Airsource woke up this morning to Nokia’s announcement to make Symbian an Open Source platform, and with it all the concrete platforms like S60, UIQ, and so forth. While Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT DoCoMo are all mentioned in the press release, it seems to me that they had little choice but to jump on board. From an Airsource perspective, S60 pretty much meant Nokia - and now Nokia will mean S60. At the very least, that might make our sales presentations easier.

This announcement is good news in two ways for Airsource’s business. Firstly, from a commercial perspective, it removes some of the cloud of doubt about what Android means for the market. Android did not exactly threaten the future of S60, the established leader in the convergent devices market , but it did cast some doubt on the subject. How would an open source competitor affect the market? Businesses, of course, hate doubt, and while S60 was ahead of Android on pretty much everything apart from source access, the playing field there has now been made more level. Obviously a $1500 charge (annual) for source access is not free, but it is vastly cheaper than the old fee to become a Symbian Platinum Partner.

Secondly, from a technical perspective, access to the underlying platform code helps the developer produce more stable products, faster. Some areas of code are always technically more complex and more poorly documented than others, such as MTMs. Access to source code will significantly ease development on the really cool stuff.

We at Airsource look forward to seeing more developments.

The Cambridge CAMRA Beer Festival has arrived in town again.

An annual event in Cambridge, the Beer Festival features hundreds of brews from all over the UK and Europe. The key message is that the best beer is “Real Ale”; not stuffed with preservatives and artificially carbonated but the genuine, hand-crafted article.

As a team bonding training exercise, the Airsource team went along to learn more about Real Ale and to sample a few ounces of the amber brew. The work was strictly investigative and rigorously scientific.

The main hall features food and, obviously, large quantities of beer.

A few hints for those unaccustomed to the beer festival;

• Work a half-pint at a time
• The cheese stall is brilliant
• Leave the more potent brews for later in the evening

Inside the Cambridge Beer Festival compound.

My vote for the best beer experienced this year is “Comrade Bill Bartrams Egalitarian Anti Imperialist Soviet Stout” which is very much worth your time and energy.

As part of our scientific study, obviously some beer needs to be consumed.

The Airsource team have just been out for their first team-building exercise. One of the benefits of running your own company is that you get to choose what the activities are - and since my sport is running, and Airsource is a four man company, I decided we’d do the Cambridge Fun Run - a four by 1.1 mile relay. I did check that everyone was up for a bit of running first though! We’ve just got back from the race - via the pub, so that’s an average of 7 minutes running each followed by an hour eating and drinking. Seems a good ratio. Not sure how we placed yet, but those who know me will know I’m not exactly uncompetitive, so I’ll be checking the results with interest!

Approaching recruitment for the first time is always a bit of a tricky one. You dread the thought of getting someone onboard only to throw them overboard again after a few weeks because you totally misjudged their capacity to work, think or be part of the team. You advertise your position and after a few weeks of interviews you start to wonder if you aren’t just doing it all wrong. It’s in these moments of sheer desperation that that the Recruitment Agency beckons.

Well, actually, the Recruitment Agency isn’t just beckoning, it’s phoning you up every other day from Glasgow, West London and various other locations, telling you all about the FANTASTIC engineer that they’ve got just sitting on their books BEGGING to be hired by you if only you’ll sign their paperwork and agree to let them inundate you with CVs. They only charge an eye-watering percentage of the recruit’s first year salary.

Now, before I go all nuts here - there are exceptions - companies who build their reputation on their relationship with you and the candidate, who are used over and over again over decades by technical people and who do a great job. But frankly these are rare and when you find them, you hang on to them for dear life. Yes, they cost good money. But they also send you great people and they do so politely and respectfully. They also don’t cold call.

So I want to offer you some helpful advice on dealing with those who can’t read or understand English.

Cold emailing is pretty simple. Every mail server has an option you can set which will cause emails from a specific domain to be dropped on the floor and ignored forever. When Airsource is emailed by a recruitment company, they get a polite email explaining why they are being blacklisted and then - into the blacklist they go. I know this isn’t very nice, but frankly, emailing me when I’ve asked not to be emailed by you isn’t very nice either, so my conscience is clear.

