Interview with Funambol
July 4, 2008Funambol has developed open source mobile messaging software that provides any type of mobile phone with email, calendar, and contact management functionality, similar to the BlackBerry interface, but completely free. I had the opportunity to speak with Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol and a native of Italy. He speaks about the tremendous demand for free email on mobile devices, the effectiveness of the company’s worldwide community of developers in building portability of the open source application across 1.5 billion phones, and his experience as a web entrepreneur in Italy in the early 90’s. He also includes a complete demo of the Funambol application on the RAZR and the iPhone, so you can get a firsthand glimpse of the software.
Also check out these other great posts on Funambol:
Mashable - Kristen Nicole shares the news of Funambol’s recent $12.5M round of funding - congrats Fabrizio!
TechCrunch - Erick Schonfeld discusses Funambol’s free mobile syncing software for the iPhone.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
[...] The PIM listener is useful for users who have several devices that must stay in synch; it notices when one of a user’s devices has been synced, and triggers an SMS to all the user’s other devices (which are known to support such SMSs) instructing them to automatically initiate their own sync to pick up the changes. Obviously, this won’t help with Outlook or an iPod (because they can’t receive SMS notifications), but is a good way to satisfy one’s most-engaged users, who tend to have lots of other toys. I believe that if one updates device A, makes a separate update to device B, and syncs A, then not only will B be auto-synced, but the result of that sync will trigger an auto-sync of A to pickup the new data from B. However, as the number of a user’s devices goes up, the number of auto-syncs may thus increase factorially/exponentially; I know of no tests to see if this leads to significant battery drain or application latency. For a demo, check out the video interview with Funambol’s CEO at TalkTv. [...]
August 15th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!