Mobile Sorcery, a start-up launched in 2004, released its MoSync cross-platform development tool in September 2007. Henrik von Schoultz, co-founder and vice president of business development, says MoSync enables developers working in a single source code to launch their applications on a diverse range of mobile-device models and platforms, such as Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile.

“It’s a very fragmented world,” von Schoultz says. “Application developers have new opportunities all the time and they have to adapt to that.”

Von Schoultz says that MoSync reduces costs and speeds up time-to-market by making it easy to port, update and create applications from one mobile platform to another. MoSync also removes bottlenecks in developing and deploying and allows dynamic services to be created simply, he says.

“Today, if a developer creates an application for Java-based phones, for example, they have to build a program for each and every model of telephone. If the customer says now we want the Symbian version, they have to start over again.”

More than 50 percent of a developer’s costs go toward testing and porting, von Schoultz says. “Developers have to produce hundreds of versions of their programs, one for every telephone.”

Von Schoultz notes that there is unprecedented demand for mobile applications and that Mobile Sorcery’s customers are both large and small developers looking for a “future proof” solution to bring their product to market quickly.

He says the market for mobile applications is unfolding rapidly, with device capability struggling to keep up with the complexity of some multimedia applications.

“Two years ago, not so many companies were interested in developing for mobile,” von Schoultz says. “Now there are a lot of them downloading tools, reading and going to all these websites in this area, such as Nokia Forum and Ericsson Mobility World.”.

Von Schoultz says that location-aware programs are “hot” in the development community now. “There are hundreds of projects going on in this area,” he says. Other products he predicts will dominate the mobile-multimedia market are “small, easy-to-play” games, instant messaging, and social media applications like Twitter. 

“The new generation of kids use messaging more than e-mail. They use messaging more than SMS, since telecoms are now selling flat rates for non-voice data services,” he says. 

And it is not just consumer demand that is driving the market. Business applications are moving from closed environments like palm pilots to phones “because everybody is buying different hardware,” he says. “The intranets are moving into the telephone.
 
“You will use the mobile phone much more than you use your computer for most things in three or four years,” he predicts.

David Callahan