The mobile model

InfoWorld: What’s the history behind MagnetPoint?

Alikhani: We started a little over two years ago [as] a communication software company focused on making it easier to build mobile applications and to do interactive messaging and location-based services accessible by various devices and various interfaces. We started off doing an end-to-end solution that was very much focused on messaging, calendaring, and directory-type services and then extended that into doing access to any type of information system. We’ve now opened it up so that it’s more of an environment for building applications using a Web services concept [in which] we offer a very wide range of Web services around presence, location-based services, delivery, and access to the information. So when developers want to extend their current business to do other things on other devices, they can do that very quickly, cheaply, and with a minimum amount of effort. All you have to understand is XML as a formatting mechanism and Web services as a mechanism of requests and initiation of services. You get up and running without downloading any application or software, and you get to test and customize an application very, very quickly with zero infrastructure expenditure.

InfoWorld: Who are some of your customers for this?

Alikhani: The work we’re doing with GM Network is all Web services. The work we’ve done with various portals, such as Cool Town with Hewlett-Packard, was entirely around Web services.

InfoWorld: How difficult is it for a company of your size to support lots of different devices?

Alikhani: There are a lot of devices, and some of them may be compliant with the same standards, but different renditions of that standard. And then you’ve got display issues, coverage issues, and bandwidth issues. Realistically, you’re trying to target the ones that have got the highest level of traction so you can hit a lot of the devices. In small companies like MagnetPoint, it’ll be crazy for us to think that we’re going to be able to, in a very short period of time, address all the devices, all the renditions, all the issues that we’ve got in terms of GUI and the various OSes that are coming up. For example, on Research in Motion, we spent a massive amount of time building C++ applications for that device on that operating system. It turns out that inside of Research in Motion, they’re going to have a Java-based operating system totally replacing that previous OS. They’re going to actually continue to completely support the existing OS, but there’s going to be a brand-new device that is going to have that new OS on it. So now our problems are doubled, and we’re seeing that every single day.

InfoWorld: What impact will UDDI [Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration] have on mobile computing applications?

Alikhani: UDDI finds a way to standardize how Web services talk to each other, how they introduce each other, and how they can find each other. And more importantly, how they can use each other’s services. The neat thing about it is that in the real world, the entity that will benefit the most is the business that’s actually trying to use the service. So you’ll see all these companies that actually have Web services come together into a community to provide a much grander and more comprehensive set of services to the consumer. But it’s still in its infancy, and there’s still a long way to go.

InfoWorld: So what’s stopping all this from happening?

Alikhani: Right now, the specification is talking about taxonomies and how you can introduce your services. But who defines the vocabularies? Where is the Rosetta stone? Where is the collection of templates, schemas, and ways that these businesses need to introduce themselves? Who sets that? How are we going to [reach] agreements on that? As sad as it sounds, it’s supposed to be the simplest part of it, but it’s actually going to be the most complex: actually setting the standards, setting the schemas. The other part of it is the developers. [We expect] them to start using something like UDDI with SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] and XML and let somebody else worry about the transport and how these two processes talk to each other, [but] a lot of developers today think this is significantly less efficient than the traditional old-school development mechanisms. It has to prove itself as an efficient and fast alternative to a socket interface and a string with delimiters in between it. I think there’s going to be some resistance there.

InfoWorld: Just how big do you think this will really be?

Alikhani: It sounds very grandiose, but I actually think that if it executes the way people think it might, this could be one of the big things that actually kick-starts [California’s Silicon] Valley. It’s time for the real business of the planet to move to Internet protocols and all these beautiful networks that everybody built to deliver Web casts, [which] aren’t being used right now [but] seem to go everywhere.