Advantages claimed
Steger says the e-mail experience with Funambol is very similar to that provided by better established competitors, but his company has four key advantages, most relating to its open source pedigree. The Funambol technology works on more phones. It's cheaper. It's easier for service providers to implement. And it's easier to install on client devices.

The company estimates the Funambol software will work on 1.5 billion existing phones. Unlike other push e-mail software such as BlackBerry and Visto, it works on so-called feature phones as well as smartphones and PDA phones. This is a key part of the company's strategy—to target the consumer mass market, which Steger insists is beginning to gravitate to the idea of push mail.

Feature phones lack the resources and capabilities of more expensive smartphones, he notes, but they have enough to be able to use his company's small-footprint software to get basic e-mail and PIM functionality. One of Funambol's slogans is, "push email, contacts & calendars for everyone."

The company achieved broad device compatibility by basing its software on open source standards already widely implemented on handsets. The software will work on any phone using SyncML, an information synchronization standard now generally referred to as Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management. It will work on phones with Java ME (Micro Edition), a Java subset for use on small, resource-constrained devices. And it works on Windows Mobile phones.

Funambol-based services can be cheaper for a few reasons. The company's software development costs are lower because it's leveraging the open source community, and those savings are passed on to service provider customers. Also, ISPs won't be purchasing push mail as a service—as they would with RIM, which has to recover costs associated with its network operations centers. They'll be implementing and managing their own integrated services.

And, perhaps most importantly, service providers using Funambol can target a much larger market than competitors such as RIM and Visto which are mostly focused on the enterprise. "There's nothing to stop RIM from reducing its prices," Steger points out. "But they have no incentive. They're enjoying an extremely lucrative and healthy market."

Consumers, however, won't pay what enterprises and business professionals shell out for BlackBerry, which according to Steger is $50 and up a month. 1&1 will charge German customers €5 for unlimited e-mails and PIM synchronization. Subscribers will need a mobile data plan, and unlike in the U.S., low-cost all-you-can-eat mobile data plans are rare in Europe. But also unlike in the U.S., cellular access is relatively open. 1&1 will resell data plans from Vodafone for €10.

Total cost for data plan and push e-mail/PIM service: about $22 a month. That's significantly less than BlackBerry, the highest priced push mail service, but also less than Good and Visto, which Steger estimates are about 15 percent less than BlackBerry.

Funambol is easy for service providers to implement, especially ISPs, for a couple of reasons, Steger says . First, they can download the source code and try it out and develop a prototype service without paying Funambol anything. And second, ISPs in particular are already very comfortable with the open source environment in which the software was built, and continues to be developed and maintained.

The company is demonstrating how easy it is to implement the software on a handset by offering a beta service from its myFunambol portal site, which it invites end users to try.

Unlike with services such as BlackBerry, which require an enterprise IT or retail store employee to set up and configure, the Funambol provisioning process is simple and automatic—Steger calls it "brain-dead easy." The portal site generates a text message to the user's phone with a link. When you click the link, the software is downloaded and the service automatically configured over the air. (Well, it's a little more complicated than that, as I discovered, but that's another story.)

Will the Funambol "advantages" be enough?
ISPs should also be concerned as well about reliability and security. Steger argues that the fact the software has been worked on for seven years in the open source community, and continues to be, ensures that it is stable and will remain so.

As for security, Funambol uses https between mobile phone and server. "It's a secure end-to-end solution," Steger says. "We also do some encryption. It's just as secure as Visto, Good, and BlackBerry." Maybe. Although RIM et al might dispute this claim.

Still, Funambol is at the very least an interesting proposition for ISPs. Given that half the U.S. population, according to recent estimates, now have cell phones, it's likely that at least half and probably a great deal more of your subscribers do—and might well be interested in inexpensive push e-mail.

—End

< Back to page one