The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon | Hacker News Reader

The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon

techcrunch.com

12 pointsgetp7 comments

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Began, the phone wars have.

RIM: $150m VC fund

Apple: $100m VC fund

Google: $10m in give-away prizes

Microsoft: ???

Nokia: ???

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 :-)

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.

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