Open Source Push Email and Mobile Sync Thrives
It’s a typical day in the eventful mobile industry. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco made sure that one of his dutiful employees stood in line outside a T-Mobile store at 3a.m. so they could acquire one of the first Google Android G1 phones to hit the market. By the time the store opened at 7a.m., there were 15 eager buyers waiting to get their hands on the phone. By 9a.m., Fabrizio had fully dissected the phone and determined its strengths and weaknesses, helping Funambol further plot its strategy and market opportunity relative to the new mobile platform.
Although the buzz and consumer excitement around Android has not approached iPhone levels (actually much less so outside the US), it is still very significant, as it is the first major mass market phone based on open source software. Open source has become a white hot trend in the mobile industry.
Funambol is seeing unprecedented demand for its mobile open source software. Funambol provides open source push email and mobile sync software for the mass market. Its software works on 1.5 billion feature and smart phones, including the iPhone, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. Funambol is also the leading cross-platform mobile open source project in the world, whose software has been downloaded three million times by 50,000 developers. Because the developers can access the source code, they enable Funambol to support the latest mobile devices much more quickly than proprietary solutions. The result – Funambol provides the broadest mobile device compatibility, many times more than their nearest competitor.
Funambol’s customer list reads like a who’s who of the mobile industry, including top-tier mobile operators, service providers, portals and device manufacturers. Recent customer wins include AOL, who is deploying Funambol’s mobile sync service to millions of users, and 1&1, the largest web hosting company in the world, who has deployed Funambol’s open source push email software in several countries in Europe and the U.S. The primary reason these companies buy Funambol’s software is open source. They love getting access to the code, which makes it much easier to integrate into their infrastructure. They need the broad device compatibility as well as Funambol’s value-based pricing that is enabled by the low overhead of open source. Open source is their antidote to the complexity and high cost of mobile.
Funambol recently introduced a new Mobile’We’ service for the mass market. Unlike Apple’s MobileMe that only supports iPhones and Apple email addresses, Funambol supports 1.5 billion handsets, works with virtually any email system, and is open source. This makes it attractive to everyone in the mobile industry that needs a messaging and sync play to compete with iPhone and MobileMe. The company is working on projects with major companies around the world, as their open source push email and mobile sync solution is poised to be recession-resistant.
Fabrizio capobianco is energized by the momentum of his company. He is a serial entrepreneur, having founded the first Italian web company and later starting another company in Italy that produced one of the first information portals, with customers such as the Italian Stock Exchange. Fabrizio has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pavia, Italy, with a focus on usability. He writes one of the most popular blogs in the wireless industry, called Thinking Out Loud. You can check out Fabrizio’s blog at http://www.funambol.com/blog/capo/ and learn more about Funambol and mobile open source at http://www.funambol.com/.
