For the past few months we have been hard at work at building Sunoh.fm, a social music network for India. Today we are announcing the launch of beta signup phase. Click here to be part of the Beta.

For those wondering what really “Sunoh” means - “Sunoh” means “Listen” in Hindi.

1. High Price Point - For long long time, RIM played an anti-consumer role with it’s $45/user/month data plan. Since there was no other option, consumers grudgingly paid for it. But that came at a cost. Even after being in the market for a long time, along with a sturdy device range, RIM failed to get mass market adoption. In the current scenario, I highly doubt RIM will get a second chance.
2. Delayed WiFi & 3G - Had it not been for iPhone, RIM would have kept selling the toothless 2G handsets forever possible. In my opinion, RIM could technically have launched a WiFi enabled more then 2 years back, but choose not to do so for whatever reasons. Since the launch of 3G on RIM and iPhone is expected to happen almost simultaneously, it will be anyones guess which phone is going to sell more.
3. Developer Community - Support from external developers for RIM handhelds is next to none. One reason can be attributed to the fact that RIM’s footprint in Europe is really small, which is the region with most mobile hackers. Yeah, RIM found support from Yahoo and Google, but that’s delivered only a handful of apps. Besides that, these are the days of iPhone SDK and Android, which means even lesser tailored apps for your blackberry.
4. Music - How does RIM plan to compete with iTunes store? Trying to kick start one right now will lead to no where. Yeah, they can tie up with Napster or Real Player or Amazon, but that would never deliver the kind of tight device integration that iPhone offers.
5. Apps - Right now, Google practically owns the web office. With launch of Android, RIM/Apple/Msft - all are going to have a tough time coming up with a comparable scalable offering.

On the whole, I fail to see what RIM can offer besides the push mail for a higher price. Hence, I expect a stagnation or dip in the RIM subscriber base by the year end. In the longer run(read 2-3 years), best bet for RIM is to be bought by Msft(if they have $$s left after digesting Yahoo).

Sounds cool? Most would say YES if they have always worked on Microsoft technologies. But anyone who has spent a bit of time in BungeeConnect’s On-Demand Application Development Platform would say - Are you serious? Cause it takes only 15 lines of code to make a similar Digg application that also without any need for XAML. And all this just for starters. Before i get into more details, you can take quick look of the Digg app i developed in BungeeConnect. While i am not sure how much time it took for Silverlight folks to create the app, it took me around 45 mins to complete this start-to-end including the UI, fonts, etc. So what’s so cool about BungeeConnect besides the less code?

No Developer Software Downloads
Few weeks back i was downloading the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Total download size for the software and windows sdk came out to be 3GB+. And if i recall correctly, for the install to take place i needed around 5GB of space. I know disk space comes for pennies these days, but seriously, 5GB? As compared to that, in BungeeConnect, you just need to signup on the site to get started with the web-based IDE. Can’t get easier than that.

No End User Downloads
For those users trying to use Silverlight apps, they might have noticed the message on their screens requiring them to download Silverlight exe before they can use the app. Now, that tiny bit of request automatically puts your application on a 2 year slow growth path. Actually 2 year is a bestimate, given Silverlight is rapidly evolving software, which is still not getting deployed via Windows Update. In other words, you would be missing out on quite a few users today and also incrementally if you make apps in Silverlight. As compared to that, BungeeConnect requires no end user downloads.

Instant Gratification
You might have noticed in Steve’s post that he only give out screenshots for the app. Obviously, when the application is running on this localhost, he can’t do better than that. Only way for him to let us touch the app would result in getting one of msft’s web team involved, requisitioning a sandbox server, filling up few docs justifying the need,…..Once he is through, you get to play with the real app. Obviously that is pain that no one wants to go through(not even for a new product). Now, not just Steve, we all face this issue every day and to be frank everyone hates it. As compared to that, in BungeeConnect you can build and instantly deploy your applications. And all this happens on the BungeeConnect infrastructure. For those who have not played with BungeeConnect, you just need to switch to “Staging” tab in the Online-IDE, go through couple of steps, and your application is live and ready for end users to play with. Cool, right?

Instant Scaling
Build your application in .net, java, php, RoR and you are automatically burdened with the task to scale it up(app severs, web servers, db servers). That’s not an easy task when you are just a team of 2 or 3, and want to focus all your team resources on getting the feature set right. From the above mentioned list, BungeeConnect provides automatic scalability to your apps from day 1 for 2 of the 3 components - Web Servers and App Servers. Yeah, you dont need to maintain your own web and app servers and also the team for them. All you need to take care of is your MySQL database(BungeeConnect can connect to your externally hosted MySQL db). In my opinion that makes your life way easier.

