Demo: App Dev Less Carrier-Focused, More Customer-Oriented

A panel of venture capital providers at the Demo Spring conference on Monday also discussed the importance of such issues as security and location-based access to startups in such emerging markets as mobile applications and social networking.

Demo Spring 2010, a semi-annual gathering of startups pitching their technology to potential venture and strategic investors and the press, is being held this week in Desert Springs, Calif.

The presentations at this year's Demo Spring are focused in such areas as mobile, social and media, cloud, consumer, and enterprise technologies.

A common thread of the startup presentations on Monday was the fact that none of the demonstrators talked about doing deals with carriers, said Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners.

That is a huge difference from only five years ago, when carriers were the primary venue for startups with mobile apps, Wong said.

"The rise of off-deck mobile (devices) with open platforms is allowing mobile communications companies to get started easier," he said.

Nagraj Kashyap, vice president of Qualcomm Ventures, said that cross-platform development has become the focus for tech startups.

"You can do much more at a lower cost if going beyond a single platform," Kashyap said.

Many of the demonstrations of new technology were shown using Apple iPhones, a fact that did not bother Wesley Chan, partner at Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google, the developer of the Android mobile platform, a top iPhone rival.

Cross-platform design is the key to building applications that work regardless of whether users use an iPhone or an Android or some other device, Chan said. Many of the new applications coming to market are Web-based apps which can be used via a browser, he said. "I'm very encouraged that we don't need to go to the carriers any more, or go to the app stores," he said.

Fortunately, Chan said, smart phones based on the Android or iPhone platforms have very powerful processors, and so are suitable for use with browser-based applications.

The increasing fragmentation in terms of the devices customers use is also lessening developers' ties to carriers, Wong said.

For example, Wong said, the Symbian platform is most common in India, while the Android and iPhone are more common in the U.S, and so the choice of mobile device in a particular market is more important than the choice of carrier.

That is pushing developers to demand open APIs, Williams said. "They have to demand the operators quit taking over the APIs and controlling the eyeballs," he said.

Location-based access to advertising has been talked about for years, but despite the availability of technologies like GPS it has yet to become common, panelists said. However, they said, this is starting to change.

In the past, developers needed to strike deals with carriers in order to get access to location-based data, but such barriers are breaking down, Kashyap said. As a result of smart phones coming with built-in location-based capabilities, developers no longer need to go to carriers for access.

Kashyap cited as an example the way that SMS application developers can now go to third-party aggregators instead of to the carriers to allow communication between users.

Security is also an important issue facing application developers. However, the panelists said, today the concern is not providing the most secure platforms for customers, but instead is balancing users' security requirements with convenience.

Lee Williams, executive director of Symbian, said that developers need to keep in mind that some users do not want to be bothered by security, but instead must also look at the kind of convenience their customers require.

"You can't compromise that convenience on the way to security," Williams said. "If you leave it up to the consumer the choice between convenience and security, they will choose convenience."

Wong said the industry has started taking into account the concept of privacy as being "generational" in nature, with younger people more likely to share personal information than in the past, which makes it important for developers to keep their specific users' requirements in mind when designing security.