Konstantin I. Boudnik's Blog

Smaller Java, but bigger market?

I'd visited CTIA conference recently. Actually, this was my first time experience with that kind of technological forum ever. It's totally different from development conferences - it's so about money. It stinks of money, if you will. It seems like all these business people at pumping a lot of cash into almost any wireless-like technology or software application. It's like the nineties of last century: if you had a word 'Internet' somewhere on your business plan - you're likely to get some crazy funding.

Anyways, at that even in Las Vegas, NV, I saw a lot of interesting wireless stuff presented by respectable companies like RIM (gosh, I love their phones!), Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorolla, NTT Do-Co-Mo, and many others. The software side was represented by a variety of service providers and SDK makers like QualComm. Even Microsoft wasn't ashamed to bring their killer PocketPC smartphones (nice name, isn't it? Perhaps all other's are dumbphones) to the expo. And it is a killer by the way it assassinates those small gizmos.

But what hit me a lot is that I didn't see the main player of the JavaME's field: Sun Microsystems didn't appear at the CTIA. And believe me - I was looking hard!
The company, which had created the most popular software platform in the world; powering as many as 2.5B Java devices around the globe had only one session in all three days of second biggest wireless technology conference ever.

The session was about NetBeans Mobility 5.0 However, it was taken away to the Harrah's casino (perhaps, hidden from Microsoft's corporate spies or something): neither Sun Microsystems nor NetBeans brands were listed in the conference catalog; neither NetBeans or Sun's info hasn't been posted on the CTIA web site; clerks at the info booths weren't aware about such a pod at all.

To give you some comparison ground: QualComm is supporting about 40+ OEM manufacturers. This gives us roughly 600 headset models (according to one of their marketing folks). And they had a big setup, a special all day long development seminar, etc. One more fact: there are as many as 200+ mil. of cell.phones owners in the US. So, do your math...

So, I'm kinda wondering what is the message JavaME community will be getting by this de-marsh? Does it simply mean, that Sun Microsystems starts paying more and more attention to the mobility tools development or something else?

But on a bright note, I'd like to mention, that a number of software development companies are still looking toward JavaME platform. I was talking to a few folks from that side of the fence, and they seem to be quite excited about what they are able to do with JavaME now. A particular interest is coming from wireless social networking developers - Java platform is greatly simplifying the user experience and reducing the development cycle for them.

By the way, the wireless social networking is blooming nowadays. I met a very promising and proactive group of folks from VCEL, Inc. who did a very first truly wireless social networking platform in this country. And it's all using JavaME (well, they've might be using Java for their server side too, instead of scripting :-). They are supporting about 20+ MIDP2.0 headsets from different manufacturers and providing a whole new way into people social communication. It's so cool! And I'll write more on this particular topic later...

See yall soon,
Cos

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