Under the Radar: SoonR and Funambol CEOs talk about their companies

12:32 | Admin | Nov 26th, 2005 7:09pm |

This is a podcast with CEO of Funambol and CEO of SoonR from the Under the Radar event in November.

Funambol (pronounced “foo-nahm-ball”) comes from the Latin words funis (rope) and ambulare (walking), meaning a tight-rope walker.

Being an open source company means walking on a rope, every day. We must always keep a balance between the needs of the open source community and the business. Every step we take, we remember to keep our balance – keeping the community committed, but also keeping our commercial customers more than happy.

Funambol’s vision is to bring the customer benefits of open source software to the $300 billion global mobile market. Just as open standards and open source software helped spark the explosion of the Internet, so Funambol believes open source software can accelerate creativity, innovation, and a wide range of new content, services and choice for wireless customers.

The mobile computing market has been made real by shipments of over 1,000,000,000 wireless devices: phones, PDAs, tablet PCs, and dedicated devices. Over 80% of these devices will ship with Java, or have plug-ins for their C++ environments. This is the basis for the next wave of computing.
Funambol’s open source mobile application server is based on the Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management standard (OMA DS/DM, popularly known as SyncML). Funambol provides software infrastructure that allows developers in carriers, enterprises and ISVs/ASPs to synchronize, provision and manage mobile devices. Funambol’s mobile application server is flexible and open, allowing the company to also offer open source implementations of other leading synchronization and management protocols for the wireless market.
Started in 2001, the open source Sync4j project is the leading open source implementation of SyncML. With more than 18,000 software downloads a month, it is supported by one of the largest mobile developer communities in the world. It is also the world’s fastest growing middleware platform.

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO Funambol
Capobianco, a serial entrepreneur and veteran executive at Reuters and Tibco, founded the first Italian Web company, Internet Graffiti. He also founded Stigma Online, developer of an information portal product with customers that included Kraft, Novartis, Italian Broadcasting Television and the Italian Stock Exchange. A finance executive at Tibco when the division was acquired by Reuters, Capobianco subsequently led the worldwide pre-sales, deployment and support of Reuters Mercury, a leading software solution for online trading. Capobianco writes a monthly column for Wireless Magazine, and has taught courses on wireless and mBusiness strategies at the University of Pavia in Italy. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pavia in Italy.

SoonR
The founders of SoonR worked together on many products that helped business users in the pc and internet eras to reach new levels of productivity. Examples include, Sidekick - the desktop organizer and Quattro Pro - the award winning spreadsheet (both Borland products at the time). Web and content management products include NetObjects Fusion, QuickSite, Frame Maker, and Collage, a content management product by Serena. As we enter the age of mobile computing, the team is focused on delivering the same kind of productivity gains for the mobile business user.

Martin Frid-Nielsen, CEO SoonR

Martin brings extensive start-up and larger company experience to SoonR. He spent 3 years in various executive positions at enterprise software provider Merant including VP of Development, and was actively involved in selling the company to Serena for about $400 million in 2004. Prior to joining Merant through an acquisition, Martin was at NetObjects for over six years, where he was the VP of R&D since founding and through its IPO in 1999, he was instrumental in defining and creating the company’s leading web-authoring product NetObjects Fusion. He was also a principal of Hilltop Software Technologies, a provider of pre-internet communication applications and consulting services. Prior to that, Martin spent ten years at Borland International in senior engineering and program management positions. Products included Sidekick 1.0 & 2.0, the company’s hit personal information organizer that created a new market category, Personal Information Management. Martin is a named inventor on four (4) U.S. Patents related to data synchronization and web authoring technologies.

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