It has been a while since I talked about the mobile space. To be honest, there hasn’t been a lot of interesting things going on in mobile or tech for that matter. It seems like a lot of the same recycled stories about web browsers and social networks.

But a trend is starting to occur that will be interesting to watch: the rise of the touchscreen.

This cycle seems to come about every few years. In the early 1990s, Apple’s Newton started the touchscreen craze. It died out in a few years. Then Palm came into being in 1997. And it died out in favor of the keyboard on early smartphones in 2003-4. Even Palm’s Treo devices, touchscreen all of them, no longer required a pen to use as the keyboard and track balls were already there.

But Apple has started the craze again. And soon to follow are (already announced) Google’s first Android device called G1, Nokia’s eminent announcement in October of their first touchscreen device, and RIM’s just (officially) announced BlackBerry Storm. Suddenly, touch screens are hip again.

The question is: will users want the touchscreen or prefer the keyboard? As I have said before, it completely depends on what your main mobile task is. I couched the fight in terms of BlackBerry v. iPhone, but it could just as easily be couched as keyboard v. touchscreen. Keyboards are great for people that do a lot of email. Touchscreens are great for people that do more browsing.

I always felt Palm offered the best of both worlds. The fake keyboards –like the iPhone — are slow to type on. Palm’s Graffiti was excellent for that as I could write very quickly. But at the same time, the keyboard could go away and this large screen was available for web browsing. It really wasn’t that different from Apple’s design, except Graffiti was used instead of a keypad.

Palm had the promise and none of the execution. Between management changes and lack of focus, the company was doomed to failure. It will be interesting to see if any of these others can challenge Apple’s momentum.

We have had quite a few requests over the past few months for a version of powerOne (Finance or Graph or CRE) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The purpose of this entry is to lay out our plans for you at a high level and tell you how you can help us. One caveat, the plan could easily change between now and release and most likely will be broken into staged releases.

The Plan

• We have begun the design process on a version of FastFigures that runs native (read: does not require an Internet connection) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. We are currently calling it FastFigures Mobile. There will be components of it that will use an Internet connection, but this won’t be required for performing calculations.
• Unlike powerOne, which was focused on traditional line-entry calculation, FastFigures is template-centric, with calculations available for business, personal and educational needs. A traditional calculator (the goal is both RPN and algebraic entry) will be included in every template.
• We are emphasizing template creation and sharing with FastFigures. The goal is to develop hundreds if not thousands of various calculations that match all kinds of uses and needs. We will develop lots of them and hope that FastFigures users will do the same. Template creators have the option of keeping their template private or sharing them with the world. Over time, we hope, our emphasis internally will shift from writing templates to adding capabilities to make more powerful templates.
• For the first time, template creation will expand to include all available data types (real numbers, decimal numbers, complex numbers, dates, matrices, tables, etc.). It will also offer multiple equations and other advanced features we have traditionally reserved for our own purposes. In short, the template creator you use is the template creator we use.
• You will be able to save calculations and sync them to FastFigures.com. Through FastFigures.com, you will be able to share reports generated from these calculations, make modifications, compare calculations, and review a portfolio of calculations you have kept on your clients.
• We will be charging a one-time price for the offline version and a subscription for the online one. How much that is is yet to be determined. Given that, our goal is to get every iPhone and iPod Touch user to buy FastFigures Mobile.

How You Can Help

There are lots of questions still to be answered, from the nitty-gritty of features to the big decisions like pricing. You can help in two ways:

1. Tell us you want to hear from us. You will receive occasional notifications about our progress, get special sneak peaks at the software and get the chance to influence our direction.
2. Tell others who might be interested. We are a small company. Your willingness to tell friends and co-workers about FastFigures will make a huge difference.

If you haven’t already signed up for information on FastFigures Mobile for iPhone, please do so by sending us an email from here:

http://www.fastfigures.com/contact

Can anyone steal Apple’s momentum?

I learned last week that there have been approximately 35 million iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s sold worldwide in, oh, one year. I’m blown away by this because, after 11 years, this is probably bigger than the installed base we had to sell to. And in one year, Apple has matched it.