Code Sharing
Another thing you might notice in Steve’s post is that he is offering source code of the Digg application to download and tryout. Hmm. BungeeConnect takes a different and easier stance on that. Bungee has a concept of DesignGroup, which can include multiple solutions and team members. With that in place, whoever is part of your DesignGroup can “import” or “include” your solution code in few clicks. This makes code sharing and reuse way easier, as compared to the download-unzip-copy route.

Language Features
While i want to talk in detail on this topic, I will touch only 3 points for now. First: AJAX effects/No JavaScript- Are you a small team looking for always scarce costly expert Javascript resource? or do you want to add Javascript effects but know the your competitor has 2 years lead in a similar core js lib? Are you sick of making sure your app runs just the same in IE7 and FF2, and FF3 and IE8, and Safari, and….? BungeeConnect takes this pain out of your development cycle. What Bungee offers is composite html controls that have AJAX functionality built into them. This makes your typical form swapping, DOM manipulation tasks so easy that you would curse yourself for wasting time on your still-not-bug-free js lib(thanks to IE)…… Second: Very strong collection and selection binding making the UI manipulation much easier. This was something new for me, since i moved over from php to Bungee. And this something to be used to fall in love with. Third: Yesterday i was reading through Brad Feld’s blog post for a Position of API Hacker in one of the company he has invested in. Although i dont know the specific reqs for the position, i guess they will be looking to make API calls, fetch data, and display it as a mashup. Something similar to the Digg app, i would say. Now BungeeConnect offers a very strong xml to class mapping, making api calls like these a no-brainer. If as a dev, you would still want to go the regular xml tree traversal route, i wouldn’t consider that to be a wise idea.

Enough said for now. Next, i will try to get write tutorial for the Digg application i did and post it in the next few blog posts.

Update 1: Matt Misbach over at BungeeLabs has done another Digg implementation in Bungee. Click here to read about it.
Update 2: For the Official list of what all Bungee has to offer, Click here. Note, the document might not be up-to-date.

For more yada yada  bubble posts, you always have Google Blog Search. Click here for all the blog posts on this predication from last year.

According to me, Web20 is all about continuous improvement to the way we traverse the web. And to claim that the pace of improvement is going to falter is a very naive statement, when today we have the next billion Internet users in the increasingly globalized space ready to get their hands on the shiny apps Web20 delivers.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. Actually not even anywhere near being correct. It’s like saying SAP competes with any Foobar ERP software development company. I am not saying the LongJump and Coghead aren’t great works of software development. But what they do and offer in no terms competes with BungeeConnect.

What BungeeConnect provides is an OOP based On-Demand Application Development Platform. BungeeConnet enables team based application development via it’s web-based IDE, and provides automatic scalability for your apps. In other words you dont really need to have your backend of web and app servers to take care off. There is lot more to BungeeConnect in terms of its OOP language BungeeLogic about which i will start writing in near future.

Now as to who might be actually competing with BungeeLabs. Well, Salesforce does compete in some terms with its Force.com venture. However the path to getting started and finally releasing an app with Force.com is so convoluted that you can do a PhD thesis on it. Anyway, for the actual application development in Force.com, you need to download a plugin(?) for Eclipse. Now this is something you dont have to do in BungeeConnect since they have a free to use and build web-based IDE.

Who else might be competing? Microsoft would be another good candidate with it’s Popfly venture. Having said that, Popfly competes mostly in concept but comes nowhere near the end-end feature set and integration offered by BungeeConnect. If there was a good integration of Popfly Concept + Visual Studio + SilverLight, that would have been the best competing product out there. However as things stand right now, it would be another 2 years before Microsoft reaches that spot.

Competition aside, Techcrunch claims that BungeeConnect is for “small-to-medium business market”. That is again not exactly true, since we are developing our social web application on BungeeConnect, and we dont think we are in the “small-to-medium business market”. In fact you can use BungeeConnect to develop apps for Facebook and other social platforms. As part of our PoC of BungeeConnect, we did an Facebook app in December. You can check it out at - http://apps.facebook.com/i-recommend

More on all the above soon.

As a side note, according to Venturebeat’s another post, iSkoot competes with Mig33. Again, i dont think that is a correct statement. iSkoot is a mobile VoIP company, while Mig33 is mobile chat+social networking company which also offer lower price point calling features that in technical terms can be similar to a calling card offering. iSkoot competing to with Fring, EQO, and Nimbuzz would be the correct statement.

Update 1: Heroku is a potential competitor for BungeeConnect. Heroku is RoR On-Demand enabler. Which means you get to deal with all the plus and minuses of RoR.

Can’t wait to get my hands on the service. Should work just perfectly with BungeeConnect.

From competition standpoint Js-Kit has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, Intense Debate is funded by Techstars, while Disqus seems to have raised money but are not officially coming out with the news right now.

