Techwave 2008 - It's all good baby!!
You know it's a good sign when the food starts tasting much better :) That is how I compare year after year. For some reason, I personally felt a lot of energy and optimism from attendees and had great traffic at my booth. More than that, there were many great questions from the folks attending the conference, which is always good.
I managed to stay reasonably busy in the SUP booth with good traffic although there was a lack of chairs. We were positioned next to the various techathlon events that were being held and I managed to show off my non-existent footie skills.
I'm excited getting closer to release date for SUP. It's been an excellent group effort to get it out considering we had teams in Paris, Pune, Singapore, Shanghai, Xian, Dublin, London, etc. Hardest was coordinating conference calls within the teams. Techwave gave me a chance to start putting the message out with real demos and there were some good questions about the product that we've also been thinking about and it validated some of our future direction. The developer tools message was well received by the audience and they felt that would simplify their development efforts a lot.
And I did have some fun too. WHIVSIV :)
Opening day at Techwave 2008 - Vegas
Yesterday was the opening day at Techwave in Vegas. I attended the keynote by John Chen and captured some keypoints; overall he sounded very optimistic regarding the direction in which we are headed. He also had a plug in for Sybase Unwired Platform demo that I had done to him last week and that was cool :) If you are interested in looking at the demo he was "raving" about, come over to the expo hall and I'll be there in the SUP booth. I also have a flash of an application build by a partner (iTask) based out of South Africa and they are around if you are interested in finding out how they have leveraged SUP for their mobile application framework.
You can also view the keynotes online here.
Some of the key points I captured from his keynote:
* Growth in the database revenue..
* State of the business
o IP
* 30 product releases
* 14 patents
* 15% spent on R&D
o Customer momentum
* Over 1200 new customers
* 800 mobile enterprises
* 200 new IQ customers
* 164 new messaging customers
* 800m new mobile subscribers
o People
* 9 best places to work awards
o Market leadership
* Gartner magic quadrants, forester waves
o Revenue Performance
* 16% revenue growth
* Shareholder return consistently returning more than major indices and peers
* Unwired Enterprise – Market Trends
o Growth in devices and smart phones
o 3.5b mobile subscribers
o 35% growth in world wide broadband adoption
o Data volume and velocity growth.
* What has been Sybase working on
o Mbanking and MMS 365
o RAP- The trading edition
o ASE Cluster edition
o Sybase Unwired Platform
o SQL Anywhere 11
o Afaria 6.0
o PowerBuilder 11.5
* Growth – where is it
o 32% CAGR for IQ
o 111% CAGR for Mobility
o 72% for mobile subscribers reached.
Was'SUP : The tooling story - Visual Studio or Eclipse; your choice, we support!!
Once upon a time the developers kingdom got split into two provinces, Visual Studio (Windows Platform) and Eclipse (Windows and every other platform) based on various factors like corporate IT decisions, deployment environment, language familiarity, etc. There were some other splinter provinces like (Netbeans, etc.) which continued to have a decent community but not large enough to cause any trouble.
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Was'SUP - No, I'm not that cool, it's still geek speak!!
You are going to hear a lot of this feeble attempt at humor from the resident geeks at Techwave (I guess we can exclude the marketing folks as they are pretty cool). If you have been attending the past few years of Techwave or visited Sybase home page or may be have attended any one of the presentations over the last few years, there has been a lot of chatter about Unwired Enterprise Platform.
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PocketBuilder Demos hit the streets!
Now that the latest EBF of PocketBuilder is available, I can say with pride that my PocketBuilder Demos have hit the street.
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The 3G iPhone Announcement – Still NO Native MMS
Let's talk about the iPhone some more. Over the last, almost 1 year, this little device has done a great deal for the mobile industry. Love it or hate it, it has had an impact. In less than one year, the iPhone has captured around 19% of the smartphone market and has done more than any other device to make mobile Internet browsing mainstream.
On June 9th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new 3G iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. This new incarnation of the iPhone will be available, starting on July 11th with AT&T in the USA. I won’t spend a lot of time here listing the new features, but I should note that the 3G iPhone STILL does not currently have a native MMS client. It is still missing things like copy & paste, Flash, Java, and video support – features that most of the other smartphones in the marketplace, support natively. I should point out that, thanks to the iPhone SDK, we should expect Sun to make available a Java Virtual Machine for the iPhone, sometime this summer. Additionally, we should expect Adobe to release Flash for the iPhone as well.
CNET provided live coverage of the 3G iPhone announcement along with details of 3rd party applications and the application developer’s toolkit. Another well-respected industry blog at Engadget gives a nice overview. Note all of the blogger comment complaints about lack of MMS.
There is now a 3rd party MMS client called “Swirly MMS” that is making some news in the blogspace. It is currently a very rough application(can only send, not receive) that one can download. Still, it is a start.
Recall from previous blogs; if I send an MMS to an iPhone user, the recipient will receive an SMS stating that they have an MMS to retrieve from an AT&T (and likely other operator) web site – a terrible user experience reminiscent of the old days when most handsets didn’t support native MMS. Hopefully, this will change
Despite the lack of true MMS on the iPhone, MMS traffic, in general, continues to grow organically and is now approaching 30% of the subscriber population sending at least 1 MMS per month in many markets.
TechWave Registration is now open!
Join us Aug. 4 – 8 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV... for the 10th Annual Sybase User Training and Solutions Conference.
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iPhone... part two
A few posts ago I wrote about how the iPhone (or full browsers on mobile phones) does not mean the end of mobile banking. And in that post I mentioned that I had some other reasons why mobile banking is different.
During the interim we've been interviewing candidates for a number of roles within Sybase 365, and with that post fresh in my mind, I thought I would ask the candidates the question iPhone vs. Mobile Banking. So here's some of the answers I got...
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New PocketBuilder Demos
I am finally adapting my PocketBuilder Demo applications, so they can be included in the PocketBuilder DVD.
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Coming soon - our 2008 mBanking Survey Report - sneak preview in Frankfurt next week
We finally completed our 2008 mBanking survey...
Last year we spoke to nearly 5,000 consumers across the globe on their opinions regarding mobile banking, so this year we looked to get a peer-based view. We interviewed banks about their plans for mobile banking services, and we got some very ineresting responses...
I'll be sharing some of the results here over the coming weeks, but if you are in Frankfurt next week, and would like to jump the queue and get a full copy of the report - here's what to do.
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