1ft Startup

So Apple/KPCB has the iFund, Google has the Android Developer Challenge, and now RIM/Thompson Reuters is starting up their own BlackBerry fund. That sure feels like they’re trying to heat up the platform wars with pushing money to developers for very narrow goals. Who the heck would want to build a BlackBerry-only startup these days, except RIM?

The problem is that this doesn’t really promote solving any interesting problem. It is just the fragmented market continuing to compete with itself. A much more interesting direction would be to align investment pools perpendicular to this notion: Build a fund around location awareness, or mobile social networking, gaming, etc. That would do much more to unify the whole pie than this war over which handset gets the bigger slice.

I was about to write an amendment to the previous post per Apple’s recent announcements about the upcoming SDK, but found a few people who already have similar thoughts and concerns. Remember that the iPod already has software developers building things for it, but it hasn’t been a huge codefest bonanza the way it was with, say, Palm software, because Apple has quite a tight grip on who they allow to develop for them and who they don’t (not to mention: they control distribution with the iTunes store).

Nokia and Apple are easily the dominant players in the new generation of high-end handsets. They’re both well poised to do something everyone in the industry has been dreaming of for years: loosening the stranglehold that the carriers have on content and open the market to crazier ideas. My money is on Nokia supporting those endeavors and Apple, well, not so much. I’d say that the great unwashed out here in reality are stuck with Java ME or web apps for at least the near future.. But I would be extremely happy to be wrong.