Who Makes This Stuff (1) - with The Makers of PocketBreeze

Posted by: PatrickJ on Jul 26 2006

  

What does it take to make truly excellent mobile applications?

Ever wondered who’s behind some of those essential, favorite applications you use every day on your Pocket PC or smartphone, and how they’ve made them so popular and successful?

Or wanted to know more about how some of this great software gets developed, and what’s coming along in the future from leading publishers? 

If so, hopefully you will enjoy this series of posts, where we will talk to some of the very best software developers and publishers. In these brief Q&A sessions, we’ll learn a little about how they got started, their views on how the whole mobile applications area is going to develop, and their thoughts on what it takes to make excellent mobile software.

We are very happy to say that our first one of these Q&A sessions is with SBSH Mobile Software’s CEO, Amit Regev. Amit, and SBSH, are the people who bring you PocketBreeze, PocketWeather, iLauncher, and other great mobile titles.

 

Company Facts:

Location: Tel-Aviv, Israel

Founded: January, 2002

Number of Staff: 9 - 7 are management and developers, 2 are support staff.

CEO / Principals: Amit Regev

Flagship Products: PocketBreeze, PocketWeather, iLauncher, Papyrus, and Facade

Platforms: Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Smartphone, and Symbian Series 60

 

Q&A:

Q: Can you tell us a little about how the company got started? Was there a particular gap you saw, an application you wanted and nobody made or did right?

The company started as a single project when I was working on PocketBreeze initial versions (former Calendar Plus). After initial development the product received great recognition from the Pocket PC users community and Adrian joined the team with PocketWeather. As our user base continued to grow, the demand for more software increased too and we continued to work on new products and expand our development team and support team to answer users demand.

Q: Give us the ‘Elevator Pitch’ on SBSH – what’s the corporate philosophy that drives your product development?

Our goal is to bring users software with the best user-experience possible that will allow them to take real advantage of their mobile devices and really enjoy their device capabilities. We put major focus on the look&feel of our products, aiming to bring a product which wraps the user important information which is also fun to look and use.

As part of the user-experience we put major efforts in supporting our users including running active forums as a communication channel between us developers and our users.

Q: What makes a GREAT Pocket PC application? What are the key factors in making a really successful and effective application for mobile devices?

There are a lot of important parts that needs to be completed for this, among those: communicating with the users-community to really understand what are the users needs, major design stages of the product goals and specifications before starting the development work and of course a great programmer that will be in-charge of the production process from the design sketches to the mobile device.

Q: PocketBreeze is a hugely well-known and well-loved application. What’s made it so successful? How do you keep it ahead of the competition? Are there any major wish-list items that users have told you about that you can tell us are going to feature in a next release?

I believe that the main success of PocketBreeze is related to the fact it was designed with the help of our community users and based on their demands.This is what allowed us to bring such a great pack of features in one product that address the needs of so many Pocket PC users. By following our user demands we are aware today that users are not looking only for ways to manage their agenda - they also want it to look good so they will enjoy looking at it, which is exactly what PocketBreeze offers.

There are really a lot of great new stuff that are planned for future PocketBreeze updates, some of are already in the works and others are still in design stages, but I’m sure we will continue to be the first to deliver the most innovative solutions on this niche; Like we just recently did with the new complete D-Pad navigation mode allowing complete one-handed operation.

Q: I’ve read a few pieces recently on smartphones and mobile applications, and the lack of takeup of applications by ‘normal’ users (i.e. not geeks). There’s a great piece by Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity on the need for a new mobile platform, because ‘sophisticated mobile data apps’ just don’t sell well. (see it at: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/). It seems that a huge percentage of users just don’t know about a lot of the great software that is out there, and don’t know all the powerful things they can do with their mobile device (beyond just phone and email). What are your thoughts on the state of mobile apps sales and how to grow awareness and sales to more of the ‘entry-level’ users out there?

I’ve read a lot of articles on this topic recently and I believe that the existence of such articles is exactly the beginning of the change that we are looking for. As of today, the Smartphone market third party content is still in the Ringtones stage, were most of the content that is being pushed to the users by the carriers are ringtones and extremely simple content.

While some of the writers will disagree with me, I believe that such changes takes time and eventually we will see the change coming from both sides. The developers from one side will have to accept a few changes with their software which will make it easier to use for the simple user and the users will start investigating the more advanced content possibilities (/software and games) that the market can offer as the ringtones stage will fade away.

Most of the writers don’t believe that the market can actually change it’s habit and put the blame on the OS and software offered today, but I think that by checking the technology history you can clearly see how the end-user habits changed according to what technology had to offer, which is what I believe we will see happen with this market too in the near future.

You can clearly see the beginning of this change with the new Motorola Q release, which is the first Smartphone mobile device that can almost be described as main-stream mobile phone. The more we will see Smartphone devices hit the market with lower price tag, the number of users exploring the software market will also grow.

Q: Are there Product Roadmaps that you work to for your stable of products – i.e. should we expect a major new version release of PB / others every 12-18 months, a .x release once per year? What’s the approach in this area?

We are holding products development road map but we usually prefer not to publish ETA for our releases since we know we might decide to expand our work on a certain product release based on users demand etc. I can hint that there will be several new important updates for our products until the end of 2006 along with two new product releases that hopefully will be ready either by the end of 2006 or during the 1st Q of 2007.

Q: How do your products do in the ‘converged devices’ area as opposed to non-connected PDAs – are your sales figures pretty similar across both, or are users slower to adopt on some of the new smartphone devices?

Since we also sell products that are designed for use only on Smartphone devices we can’t compare sales for those products with non-converged devices. I can confirm that on the Pocket PC market we see more sales from converged devices, due to their rising popularity of course.

Q: Any concerns that Microsoft will eventually produce a Today screen / desktop for Pocket PCs that will be slicker and more compelling for users, and that will put a dent in the market for Today screen add-ons and replacements?

Hehe I will have to leave the last two questions for MS guys to answer. We will be sure to follow all new developments in the market and continue offering the best solutions for all new developments for the market.

Q: The Smartphone and Pocket PC awards for 2006 will come out later this year. I always find that a superb jumping-off point for finding great software in lots of categories. So … will PocketBreeze or any of your others be winning any?

Since the judges are still ranking the different software titles I still don’t know if we will be winning any of this year’s awards, but I was told that we have three different products that made it to the finalist stage.

Our Papyrus for Smartphone won last year wards as the best application for work and I’m hoping that one of our finalist products or more will be elected as the winning products for this year too.

Thanks To Amit, Matthias, and SBSH 

So … there’s our first one of this ‘Who Makes This Stuff’ series done. The thing that really leaps out to me in this Q&A is the emphasis on communicating with, and listening to, the users. He even credits users heavily in terms of factors in making the products successful. Very nice to hear that from a top software publisher!

Huge thanks to Amit for doing this with us, and to Matthias Baas for helping to organize it. Hope you enjoy this Q&A - let us know what you think, and what other questions you’d like to ask - so we can all learn a little more about what it takes to make great mobile software.

And of course, if you want to see and try out some of SBSH’s great software, visit their site at:

SBSH Mobile Home 

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Tags: SBSH, PocketBreeze, PocketWeather, Windows Mobile Software, Mobile applications, Just Another Mobile Monday

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