blogs:

BusinessWeek

New York Times

Bloomberg

Christian Science Monitor

TechCrunch

VentureBeat

Scobleizer and a 2nd follow on video with Scobleizer

Wired

The Register

eWeek

InfoWorld

IDG News Service

Wireless Week

Fierce Mobile Content

Another new Ignite client is a promising startup in the mobile apps arena named  Urban Airship, an early mover in the emerging mobile app infrastructure services arena.  Similar to when Amazon pioneered its EC2 cloud services to enable developers to scale with an affordable pay-per-use model, Urban Airship is the first to offer scalable, on-demand mobile app infrastructure services that reduce developers’ costs for implementing advanced smartphone features such as push notifications and in-app purchases.

What’s admirable about Urban Airship is that from Day 1 of business, this young upstart actually had secured their first paying customer!  Now only 9 months old, Urban Airship has seen rapid adoption of its services, signing more than 1,600 customers and delivering over 130 million mobile messages across 10 million devices.  The company recently announced a $1.1 million Series A round led by early stage venture firm True Ventures.  Aside from their rapid growth and customer traction, True Ventures invested in Urban Airship as they see that while most of the focus to date has been on really cool mobile apps, what is equally pivotal is the underlying infrastructure required to enhance these mobile apps and enable them to run reliably and scale. Here’s just some highlights of recent news coverage that Ignite PR secured for Urban Airship:

New York Times

Mobile Marketer

Alarm Clock

Adotas

ZDNet

Seattle PI

Enterprise Mobile Today

Internet News

VentureBeat

So what can we expect in the coming year? A Gartner analyst commented: “Looking back at the announcements during Mobile World Congress 2010, we can expect 2010 to retain a strong focus around operating systems, services and applications while hardware takes a back seat.” It will be interesting to watch major mobile players make their next moves (Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, et al) in the highly dynamic mobile landscape.  Be sure to check out the continued progress and leadership from innovative companies like an Appcelerator and Urban Airship that are delivering compelling and invaluable products and services to squarely address their customers’ needs in the burgeoning mobile app market.

Back in January 2008, we posted about cloud computing as a growing trend—2 years before it really took off into the clouds.  We highlighted initiatives that a handful of the largest corporations were just starting to get underway, and now these industry leaders are taking even bigger steps embracing cloud computing.  For example, HP and Microsoft just announced they will jointly invest $250M to develop cloud-based systems.  Cloud computing is undoubtedly one of the hottest IT initiatives today.

Since 2008, interest in “cloud computing” has increased 3,233%.  CIOs are making adoption of the cloud a priority in 2010, and industry analysts predict that by 2012 cloud computing will be so pervasive that 1 out of 5 businesses will be completely in the cloud.

The advent of cloud computing has clearly made the economies of launching a business far more affordable, spurring hundreds of startups across many industries to offer a wide range of cloud-based services and solutions.  In lockstep, we had an opportunity to work with some innovative tech startups that are pushing the envelope by enabling companies to be far more nimble and competitive at how they operate their business and enable their users to be more efficient. Here’s a snapshot of 3 Ignite clients that are playing a unique role in the cloud computing landscape.

Syncplicity

Syncplicity is the leading provider of centralized file management, backup, instant synchronization and collaboration — all in one integrated solution. The company seamlessly integrates desktop files and apps with the cloud, eliminating the problem of multiple islands of data across users’ multitude of computers, devices, and web stores.

Backed by True Ventures, Syncplicity’s cloud service just announced a partnership with Google, expanding its Business Edition’s cloud-to-desktop functionality by deepening its integration with Google Docs and Google Apps. While Google Docs allows each user to store up to 1 GB each for free into Google Docs and file sizes can be up to 250 MB.  Through Syncplicity, Google Docs and Apps customers can store any size document in the cloud today, and can store any amount of data with no limits in the cloud. Syncplicity is essentially bridging the desktop-cloud divide across more than 5,000 joint Syncplicity and Google customers, who are using their products together to sync nearly 1 million files each day.

LongJump

Ignite showcased our client LongJump, an early player in the cloud market with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. When LongJump launched in 2007, the company quickly moved to the forefront, introducing the industry’s first on-demand database (DaaS). LongJump is continuing to cultivate its expertise in the cloud domain and pundits are taking note.  LongJump has been called the “Holy Grail in Cloud Computing” for its flexible hosting options (enterprises can choose to host the platform on-demand, in the cloud, or on-premise), and in 2009, the company earned industry validation, including:

• The only company with a PaaS offering positioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers
• The only PaaS provider named by Gartner a “Cool Vendor” in its Cloud Computing report
• The recipient of XChange’s XCellence award in the category of “Most Innovative Technology”
  

Reductive Labs

Reductive Labs is a leader in next-gen, enterprise IT automation. Its flagship offering, Puppet, is an open source software framework to automate infrastructure, which fundamentally changes how companies can configure, provision, manage and scale their IT infrastructure using software tools rather than IT staff.  While both virtualization and cloud computing offer cost-effective ways to expand storage, services and processing capacities without further cash outlays for new hardware infrastructure. Puppet’s automation capabilities alleviate management complexities and expenses introduced by both of these technologies. IT departments can leverage Puppet to flexibly move services back and forth from the cloud to behind the company’s firewall.

