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Comment by haseman | Hacker News Reader

Woah there. This is the kinda stuff we saw in the early dot-com days. Mobile will be big, but there are some huge hurdles to get over...just off the top of my head:

1-Bandwidth limitations. Have you tried using AT&T in San Francisco?

2-Divergent platforms: I write mobile software for a living and I'd say about 60% of my time is spent making the same software work on a different device. This is ruthlessly inefficient and I've yet to see anything (aside from the single resolution iPhone) to address this issue.

3- User Interface: Small screens, small keyboards.

Mobile will be big, but it's got problems, and if too much VC is poured in now we'll build up a market that can't be sustained. It's already happened, in some ways, with the iPhone marketplace.

Easy does it.

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The operators / carriers are a big limitation to innovation in the mobile space. It is completely closed in comparison to the internet. In India, where I worked for a startup which is trying to build a platform without getting into bed with the operators, they pretty much got away with what would appear to normal people to be illegal. Your services are blocked for the simple reason that they may be competing with their own. They will do everything possible to screw up the user experience. I'm not sure how it is in the US. While there are opportunities, there are too many gatekeepers at present.

> Bandwidth limitations.

This is going to be a big problem - the simple physics of it, means it's much more limited than wired.

> I write mobile software for a living

I always wondered about that. Do you write native apps, or is it some kind of HTML? I see so many: WAP, WML, XHTML-MP. Which do I use if I want to get started?

It really depends on the market you're trying to address. I would assume that most phones sold in the developed markets in the last two years have browsers with XHTML+CSS support. But, tons of low end phones are still sold the world over. They may support only WAP. We started with WAP on a project and quickly gave up.

I personally write native apps. J2ME for most low end AT&T phones and blackberries. Brew (A SDK straight out of the 80's built on non-static C) for Verizon. Java on Android for the Google phones and, of course, Objective C on Mac OS for iPhones.

I'll work with any 3 of these platforms in a given day. 2 if I'm lucky, 1 if there's a looming deadline ;-)

Henry Blodget promoting Mary Meeker content - early dot-com days indeed.

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