This goes for those who claim not to be recruitment agencies;

When you are next looking to recruit, wouldn’t you like to:
- Reduce you(sic) cost per hire by thousands
- Reduce the time it takes you to recruit
- Increase the exposure of your vacancy and have it potential(sic) viewed by millions of active job seekers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 356(sic) days per year.

FooDeBlah is not a recruitment agency - in fact we’re very different. The biggest difference is that we do not charge an end placement fee.

Yes, 356 days a year. After all, even agencies need to have some time off. But different? Different you say? You, sir, look like a duck. You talk like a duck. You walk like a duck. You email as if you were a duck. You are on my blacklist.

Of course, you then get the agencies who think that getting on the phone to you is somehow special - it’s actually ok to call me up and waste even more of my time instead of emailing me. That somehow I won’t be nearly as annoyed.

Two particularly cute stories - I had a nice chap from Glasgow who just “happened to ring me up” and “hadn’t seen any ads online” so couldn’t possibly have noticed anything whatsoever about my request to not be contacted by an agency. When challenged that in fact this was a load of old rubbish, the poor bloke got all teary on me - “if we never called up people who asked not to be contacted, we’d never get any business.” Deary me.

The second one was a more aggressive gentleman who rung me up and insisted on trying to pry as many possible details as he could from me. I resisted, explained that frankly we weren’t interested in his services and that he really shouldn’t ever call us again. He got a little shirty at this point and said “Who’s your boss?” My reply was “I’m the CEO of Airsource.”

Last Friday I had the opportunity to head down to London to see the Motorola MOTODEV Summit world tour come to town. MOTODEV is Motorola’s attempt to woo the developers of the world to their platforms and devices - attempt to capture some mind-share and give us some insight into what is around the corner for their technology.

The main lobby of “The Brewery”.

It was a pretty small gathering, at “The Brewery” near Liverpool Street Station in the heart of “The City”, an area of London frequented by blokes in suits carrying Blackberries and shouting “Sell! Sell!” in increasingly fervent tones. Members of Motorola’s “ecosystem” were there, and about 24 low-key stands were put up so that various parties could hawk their wares.

The main hall, first thing. The exhibition, “breakfast” and lunch were all served in here.

About half of the people there seemed to be Motorolans (yes, that’s what they call themselves. I know this ’cause I used to be one…), and there were quite a few suits and ties. I recognised a few faces from the MoMo London events, and a few folks from overseas had even come in for the occasion - I spotted some Israelis, a few of the nice folk from Funambol in Italy and I spoke to someone who had come in from Barcelona. It’s fair to say things even felt a little European.

Obviously, there’s a lot of buzz about Motorola. For all of the horrendous history they have on the user interface front, Captain Zander and the gang have been doing some hard work whipping their phone platform into shape for the 21st Century. They have a great bunch of engineers and their “feature phone” devices are some of the most popular in the world - the bestselling device of 2006 I believe was the RAZR - but these “big hits” are few and far between, and Motorola just hasn’t managed to build the sheer volume of models that companies like Nokia have. Motorola has become pretty strong on style, but their software has unfortunately been weak - it’s fine in the guts of the thing but the bits the user sees have been very poorly thought out. They were a bit late to the UI party. So I was certainly interested to hear what they had planned.

Despite the advertised breakfast, a woefully small stack of pastries was on offer (note to event organisers - please - a proper feed in future?) but free WiFi and a lounge-like atmosphere made for a nice escape from the biting cold outside. The keynote kicked off at about 9:30 and Christy Wyatt greeted us with Motorola’s perspective on where the big challenges were in the mobile industry and how Motorola was going to address them.

The main theatre where the keynote was given.

(Christy was actually pretty refreshing. I’m becoming slightly tired of the woeful presentation skills shown at these events and she was great. No notes, spoke well to the audience and didn’t stumble or start, despite some technical outages. Bravo.)

Christy Wyatt, VP for ecosystem and market development @ Motorola, delivers the keynote.

