Twitter Rocks San Francisco at Chirp Conference

MotherApp's Kedar Shah (left) with Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone (right)

MotherApp's Kedar Shah (left) with Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone (right)

It was a rock concert atmosphere on April 14 and 15 at Fort Mason in San Francisco for Chirp, the first-ever Twitter Developers Conference. Technologists, media types, and entrepreneurs from the local Bay Area and as far away as Toronto, New York, Mumbai, and London descended on the Marina for a high-octane, inspiring 2 days of non-stop chatter, pitching, demoing, networking, learning and of course, Tweeting about it all!

The pleasant weather and sunny skies provided an inspiring backdrop over the Bay and nearby Golden Gate. As MotherApp’s Evangelist, I Kedar Shah got a chance to meet many interesting folks at Chirp, including the Twitter team. Surprise DJ at the Twitter Party was none other than a rock-star himself, Will.i.Am of the Black-Eyed Peas, who proclaimed, “You know what’s dope, I am the only person from the music industry here.”

In addition to the 1,000 attendees, anyone around the world could view the Chirp talks streamed live on Justin.TV, a fellow San Francisco startup. Closing out the event, Co-Founder Biz Stone revealed that going into the week, the Twitter team wasn’t even sure if holding Chirp would be a good idea. But in the end, it surpassed everyone’s expectations, agreeing that technology is a “Triumph for humanity.”

Developers are building innovative, real-time intelligence through the Twitter API. Media, Advertising, and Marketing agencies are extending the conversation with viewers through Twitter. The big take-away from the week and the ecosystem was all about expanding channels for real-time interaction, feedback, and connection.

The newly unveiled and evolving Twitter Business Model of Sponsored Tweets and Premium Advertising is all about matching the right content with the right messaging at the right time. An upcoming frontier is the synergy of location-based applications and Twitter to reach an audience at the precisely correct location with right messaging at the right time. The MotherApp Developer Engine can empower Twitter developers to mobilize their real-time applications, meaning create native mobile Twitter applications leveraging location, photo upload, and other mobile device features. The possibilities are endless for using location to provide uber-relevant content, trending topics, and connections to users. Not to mention, the holy-grail of Twitter monetization is within reach – Promoted Tweets, Advertising, and Filtering personalized by user, location, and content. Mobility and Twitter can enable the dream of Marketers and Advertisers by enhancing, not diminishing the user experience.

Look out shortly for more on the interesting people and applications unveiled at Chirp and how developers can mobilize their Twitter web apps.

MotherApp at SXSW

We’re in beautiful Austin, TX making our first appearance at SXSW!  You can stop by the MotherApp booth in the exhibit hall to find out all about what we’ve been up to.  We’ll be creating apps right before your eyes.  If you’ve got an Android phone, we’ll make you a personalized app that you can take with you, and all you have to do is tweet about.

SXSW-2010-logo

MotherApp CEO Ken Law will be on hand to answer your questions and give you the latest news on the MotherApp DevEngine, which is revolutionizing mobile app develop.  The DevEngine is the first cloud-based SDK for developing custom native apps on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.  There’s nothing to download and you can code apps using only HTML.

If you’re at SXSW, we’d love to meet you, so come by and say hello.

Now, Everyone can app!

MotherApp is hiring & we’re looking for a Developer Evangelist!

MotherApp is looking for a Developer Evangelist to build our development community, get people excited about our technology, help us to continue our momentum, and assist developers in using MotherApp to build mobile applications.  Our ideal candidate is tech savvy, has great relationships within the development community, is a strategic thinker with great marketing insights, and is comfortable communicating with developers of all levels – from students to CIOs.

You should be able to look at the big picture (and help shape it), but also be able to get into the nitty-gritty of code.  You’ll help us continue to push the envelope with your big ideas.  A solid understanding of mobile technologies and experience interacting with the web communities are musts. You will be the public face of MotherApp in the development community and you’ll need to have killer presentation skills.  You must be comfortable in front of large audiences, as well as interacting with executives in smaller settings.

So what will you be doing?