Gartner estimates that enterprise software delivered in the cloud as a service will total over $12B by 2012 and grow at 17.7% each year.  It will be interesting to see how the market shakes out – with stalwarts looking to more aggressively add cloud computing strategies and initiatives to their war chests (ie: acquisitions).

Cloud computing-based initiatives are gaining adoption with startups and large enterprises that need to increase efficiencies across departments and within their data centers. While the benefits of cloud computing such as reduced infrastructure investments, increased economies of scale and accelerated time to market are highly appealing to businesses, concerns still exist around the risks of cloud computing. 

An interesting trend seems to be taking root that provides a growing opportunity for aspiring tech entrepreneurs to tap. According to a March 2009 PhoCusWright report titled, “Hyperlocal Content Services,” this trend relates to local content proliferating as new tech advances enable improved search, aggregation and distribution.  The concept of hyperlocal is introducing a new model in which content based on proximity, presence and context is delivered to users.

Today MySpace announced a deal with CitySearch where the social network site will introduce MySpace Local, which is essential a social directory for local businesses and venues powered by CitySearch.  The power of the new offering will allow MySpace users to peruse local businesses and venues and see their friends’ reviews.  Additionally, it will provide MySpace with a bonanza of new ad inventory where it can run geotargeted advertising.  It’s no wonder that this deal was a wise one for MySpace to strike given that the local internet-advertising market has accounted for some of the fastest growth in Internet advertising in recent years, as small businesses take their marketing online.  Another new example of a hyperlocal website that today also unveiled a beta version of its service is from client, A Day’s Outing, an online search tool for discovering short-distance day trips and weekend outings.  A Day’s Outing takes the proximity of where someone is starting from to deliver a comprehensive list of outings and events personalized around their preferences.  It currently focuses on the Mid-Atlantic region and will continue to expand regionally. A Day’s Outing represents a growing number of tech high tech startups popping up to introduce new services that deliver highly relevant, personalized, local information to users when they seek it.

Hyperlocal websites as well as smartphones are increasingly helping users access geolocation-based content such as information, advertising, events, and entertainment centered on a user’s locaton and time.  While local information is abundantly available, getting it quickly and easily still leaves a lot to be desired and users seeking a better way.  Expect to see more innovative partnerships such as the MySpace/CitySearch deal as well as many other innovative companies such as A Day’s Outing move to better address users’ need for getting the right information when they want it.

We worked with San Francisco-based Syncplicity recently on their funding announcement.  The timing for the startup was fortuitous because they managed to get their post-seed funding just before the market conditions and environment for tech startups became much more challenging.  Syncplicity and their VC firm, True Ventures, have been sharing their perspective related to the funding environment and tech start-ups.  Here are a few postings that we wanted to highlight that touch up some of the notable points of Syncplicity’s funding.

http://profy.com/2008/10/31/simplicity-still-viable-investment-syncplicity-gets-2-35-million/

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2008/10/cloud_computing.html

VentureWire’s Scott Denne’s piece captured that Synplicity found one of the biggest challenges in closing the round was that most venture capital firms wanted to put in more money than the company was willing to take. Since Syncplicity runs largely on hosted infrastructure, like many Web 2.0 start-ups, its capital needs were out of sync with the amounts that larger venture firms look to put to work over the life of a company.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall just did a post related to the current VC model and startup environment that elicited insightful, provocative comments from readers as well.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/12/the-vc-model-is-broken/

What’s old is new again; Cloud computing (a.k.a. grid computing, utility computing, computing on-demand) which was talked about nearly ten years ago, is once again the horizon (pun intentional). One of the December cover stories of BusinessWeek did an in-depth series of cloud computing and spelled out several lofty initiatives that IBM and Google have underway. It appears Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are quickly following suit to tap into a potential goldmine for data storage and access services.

Google is betting that cloud computing will support a 300-year plan to make everything – and possibly everyone – online and searchable. Recently, Google teamed with IBM to bring cloud computing into academia with a six university pilot program. An increasing number of businesses are looking at cloud computing as a foundation for their business processes. Gartner Group picked cloud computing as one of its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, noting that companies must evaluate the positive impact of SaaS and web platforms that provide “access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through ‘cloud computing’ environments.” We’d like to respectfully add online databases to this list as well.

Last week our client, LongJump, made an announcement that put them at the forefront of startups offering online databases on-demand. LongJump announced its powerful new “cloud database service” that presents several potential advantages for a web startup. LongJump’s DaaS is a fully managed infrastructure and administered relational database architecture that includes: SAS 70 Type II data protection compliance, enterprise-level security, flexible access and control, real-time mirrored database replication, and 99.999% application uptime.

In spite of announcing in the throes of CES, LongJump’s DaaS announcement was able to rise above the noise and land in some prominent publications, news venues and blogs. Here’s a brief snapshot of some of those news stories:

TechCrunch

eWeek

ZDNet

Web Worker Daily

VentureBeat

Network World

DMNews

TMCNet

ComputerWorld UK