Here’s where it got interesting. The single biggest issue facing the mobile market from a developer’s perspective is - fragmentation. But instead of addressing the issue by driving their platform strategies to minimise this (like Nokia does), Motorola are determined to go bananas and back pretty much every platform under the sun. So Motorola has;

• AJAR (The “low-end” platform MIDP 2.0, migrating to MIDP 3.0 in the coming year or so)
• MOTOMAGX (The “feature” platform - Linux, MIDP and WebUI)
• UIQ (”High-end multimedia” platform)
• Windows Mobile (”Enterprise Mobility”)

So Motorola is exhibiting the broader malaise of the mobile industry. They are fragmenting their platform strategy. Frankly, this isn’t a help to developers, but a hindrance. They offer a confusing array of development choices and no way of addressing their handset base with a single effort. Perhaps it’s unfair to think that this is even possible, but it looks to me like they are backing every horse - a bet which is going to be expensive and inefficient.

The question on everyone’s minds, of course, was - what about the Open Handset Alliance? Motorola are part of the gang there, so what are they doing about it? Can they tell us anything about the platform and when are they going to launch something with it? Predictably, the nice people at Motorola looked a bit like rabbits caught in headlights - because although they were part of the OHA, they had no idea of the shape of Android was actually going to take. So the OHA doesn’t look like a club of collaborators so much as a group of companies interested in the rabbit that Google is going to pull out from their hat.

So the sparsely populated hall emptied out - Motorola had put on a wide spread of talks in 5 different tracks that people could attend. The one that had really caught my eye was the presentation on the MOTOMAGX platform. I knew from the past that Motorola had been trying to do something with Linux but had thus far been unsuccessful in their attempts to commercialise it. How far had they come? Had they done it yet?

The MOTOMAGX presenters prepare to start.

I was pleased to discover that they had. MOTOMAGX really is Linux and it really is running on their new feature phone devices - from the RAZR 2 onwards. There is the plan to offer a Linux SDK from H2 2008 onwards, and QT 2.3 is currently being used for the UI. So there really is an “open source phone”, although of course you can’t rebuild the kernel for this particular device…

A block diagram of the MOTOMAGX solution. 3 different development options on the one device. Ouch.

The most surprising thing for me was Motorola’s efforts to offer the “widget” model of application development to the community. The newer devices sport WebKit and Motorola are adding a broad JavaScript extension model in order to allow proper off-line applications. I’m pretty skeptical about how successful this will be for mobile applications (Widgets aren’t really useful for desktop applications; why does anyone want to use them for mobile applications?) but it is interesting to see how broadly WebKit is now being used in the mobile market. Nokia, Motorola, Apple and now Google are all behind it and shipping it as their on-device browser of choice.

Oh, and all of these SDKs will be in a single “unified” development environment (Eclipse, of course). They should all be available in H2 2008, and we are certainly looking forward to the possibilities - particularly in the native application space.

So - even more fragmentation. There are 3 different application frameworks to choose from - on the one device platform!

The presenters are mobbed. The offer of early access to the MOTOMAGX SDK proves too much for the huddled masses.

The MOTODEV road show heads off to Beijing next in order to spread the news. But a fragmented mobile world we live in today looks set to get even more so in the coming years. It’s going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better.

After a few months of intensive effort from myself and Ben (not to mention the efforts of many potential candidates), we managed to find two engineers who fit the bill. Taking on two people at once is a bit risky when you’re as little as we are, but when you find great people you just need to grab them. There’s more equipment to buy and there are more salaries to pay, but once you’ve got the people on board you only have to go through things once with both of them, so overall it seems to save time. We’re feeling pretty chuffed.

But the obvious side-effect of taking on more people is - where in the heck do you fit them? Ben and I started off in his front bedroom, which was tough going but kind of fun. I’m one of these blokes who likes a fair bit of waggle room, though, so as soon as we possibly could (14 months in!) we moved across the road to a lovely little pseudo-serviced office outfit with wonky floors and bundles of character. And two months later we’re already trying to work out where we are all going to fit.

