This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Personal Digital Assistant and a decade of Enfour developing software for mobile platforms. That’s right, Enfour was the first company to develop commerical software for PDAs (back then the Newton) but now for all platforms. In fact, Enfour, Inc. was spun-off from Enfour Media Laboratory specifically to pursue development of software for handheld computers.
We spent an afternoon at the Symbian Workshop in Tokyo recently and chatted with Nokia’s Gerard Bruen, Director of Series 60 and Alliance Partners. Tune in for a surprisingly candid discussion about what the big push was for this event.. “the Japanese market is sophisticated, the developers have a good understanding, there is a good eco-system already built around financially stable developers and content owners and we should utilize that.. Nokia has the reach to go global, and to take them global”. A must see interview for wireless developers everywhere who are planning their mobile business strategy.
HI Corp, a mobile 3D rendering technology developer in Japan, and the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola Inc have agreed that HI will offer its Mascot Capsule Engine to customers of Motorola’s Innovative Convergence i.250, 2.5G GSM/GPRS handset platform. The HI technology is also scheduled to be available to Motorola’s i.MX applications processor customers and i.Smart smartphone reference design customers.
The past couple of weeks saw two lavish events at trendy Tokyo venues hosted by carriers NTT DoCoMo and J-Phone to fete their content provider communities (so, yes, there was a lot of overlap in the guest lists). One attendee at the J-Phone event, held at Zepp in Odaiba, reported that it was a sweaty, raucous evening with content community punters packed in six deep. “There was a lengthy line-up of folks waiting to exchange meishi business cards,” she said, adding that a good time was had, evidently, by all.
