Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser

This is the first of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-timebusiness and current ���hobby with a logo���. I thought it might be useful to some tosee how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on.

Often times, when I explain my adventures as a self-styled independent developeradvocate for Android, I���m told ���you were really lucky to get in on Android so early!���And, that is true: I did benefit from some luck, and I will point one prominentinstance of that a few posts from now.

However, in entrepreneurship and many other facets of life, you make your own luck.

By 2007, I already had started and buried two businesses, one pathetic enough that itdoesn���t even make my LinkedIn profile. I was focused on identifyinga business model and an area to apply that to. I will get into the business model morein the next couple of posts. It turned out that I had been thinking about the area to applyit to for far longer than I had expected.

In 1995, I co-founded a firm named, at various times, The Sapphire Group and Firewater.We attempted to sell a Web application engine and IDE called PageBlazer.

(branding is hard)

In 1996, I stumbled upon a firm named Unwired Planet. They were partnering with AT&T Wirelesson cellphones that could connect to the Internet. While nowadays that is ridiculously common,back then the Internet itself was fairly new to most people, and we were happy if our cellphonescould reliably place voice calls. Unwired Planet createdthe Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML),which described stacks of cards, each designed around a few lines of text, and each supportingsoft buttons for navigation between cards. AT&T Wireless created a cellphone that could get tothe Internet via a gateway, hit a Web server that served HDML, and render the results. Effectively,Unwired Planet created a ���Web��� browser, just based around HDML instead of HTML, and designed aroundsimple text interfaces that supported the screen technology used by phones of that era.

I adapted PageBlazer to support HTML and HDML from a single set of source code, in hopesthat we could ride a mobile Internet wave. My business partner and I knew that one year, mobileInternet would become huge. 1996 was not that year. The phones��� battery life was best measuredin minutes and IIRC never hit the market.Unwired Planet���s HDML eventually formed the foundation of the Wireless Markup Languagethat in turn was part ofthe Wireless Application Protocol (WAP),which enjoyed modest success.

After that, I kept tabs on mobile communications technology, waitingfor something to show up that I felt would capture mainstream interest ������crossing the chasm��� in Geoffrey Moore���s terms.Many candidates popped up but never reached that sort of attention:

Two-way paging from Motorola and Research in Motion (a.k.a., BlackBerry) The Palm VII Handheld PCs many of which ran Windows CE Windows Mobile

Then, in January 2007, Steve Jobs debuted the iPhone.It was obvious to me at the time that the iPhone was going to be big��� but you couldn���treally write apps for it. They had some Web technology that could be used, but it never reallytook off.

Later in 2007, though, two announcements rocked my world:

In October, Steve Jobs announced that they would release a real honest-to-goodness SDK fordeveloping iPhone apps in early 2008

A month later, Google announced the formation ofthe Open Handset Alliance and shippedthe first preview release of Android

At this point, I knew, without a doubt, that one or both of those would ���cross the chasm���and become mainstream, and that I could build a business supporting one. But, which one?

I���ll get to that decision a few posts from now. But before that decision would be meaningful,I needed a business model. And before that would be meaningful, I needed to address a fundamentalproblem: I absolutely suck at marketing. How I planned to get past that will be the topic of the next post.