So I was thinking about this bit of information and reading my RSS feed on the way home from a meeting and found an article on Palm’s recent acquisitions and started to wonder how someone can steal Apple’s mojo.

And I came up with the answer:

1. Build a beautiful, touchscreen device
2. Make it synchronize with web-based applications
3. Focus on offline use of online applications

Without that three-some, it’s just another iPhone clone.

The touchscreen device is a given anymore, whether it has a keyboard or not. That’s the cost of entry.

Second, automatic synchronization with web-based applications is important. Think Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Memos, just to name four. One, it raises the requirements for others to enter the mobile market space. Two, it ties users to the system. It doesn’t have to be apps, per say, it could just be a database in the cloud that also syncs back to your desktop or laptop. But the truth is all those people that don’t use Exchange need the sync capabilities of Exchange, and this will provide it.

The third point, though, is the most important. To use web standards such as html, css and Javascript means automatically getting a wealth of applications and developers and, by default, would allow every application to sync to their online counter-part. Of course this means the device would have to have local versions of various web back-end technologies (things like Java ME, Ruby on Rails and a little MySQL database, if I’m making a wish list) and some way to promote apps, but figuring out how to make online apps run offline is a good challenge that would make the platform infinitely expandable.

Apple has around 1000 applications in its AppStore, will probably push this onto every one of their devices, and is leveraging every Mac OS X developer in the world. The problem of developing for a new platform is daunting, as I have commented before. By leveraging already accepted standards and courting a group that now feels abandoned by Apple, any new device could instantly have a huge developer community.

Other smartphone makers not named Apple will need a unique hook to get back in the game. Only RIM, with instant push email and their BlackBerry Enterprise Server, has such a hook today. Web sync and localized web apps can do that for others.

If you have been hiding in a hole somewhere, today is the day that iPhone 3G launches with its vaunted App Store. It’s the first time I have seen developers excited about the mobile market since Palm’s heyday from 1998-2002.

I was also reading Fred Wilson’s blog on the subject of whether Apple iPhone software ecosystem will be anything like Facebook application ecosystem. If you don’t know, Mr. Wilson is a very well respected VC out of New York who has done a lot of web, some Facebook and one iPhone investment.

While I appreciate his perspective, I think he is making the wrong comparison. I think it is far more likely that the iPhone market will be like the early PalmPilot market than it will be like the Facebook market.

The make-up of the people buying iPhones seems to be identical to the PalmPilot market during the period of 1998-2001. The device sales are roughly similar. The frenzy is identical. In those days, Palm did a very good job of making users aware of applications even though there was no way to provide an on-device store. There were flyers in the box, developer programs that gave certain of us visibility. Software was still sold in retail so there was an opportunity to get into stores. There were tons of free download sites and partner companies who, in those days, partnered with us rather than ripping us off. In essence, what all this did, was make a lot of little companies just big enough to be small, but never big enough to be investable.

I’m not certain I see a lot of differences this time around. In fact, I think exposure when you are one of 30,000 apps all in the same store front will be impossible. And Apple is taking 30% of the margin, which seems like such a bargain compared to other current stores until you realize that this includes no marketing expense. A company will easily spend 60% of its revenue on marketing and sales (including reseller margins). Does this make a financially viable business?

Another consideration: will the eco-system for iPhone really become so large that there will be enough devices out there to make it worth a developer’s time to focus on it. In the old days of PalmPilot, approximately 60% installed applications and 50% of those paid for one (~30% bought third-party apps. The data was from some of my old notes provided by Palm). That means there is an available market of roughly 1M devices today. A developer will have to develop a pretty broadly applicable application to make that small number of devices work well in terms of sales, not to mention fight through all the noise. I will bet that there will be lots of products in those key categories.

Keep in mind that this is just an analysis of the iPhone opportunity. It doesn’t even include the broader challenges of mobile, some of which Apple is trying to handle.

This doesn’t mean the iPhone won’t be a roaring success. I think, as I have said before, that the iPhone and BlackBerry will dominate the US smartphone market. My guess is that iPhone, as a developer opportunity unto itself, will create a lot of little companies. The ones to invest in in the mobile space will be those that have a richer plan, a plan to leverage the devices, their personalized nature and their web connectivity across the entire ecosystem of mobility.