Insight Community

The nimble development teams that create small and useful mini-apps sometimes face a point when acquisition by a much larger software firm is desirable. A moderate-sized blog tool firm is looking for the track records of its potential suitors (eg. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, IAC, etc) for dealing with culture clashes and maintaining the usefulness of its products post-acquisition. From an insider's perspective, personal experiences and cautionary tales are welcome. From a users' viewpoint, describe how your loyalty to an acquired service was affected after your favorite widget-like software was bought.

We would like to compile the current size (# of providers, customers, revenue), historical growth, and potential growth in the wireless broadband internet market on two scales: 1) municipal wifi and 2) rural fixed wireless -- on a state-by-state breakdown.

This issue is clearly a tall order, so the first 10 acceptable responses to provide data and/or suggestions for obtaining this information will be chosen as winners. A follow-up issue to this project may be posted based on the responses gathered here.

Two big topics these days are SaaS and wireless. Obviously the two are on a converging path. Already, Blackberry email is considered an essential wireless SaaS offering. What other opportunities do you see coming into this space. If you were investing in wireless Saas, where do you think the biggest opportunities are today?

Mywaves has created a unique embeddable video player (available at http://www.mywaves.com) with complete mobile capabilities. In addition to all the usual features of embedded players, it's designed to integrate with mobile phones and can be used as a viral marketing tool. With mywaves, users can send content from the web to their phones or to their friends' devices. Videos can also be uploaded directly from mobile phones and sent right to other users' handsets, as well as the web.

Mywaves is interested in the following feedback about its player:

1) What are the obstacles to adoption? How can they be overcome?
2) How can mywaves be marketed so that potential users can better see its value?
3) What groups of potential users should the company be targeting, and who can benefit the most from the player?
4) How can mywaves better reach that potential audience?
5) Mywaves is in the process of redesigning its site -- What are the top three ways the mywaves site could be improved to better attract and support users?

Please rank the following companies' media device strategy on (a) vision and (b) ability to execute: Apple for the iPod, Microsoft for the Zune, Creative for the Zen, Samsung, Archos, Sony. Rank each on a one to ten scale (1 to 10 for vision, and 1 to 10 for ability to execute), with one being the lowest, and ten being the highest. Please provide a short paragraph explaining your rankings.

If you had to bet on one single wireless technology to dominate in the next five years, what would it be and why?

The telecom space is facing an interesting convergence challenge, between mobile technologies, broadband technologies and VoIP. Recognizing that the trends for these technologies is inevitable, as a traditional telecom firm, what's the best strategy to embrace these technologies without completely destroying our core telephony business?

The computer security game seems like a continuous tug o' war, with security firms reacting to each new trick from malicious hackers. Can there be a better way to design security so that we're not always one step behind?

Developing applications for the mobile world is incredibly tricky. Unlike the PC world, where the choices are pretty obvious, the complexity level for mobiles is exponentially more difficult. You basically take carriers multiplied by OEMs/handset vendors multiplied by operating systems multiplied by development platforms to set the base level of complexity. Add to that the rapid churn rate of users, and it becomes even trickier.

So, for a company that's developing mobile applications, and wants to maximize coverage while minimizing integration costs, what is the best strategy? We recognize that it may be different for enterprise apps and consumer apps -- but are interested in both areas, so please give thoughts either on both markets. Feel free to think outside the box, but hopefully the answers are practical. As a secondary question, if the strategy is to attack one platform at a time, what sequence of carriers/platforms/vendors makes the most sense, for each of the consumer and enterprise markets?

Salesforce.com recently launched their Apex programming language for developing on-demand applications to run on their hosted environment. Is this a compelling offering? If not, why not? If so, why? What might you use it for?