When push comes to shove, you need to make sacrifices. In many places I’ve worked, there was a pretty strict hierarchy when it came to allocating seating spaces. It went a little something like this:

• Senior executives (CEO/CTO etc.)
• Managers (People with Director in their title)
• Sales staff
• Support staff (IT people, Accountants, Office staff)
• Engineers, Testers, Content developers

Now this is a bit topsy-turvy, and here’s why. The only guys who actually MAKE money in the company are the guys at the bottom. Yes, that’s right. Everyone else is basically an overhead on a software business. The executive team spend a lot of time meeting people and forming relationships, opening the doors for software to be sold. The managers motivate teams, resolve differences and bond with people. The sales guys spend a lot of time on the road, seeking opportunites in new markets. The support staff keep the ship running smoothly. But the folks at the bottom are the ones that actually build things that can be sold. So why don’t you put them first when you’re planning this out?

So if I’m going to be consistent on all this it means that I’m the first on the chopping block. My new digs are substantially smaller but frankly since I should be out building those all-important corporate relationships do I really need a huge desk? Nah. Besides, it acts as a huge motivator to get me out and tracking down our long-term office.

Chez moi!

So we had a lot of rearranging of furniture to do. Squeezing in an additional two people proved to be kind of a challenge but with me moved back to a small desk where a bookshelf used to be it opens up the possibilities to fit everyone in. Ben and Teanlorg have one side:

The guys hard at work

And John has the other:

John, pounding on keyboard

Ah, the heart-warming clickety-clack of fingers on keyboards. And yes, those are Aerons. If you’re going to sit in a chair for as long as we do, you might as well do it in comfort.

One pile of CVs later, after 53 days and a whole bunch of interviewing, we have finally filled our roles. The Airsource team is about to double! This means we’re not currently recruiting. I would say that speculative applications from good candidates are always welcome, but until we get our new office, that’s just not true. Unless you are a bat or a sloth, and can code whilst hanging upside-down from the ceiling.

Looking for a new office is another task that’s been occupying our time. We’ve found one, over four times bigger than our current pad, in the centre of town. We’re just going through all the legals, which apparently could take quite a while. In the meantime, the next couple of months are going to be pretty cosy.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll notice things have been a bit quiet recently. Business is good - and we need another software engineer. If you’re good, and willing to work in Cambridge (that would be Cambridge UK, for our US readers), then we’d love to hear from you. Experience counts, but so does passion and talent.

Degrees? We’ve met PhDs who can’t, and 15 year-olds who can. If you’re looking for your first full-time software job, then you will learn more in a month with us than in a year at a big corporate. If you’ve been watching your company fail to learn from history for, well, what seems like long enough to *be* history, then come talk to us. If you want to be in early on a successful startup, whether in a junior or senior role, send your CV to jobs@airsource.co.uk. More details at http://www.airsource.co.uk/jobs.

Agency emails will go straight on our spam filter. If we want an agency, we’ll call you.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the grapevine, you will have noticed that today ARM has announced the release of an upgrade to the RVCT toolchain for BREW. For those who aren’t aware, RVCT gives BREW developers access to a version of their ARM compiler, linker and associated tools which can be used for creating applications optimised for running on device.

If you looked closely at the announcement you would have seen that we got a mention. Airsource has had an early opportunity to test out RVCT 3.0 and evaluate the performance and features being offered. It’s fair to say we were pretty impressed - it’s a much-needed upgrade and ARM has definitely got the edge over GCC when it comes to performance and size.

We’ll be offering more details on some of the results we discovered and some analysis of the new features in RVCT 3.0 in our talk at BREW 2007 on Friday in Randle A at 13:45. After our presentation we’ll try to get some more details up here.

There’s a strong Airsource theme in this Blog. But what is Airsource?

Our website will tell you a bit more about the company and the people, but in short, we’re a mobile software company, based in Cambridge, UK. We’ve got experience on a bunch of mobile platforms - all the usual suspects like Pocket PC, Symbian - and can code just about anything you want on any phone. Our specialist area, though, is BREW. We reckon we know more about BREW than any other consultancy in Europe. And if it’s uiOne you need help with, then we know more about that than anyone. Why? Well before we formed Airsource, we used to work at a small company called Trigenix, which wrote some software called Trigplayer. Trigplayer is the renderer used in uiOne, and we wrote versions 1,2,3 and, yes, you guessed, version 4, which just happens to be the BREW version used in uiOne.