- Building excitement and passion around MotherApp offerings through a variety of methods: blogs, sample applications, discussions, conferences, press events, and trade shows.

- Identifying and engaging strategic partners and vendors that can benefit from MotherApp technologies.

- Maintaining market knowledge of the industry, competitors, developer needs and consumer behaviors.

And what will you bring to the role?

  • Credibility: You should have strong track-record in the web or mobile development community and have great contacts and strong relationships in the industry.
  • Technical Expertise: You must be able to discuss technical aspects of web and mobile development and to dive deep into the details.
  • Passion: You’ve got it!  And it shows.  Your excitement about MotherApp and the industry should shine thorough and be readily apparent.  Your positive energy should be infectious.
  • Business Smarts: It’s not enough to be technical.  You should have great business sense. Do you understand where mobile technology is heading? How will the new Windows Series 7 OS change the mobile landscape? What are the major breakthroughs for the mobile industry over the next 3 years?
  • Strong Communication Skills: You should be able to pull together clear and concise documents and command a room when you deliver a presentation.

Requirements:

- BS/BA or equivalent; MS/MBA a plus

- Web and mobile development experience

- Experience working with the developer communities

- Understanding of the trends in mobile technology

- Effective negotiation skills

- Strong persuasive skills and ability to influence decision makers

- A willingness to travel (up to 50%)

To apply for this position, send your resume to jobs [at] motherapp [dot] com

Company Description

About MotherApp:

MotherApp was founded by Ken Law who started as an engineer intern at Google in 1999 after finishing his masters in CS at Stanford. MotherApp has developed the DevEngine, which enables development of native mobile apps in the cloud. The result is the ability to develop for multiple platforms in one development environment. (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.) Developers simply write code in our specialized HTML, run it through our engine and the output is a native app. There is no need to download an SDK, as we put it in the cloud.

More than 300 apps have been created using our technology. Our clients include mobile operators, banks, and leading content providers.


We were at Tokyo2.0 x Mobile Monday: Mobile Web Convergence – Engaging users across the PC/mobile divide

MotherApp @Tokyo2.0 x Mobile Monday

MotherApp @Tokyo2.0 x Mobile Monday

We were there with Google Japan and all other amazing speakers sharing interesting insights and vision on PC, Mobile and Web convergence and how it changes our lifestyle.

More than 150? 200? were packed in the nice venue with bar corner serving tasty beer!! How nice.

This is a post from The Next Web Asia:

MotherApp Takes RSS Feeds, Makes them into Native iPhone Apps (presentation included)

Mobile to Cloud: B2SMB

Of the 134,000 iPhone apps reported by GigaOM on January 12, 2010, very few cater to the needs of SMB (small and medium-size business) owners.  There are a few standalone productivity apps, some branding and retail apps, and a few Oracle and Salesforce.com apps that front their enterprise client-server systems.  In fact, small users are unceremoniously excluded, unless they migrate to more expensive editions.

Many thought the advent of the PC, then the Internet would precipitate a move to business computing.  It did and did not.  Some 3,000,000 SMB in America have 5 computers each, doing accounting and spreadsheets and ecommerce.  However, after 30 years of personal computing and 15 years of Internet access, a large portion of SMB is outside the purview of Google Search.  Of the Websites created around the year 2000, a large percent of them are still in Web 1.0, displaying static catalogs and reference material.   Computing is still too expensive and complex for SMB.  Small business owners have little time and resources.  Things have to be cheap and easy.

Now comes cloud computing with smartphones as terminals.  The iTunes model of downloading apps from the air plus simple one-function apps that only do one thing, but really well, is changing the computing landscape.   Apps are simple enough and cheap enough, by and large.   Developing a generalized mobile app linking the smartphone to the cloud is now a fraction of what it would be on a PC, thanks to standards such as RSS, and large platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.   Specialized apps are still labor intensive because of the cost of building proxy servers.  There are no Twitter, YouTube or Facebook equivalent in enterprise apps similar in scale and standardization.  There are still too many flavors of SAP and Oracle backend.

