FastFigures Mobile for iPhone: An Introduction

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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

Great Books: Four Steps to the Epiphany

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Every once in a while I read an amazingly good business book and want to share it. I can highly recommend The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank. (Amazon link. I make no money from this promotion.)

Four Steps deals with an issue that has run through my head for years: why do start-ups fail? Mr. Blank believes that start-ups fail because of two reasons: 1) they don’t focus early and often enough on understanding the customers and 2) these companies don’t realize that the way to enter the market depends on what market type the company is going after (new market, existing market or resegmented one).

It’s not that he just describes the problem, though. He actually outlines an exact methodology for tackling this problem, literally step by step.

A little background: I love history and believe very strongly that those who don’t learn it are doomed to repeat it. After reading this book I was able to see where a number of companies I have observed over the years, including my own Infinity Softworks, have gone off course.

I have already started implementing his ideas for the next generation of Infinity Softworks. I’m certain it will pay off.

The Long Tail and Mobile Software Development

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Chris Anderson, a writer for Wired Magazine, wrote a stunning treatise a few years ago called The Long Tail (Powells or Amazon). If you are unfamiliar, it highlights that more money can be made by selling less of more. Think iTunes, which has made a killing carrying millions of albums and selling a few of each as opposed to Walmart who carries a few thousand albums and sell lots of those. The long tail refers to the sales curve, where hits are few but sell tons (the head) and then tails off where individual units sell fewer and fewer.

As for examples, I could go on all day. Amazon sells tons of stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Start-up Etsy is trying to do this for crafts. eBay for all of us who want to sell our junk.

The problem is that there is tons of money for the aggregator but not that much for the suppliers. I have seen this first-hand for years. It was never the developers that made tons of money. Most of us scrambled to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and that was by putting tons of effort and energy into it. We were all suppliers to the long tail.

Apple, with the AppStore, is trying to recreate the magic of iTunes for mobile software. They may very well succeed and make tons of money from it, but I can guarantee the very dynamics of the market will mean very few of the software developers make it big.

If we want to build big companies, I argue that we as software developers need to think beyond the mobile device. What does it mean to be web connected? What does it mean to work everywhere? And what’s the bigger story that includes mobile but is not only mobile?

Master Chaa’s Got It All Figured Out

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Meditation Master Achaan Chaa was visited by one of his students who wanted to know how he could be happy in a world with so many problems. Master Chaa held up a water glass and said, “For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and my elbow brushes it and it falls to the ground and it shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that this glass is broken, every moment is precious.”

Here’s to assuming every day is broken before it begins.

A Recipe for Beating Apple

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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.