24 January 2006
bluepulse: mobile 2.0?
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Mobile .
There has recently been a lot of buzz (MobileCrunch, TechCrunch, Tom Hume) circulating in the mobile space about the product launch from bluepulse. bluepulse has launched what they call “the easiest way to access the internet services you need from an ordinary mobile phone”. Oliver has made some really lofty predictions for bluepulse, which I personally feel is putting unfair expectations on their product.
What they have attempted to do is create a basic platform on top of which you can deploy mobile information service applications that avoids fragmentation at the device and OS level. For that task, I think they have made a great accomplishment. Having to deal with mobile development on a daily basis, I know how much of a non-trivial task that is. Mobile developers, to date, have been hampered by software and hardware fragmentation and have at best been able to deploy solutions to ~40-50 devices. bluepulse claims it can deliver to around 250 devices, which I totally believe.
What makes this possible is that they seem to have built a framework, called the Open Application Delivery Platform (OADP), on top of which you deploy your apps. This framework limits the amount of functionality and abstracts most of the display and workflow logic away from the actual application and places it onto the bluepulse “runtime”. This consequently allows developers to deploy an application to a large number of devices, but obviously prevents any single application from taking advantage of any features that would be considered anything more than the “lowest common denominator”. So with that being said, developers now have a great platform for building basic information apps, like RSS readers, IM gateways and so on. But to Olivers point of the bluepulse platform being the “first category dominant players in mobile 2.0″, I have to emphatically disagree. bluepulse has admitted that their platform has to deal with MIDP1.0 phones gracefully, and thus is limited. As more MIDP1.0 phones move off the radar, its possible to update their platform to take advantage of features available across all handsets. I see bluepulse as being the first company to perfect mobile 1.0, with a platform that can move towards what we hope to be mobile 2.0.
The real barrier to mobile 2.0 isn’t software developers, its the operators, “standards” groups (Sun), and ultimately the consumers that are responsible for the fragmentation. As long as the market demands phones of such varying capabilities, operators will produce them, and companies like Sun will play a cat and mouse game of trying to force the operators to standardize, but ultimately will succumb and retroactively build development platforms that try to “more elegantly” handle the fragmentation. I wish there were a simple answer to this issue, but unfortunately I feel the battle of functionality and compatibility will always be fought.
The guys over at bluepluse have also done a great job about actively communicating with the community that supports, and criticizes them and they bring some great light to the debate. So be sure to check out their blog, and specifically the post, bluepulse strongly polarizes the mobile community.
