
The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon - getp
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/10/the-ifund-has-competition-150-million-blackberry-fund-to-be-announced-soon/
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nickb
I know a couple of guys who worked on a trip tracking app for Blackberry. They
collected GPS readings out of RIM devices and displayed them on web pages so
you could easily tag your trips etc. They supported Blackberry and from what I
heard from one of their dev's, it was a huge pain. The toolchain was just
plain crappy. Lots of convoluted API calls, lots of incompatibilities between
different versions of firmware and lots of weird bugs that were sometimes
traced back to the libraries themselves. RIM also decided to create their own
markup for "widgets" and they completely ignored web standards. It was all
highly complex, convoluted and proprietary. RIM was also providing zero help
in distribution and marketing. The startup eventually failed and the whole
experience left a bitter taste in everyone's mouths.

If this is an indication of the current RIM developer ecosystem, I would bet
much that they'll be able to change the environment in the next 6 months.

After playing with Apple's iPhone SDK, I can see why everyone's so excited.
It's extremely dev friendly and a lot more fun to use (also, you avoid Java).
The app store is huge and will make marketing and distribution of apps so much
easier.

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vlad
Both RIM and Palm (or PalmOS, AccessOS, Palm again, Garnet OS, or whatever
their OS is now--Windows Mobile?) must think the complete definition of
developer support is to enable third party access. The iPhone does so much
more, with a Store, an SDK, a UI builder, and developer videos.

I've had three Palm devices, and the iPhone is a huge leap forward. The only
thing Palm did 2005-2007 is announce a revolutionary new operating system that
is the same as it was, doubling the onboard memory and camera resolution, and
adding new color options is Palm's idea. As lame as that was, changes have
been even less noticeable since 2006.

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ardit33
Blackberry has been around for ever, and development around their devices has
been meh.... at best. I actually developed an app on their eariler 3.5 os
version, and it was a nightmare. Network connections in some companies have to
go thru this thing called Bes (blackberry exchage server), which can bllock
anything, even your app, let's not go thru the "split pipe" problems, which
the only way to fix them was for a user to wipeout all the date in their
device.

Definelty not a user friendly experience.

I had to add: All these incentive funds exist for the simple reason: Mobile
development is totally broken, and not profitable to startups. So many
hooplas,workarounds, and redtape from the carriers.

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iamelgringo
"Developers, Developers, Developers..."

It reminds me that we as developers are the king makers in the platform wars.
Developers that make killer apps make the platform the standard which in turn
makes the platform makers very, very rich.

The best quote of Startup School for me was from Sam Altman (paraphrased):
"The VC's know that there's nothing quite so powerful in Silicon Valley as a
developer who knows how to make a great product."

I'd add that the platform makers know that, too.

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DenisM
Began, the phone wars have.

RIM: $150m VC fund

Apple: $100m VC fund

Google: $10m in give-away prizes

Microsoft: ???

Nokia: ???

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st3fan
The Blackberry is losing customers quickly to the iPhone I think. Apple's more
enterprisey plans with the iPhone, like the Exchange integration, must scare
them a lot.

Getting a small chunk from a 150 million fund is nice. But it does not change
the fact that developing for the Blackberry is so much less fun than
developing for the iPhone :-)

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webwright
They should spend all $150 million to buy a new UI for the Blackberry.
Seriously.

I think if they (very quickly) build a non-crap UI for the Blackberry, they'd
have a shot... Given that Jobs is adamant about his ridiculous on-screen
keyboard.

