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Print Edition StoriesMonday, December 15, 2008
Everypoint, Red Bend make iPhone-like web apps for featurephone users
By Galen Moore
NECN: Scvngr tours explore cities, campuses by cell phone
Two Boston-area companies have developed technologies that promise to bring iPhone-style mobile web applications to the billion-plus cell phone users worldwide who don’t own smartphones.
Boston-based Everypoint Inc. will announce today the beta launch of its Nemo platform, a Java-based application development and delivery system that sits on top of a featurephone’s firmware. Waltham’s Red Bend Software Inc. says it is ready in 2009 to release a platform that will enable service providers to push firmware updates needed to run the next generation of Java-based mobile applications on featurephones.
“I think people are fixated that the iPhone takes over the world, which we know it won’t,” said Fairhaven Capital partner Rick Grinnell, who invested in Everypoint when it was founded in 2004.
Smartphones’ share of the global handset market, which is now between 10 and 13 percent, will grow as prices come down, Grinnell said. However, in markets where prices aren’t subsidized, and incomes can’t support a large up-front purchase, featurephone sales will continue. In some demographics, featurephones will continue to be the device of choice — like parents buying phones for kids, he suggested.
Everypoint’s application environment will enable developers to create enterprise applications, or offerings similar to those that iPhone users see in Apple’s AppStore, said CTO and founder Allan MacKinnon. The company will allow free applications, but will charge developers who require users to register. Developers that charge users to download applications will pay a percentage to the company.
MacKinnon said he anticipates a social application, like the iPhone’s popular Facebook app, will be the company’s biggest revenue booster.
Meanwhile, Red Bend proposes to solve a deeper problem. Most featurephones ship with only the most basic Java capabilities. Sophisticated applications built on the most recent iterations of Java won’t run on their firmware.
“We’re on it to try to help (Everypoint) and every other company in the mobile system solve this problem,” said vice president of marketing Lori Sylvia.
Red Bend, which already manages over-the-air firmware updates for cellular service providers, next year will ship a platform that enables automatic Java updates that come over-the-air when customers download new applications. The first featurephones with the new capability will debut in Europe in 2009 and reach the U.S. market by 2010, Sylvia said.
Everypoint’s Nemo is designed to work on about 400 of a new generation of featurephones released roughly in the past year, MacKinnon said. These have larger screens, faster web connectivity, more memory and more processing power than earlier phones, he said.
The application platform’s key attributes are a graphics engine that provides high-quality 3-D visuals, and a runtime that manages applications using a cloud-based data sync to minimize the size of uploads and downloads. It is written in MIDP 2.0, a simplistic Java specification embedded on most featurephones.
The release of Nemo marks a shift back to Everypoint’s founding idea, investors said, after the company released a series of one-off mobile web apps, including a sports news application for Yahoo Inc. during the 2006 World Cup soccer tournament.
“Those were, I’d say, distractions along the way, although 75 percent of that code was useable for the core thrust,” said Grinnell. “We should have kept focusing on the core mission.”
Grinnell acknowledged the company faces a marketing hurdle in getting widespread use of its new product. He said they will focus first on attracting developers to produce compelling applications that will spark adoption by individuals and cellular companies.
Everypoint’s venture capital investors are Needham-based Prism VentureWorks, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Venrock, and Cambridge-based Fairhaven Capital, who invested as part of their initial TD Ventures fund. The company’s total investment is $14 million.
Red Bend got a fifth round in April, bringing its total investment to $34 million. Investors include Coral Capital Management of Minneapolis, Minn., Greylock Partners, which operates an office in Waltham, Pitango Venture Capital and Israel-based Carmel Ventures.
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