(or lots of these other “webOS” platforms)

So the other day while at Mobile Monday Miami (disclosure, I’m on the executive committee) someone asked if I was going to start porting my apps to Palm’s new Pre platform. I responded with a resounding NO, maybe too hastily, but I still stand by my response.

So why am I not building anything for the Palm Pre, even though the apps are all going to be HTML + Javascript (right up my teams area of expertise)? Well Palm isn’t building a global platform out of this phone from what I can tell. They paired up with sprint, which is fast declining as the number 3 carrier in the USA, which means fewer and fewer potential customers. Secondly the pre is built on a CDMA chipset (supposedly a gsm version is in the works, but palm is slow w/these things) which limits the number of markets they can sell it to (USA, Japan, S.Korea are the 3 big cdma markets, and this phone is too basic to catch fire in Japan or Korea). So being limited to Sprint customers and those paying the $99/month fee at that seems like a small market, maybe 100-200k users in the next year. Compare that to the iPod Touch/iPhone market of over 30 million, and it seems to me like a no-brainer which to invest in.

So you might be thinking, well its cheaper to build for the Pre, and theoretically building for the Pre is the same as building for the web right? Well the Pre is only the first handset in Palm’s WebOS plan, so we don’t know if the future handsets will have the same specs, or dimensions, or capabilities, so making apps becomes more fractured. iPhone development is simple, all the phones or iPods have the same screen resolution, same capabilities, and are uniform worldwide. As a web developer who has been building web apps for a decade, hassling with all the different browsers and operating system nuances has been a royal pain, and the last thing I want to do is deal with 5 different phone configurations which serve maybe a few thousand users.

Now if Palm sends me a few unlocked PREs with free data/phone cards in them, I’ll happily dive more into it and let you all know what i think, but realistically that same offer would apply to Google with their Android (which I could talk about later and have many similar gripes).

In the end it all boils down to a cost per user acquisition, and costs to support each user. In a bootstrap economy, we’ve all got to take those things into consideration.

UpdateI was pointed to this link that @whurley(who is a kick-ass community leader in texas) posted about his experiences with palm. Worth the read. via @mherzber. Also worth reading is @giovanni’s reaction to Pre.

So you might be thinking, “Brian, hasn’t everyone been saying that every year for the last decade???” Well you are completely right, people have been saying this, I haven’t, but others have. So why do I think this will be a big year for mobile? A number of factors really:

1. The experience is changing
   1. iphone native apps will emerge (hopefully, apple don’t let me down!)
   2. Blackberry apps will be easier to build (RIM don’t let me down!)
   3. interfaces are getting more clever
2. SDKs will explode this year for transitioning mobile phones into better recipients of web content
3. Web data connections are becoming default (blackberry, iphone, iphone clones, etc.)
4. People will start building mobile specific stylesheets. Sorry folks, valid XHTML/CSS does not equal nice looking interface on mobile.
   1. Templates should emerge, and virtualization software to emulate mobile browsers.
   2. Mobile browsers will evolve (I hope, safari on iphone is a hell of a browser)
5. Flash mobile will grow (games, yeah, thats right, games will push this)
6. geolocation+webdata=goldmine. lead generation is a billion dollar industry waiting to be cracked open on mobile phones. I’m sure some smart VCs are reading this, you know this is true.
7. Social and mobile will be big big big this year.
   1. Facebook mobile api is actually being very well developed, i can definitely see some sort of neat mashup emerging here
   2. Myspace has lots of mobile deals, once the developers get an api for it though, it will be big
   3. twitter’s api + short code system are a great combination.
   4. Someone else with a lot of money will come up with some sort of short code sms api and foot the bill while that grows to scale.

So what does this all mean to you? It means the 3 tier design for web apps I proposed last year is going to shift to a 4 tier. You need to see how you can tie your data into a wrapper that functions well for the mobile world in addition to your 3 previous strategies (homepage, opensocial, facebook).

So yesterday I mentioned how email was one of the killer game changing features on the iPhone. Well its true, Apple partnered with Yahoo to offer free “push” email. What does this mean? Well basically RIMM is in trouble. Why are people going to pay $30/month for blackberry service if yahoo is giving it away for free? Push email is the killer app that got blackberries to be nicknamed crackberries.Actually this move is two-pronged, it shows that Yahoo realizes mobile is the way to fight off google’s attempts to steal their mail customers, and it also allows yahoo! mail to become something more widely used than for just spam email folders. Now the big question: will yahoo search marketing be able to monetize yahoo mobile mail??? Second killer question, can they deliver geo-targetted ads via gps? that would mean yahoo would be increasing their monetization opportunities dramatically, and give them a better than fighting chance against goog.

So apple computer inc. dropped their new iPhone today. Pretty amazing gadget if you ask me. It does pretty much everything for everyone (phone, email- more on this later, camera, video, etc. etc. etc. etc.) which is amazing in its own right, but the real question/issue is: how does it doing everything affect the business world?First we have the fact that this is a phone, first and foremost a phone. Cingular has an exclusive deal (not sure how long exclusivity they have though) that allows them to feed off of the Apple/iTunes/iPod brand thats hot right now. They also probably get some cut of iTunes sales from the phone, because I’m sure the iTunes loaded on there will let you buy direct eventually (how can you not with wifi and edge capability).  So who does this affect: Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Amazon, and whomever else sells music (and movies, and…). But these are the same people who might get to sell the same device too, so we’ll see how that pans out. (more…)