In addition, there are too many mobile platforms to deal with.   iPhone has a large and growing market share but Android is coming on strong and RIM is maintaining their corporate presence.  The MotherApp Engine is designed to make cross platform development easy.   We are looking for partners who can deploy our Engine, writing one MotherApp HTML code to support multiple platforms.   Market reach means market share.

Games, fitness and other life-style apps are vital to the app economy.  Equally important, in our view, is small business needs.   The promise of client-server computing to make back office information (inventory level, availability, order status) available at our fingertip is now made affordable and simple enough by cloud computing.  With geo-tagging, we will be asking soon: “which ad to be placed with which app, where and when.”

Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report

Mary Meeker of Internet fame in the 90s directed a study of the Mobile Internet at Morgan Stanley on Dec 15, 2009.  She studied the rate of change spurred by the iPhone and the surrounding ecosystem and made the following observations:

  1. Mobile Internet is the 5th computing platform, after Mainframe, Mini, PC and Desktop Internet.  Each wave created new winners and losers; new wealth will be created and value of old destroyed.  This mobile wave is larger and coming faster than any previous wave.
  2. It took Apple 2 years and 3 months to reach 57 million users, compared to 5 years for Docomo to reach 40M, Netscape 4 years to reach 50M.  The trajectory for Apple is very steep at this time.   Smartphone, in aggregate, will grow from 288M in 2008 to over 1B units by 2013.
  3. Convergence of 3G+Social Networking + Video + VoIP + iPhone/Android…  created an ecosystem that is rapidly ramping the Mobile Internet which will be 2X the size of desktop Internet.  Hence the many mergers, acquisitions, and new company formations now underway in the mobile space.
  4. Apps are critical to the success of smartphones.  The Docomo monetization roadmap in Japan may be roadmap for the rest of the world.
  5. Disruptive new business model will be created.  Meeker quoted Mathew Honan in Wired, “…Location changes everything.  This one input, our coordinates, has the potential to change all the outputs.  Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search, where we go – they all change once we merge location and the Web.”  That means where we advertise and monetize will change.

Two months ago, BusinessWeek called it the “App Economy”.   Prediction is that there will be 300,000 apps on the Apple App Store in a year, plus tens of thousands for Android, Blackberry and others.  This should fuel the demand of cross platform tools like MotherApp Engine.  With one source code, the developer can compile five native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.  This then helps the developer to address >90% of the mobile market.

Older operating systems such as Symbian. Blackberry, and Docomo need to rapidly transition to modern architectures to compete.  It is now a software play.  Similarly, older enterprise apps developed under client-server models will need to be “mobilized” to work in the cloud.  This should present major opportunities for developers.

To be continued…

We are in Startup Weekend Tokyo

We are with Geeks on a Plane leaded by Dave McClure in Startup Weekend Tokyo (#swtokyo) from 19 – 20 Dec 2009!

Geeks on a Plane X Startup Weekend video: http://bit.ly/53P0Ly

UStream: http://ustre.am/9Nmv

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tkysocialevents/4196961281/

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fumi/sets/72157623033385034/

We have presented at TechCrunch Japan Startup Meeting Tokyo

TechCrunch Japan Startup Meeting

TechCrunch Japan Startup Meeting

We have participated in the first Startup Meeting organized by TechCrunch Japan in Tokyo on December 14, 2009. It was a full house with 150+ people. We have presented the MotherApp Engine and have been voted as the best demo/presentation in the event. Greatest appreciation to all participants. You guys are awesome!!

[update] Techcrunch Japan report: http://jp.techcrunch.com/archives/jp-091222-report-of-startupmeeitng-1214/ (English version here)

We will speak at the AppsXchange Asia

We will speak at the AppsXchange Asia from Nov 16 – 17 at JW Marriott, Hong Kong. The conference focuses on the implications from App Store and we are looking forward to hear the latest updates from SingTel, RIM and other companies as well.

Update: Check out the photos below.

We will speak at the China 3G Industry Summit

We will speak at the China 3G Industry Summit from Oct 20 to Oct 22 at Swissotel, Kunshan . It is one of the biggest mobile events in China. Looking forward to meet the people in China.

Update: Check out the photos. The event is also reported in TechCrunch.


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