“Though almost every discussion at the MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday centered around the iPhone, venture capitalists told mobile entrepreneurs to broaden their focus and build applications for all phones. Still, all anyone wanted to talk about was the Apple App Store, from which users have downloaded 30 million applications for the iPhone this month,” Claire Cain Mlller reports or The New York Times.
“Startups should ‘intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,’ advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, ‘the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,’ as Mr. Wong put it,” Mlller reports.
MacDailyNews Take: In other words, the store for underpowered devices with tiny screens, indecipherable user interfaces and no built-in iPods, most of which are incapable of running anything more taxing than a contacts list; iPhone also-rans, wannabes, and worse. No wonder developers don’t care about them.
Mlller continues, “”Rick Segal of Blackberry Partners Fund and JLA Ventures reminded developers that the iPhone only accounts for a tiny share of the worldwide market… ‘You must think multi-platform,’ he said.”
MacDailyNews Take: Blackberry Partners Fund = Me Too Joke (Related: Hot on the heels of their fake iPhone, RIM launches fake iFund – May 12, 2008)
Mlller continues, “Some investors insisted that multiple mobile platforms–whether Apple’s, Google’s, Research in Motion’s or others–will thrive. Matt Murphy, head of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $100 million iFund, said most entrepreneurs who pitch him have iPhone applications, but that the platform war ‘is not a winner-take-all game.’ David Sokolic of Battery Ventures disagrees. He predicts a shakeout akin to the PC market and Microsoft’s Windows, with a clear leader emerging.”
“So what’s a mobile startup to do? One solution: launch new features and applications on the iPhone, then push them out to other types of phones if customers like them,” Miller reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "lumi" for the heads up.]
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