Coming back to SezWho, apart from the funding the startup also introduced two new widgets  - The Red Carpet widget that lets communities feature top-rated participants on a virtual red carpet. Each avatar links to individual profiles that provide a history of comments, associated articles or pages, and the overall ranking for each. Besides that a new SezWho badge lets contributors display their personal rating and expertise portfolio on their blogs or other sites to reinforce an earned reputation.

To  add a bit more, SezWho now also provides statistics for both contributors and site owners. This includes number people rating and viewing a contributor’s profile, and traffic SezWho is driving and where that traffic is coming from.

Central Desktop, one of the smarter, profitable, and never funded team collaboration startup, delivered another feature full release of the web app yesterday. Desktop’s new database features enable teams to create online, relational databases  and link database records with tasks, documents, spreadsheets as well as launch discussion threads within the database application.

In simpler words, this makes Central Desktop’s contextual collaborative database ideal for managing customer and partner contacts, product listings, price lists, corporate compliance or custom workflows. In comparison terms, a competing product for all the Web DB app providers like DabbleDB, Coghead, Trackvia, and more.

In my PoV, the real deal in the new release is the new File Quick View feature. Desktop users can now preview, zoom, scroll, search, copy and paste within the most widely used file types including MS Office and Adobe PDF. All this without leaving the Central Desktop workspace or downloading the file to a desktop. While I still need to dig up details behind what is powering this feature, from the end user standpoint, this really seems to be a great option to have. Last time I heard, among other things Koral had delivered a similar feature for Powerpoint previews(read only mode), before they got snapped up by Salesforce.

In addition, Central Desktop’s enhanced APIs deliver custom project management triggers and the ability to import, export and merge data within workspace applications as well as from external applications to streamline lead generation projects for sales, business development and marketing.

Disqus, about which fellow blogger Ashish Singh had written about couple of months back, today finally launched it’s feature-full blog commenting system. Among others, the YCombinator startup competes with Js-Kit, Intense Debate, and SezWho.

Disqus is branding itself as a “distributed comment system for blogs and websites.” The app delivers both a forum like interface to keep your conversations glued together, while replacing your existing commenting app. As a blog owner you need to install the plugin for WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, and TypePad to get going quickly. Comments from your existing/default commenting system stay put, and for any new comments, the Disqus app kicks in.

Blog/site owners have pretty much complete control over the look and feel of plugin. For those concerned about the content, Blog/Site owners still own all the content created and stored at Disqus. And when you are talking about comments, commenting spam is never always the thing to watchout for. Disqus team has built an inhouse comment spam protection that is backed by Wordpress’s Akismet. Disqus has also introduced an API with the launch, but I am not sure what direction they are taking with it.

As for search engine indexing of the comments, the app places all the actual comment content on the blog/site page. In other words, no loss over SEO goodiness.

From comparison standpoint, competing commenting application Js-Kit also makes sure that search engines can index  publishers data. As for data backups, Js-Kit provides access to blog/site owner data via RSS feed which provides real-time export of all comment data back to the publisher. JS-Kit has also added moderation tools to it’s Comment Service, including Pre and Post moderation of comments, SPAM protection,
and Session & IP level blocking. The app also comes with visitor controls like “score” comments and the flexibility to sort comments by score (”Karma”), visitor name, and date. 

On the whole, the basic feature set is comparable but Disqus does beat Js-kit in terms of UI/end user experience. From my standpoint, I am still undecided :-/

Canadian telco startup MOBIVOX seems set for long term Skype strategy. The startup announced yesterday that it has appointed former head of Skype Mobile Product Group, Nitzan Shaer, as the company?s Chief Operating Officer.  Shaer was also appointed to the MOBIVOX board of directors.

Shaer’s past experience includes working as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at IDG Ventures. Among others, IDG ventures was one of the venture firms that participated in MOBIVOX’s $11 million Series A round of funding.

Prior to IDG, Shaer was the head of the mobile product group at Skype. According to the information we have, Shaer was worked on development and marketing efforts that made Skype available on Nokia, Motorola and Windows Mobile.

Not a surprising deal, but definitely one that does not make sense as of now. Especially when the mover behind the deal is News Corp/MySpace and not Skype, as we might have expected. News Corp./MySpace today announced partnership with Skype that will bring Skype calling and instant-messaging features to MySpace users. According to WSJ, from November, MySpace users will be able to call people through instant message.

Since Skype does not have any web based look alike for the downloadable instant messaging client, it remains to be seen what form the integration takes. Will it be a simple click to call integration or would it be similar to what Jangl and Jaxtr are offering on other social networking platforms? Integration with Skype Instant messaging part seems out of scope for sure.

As always, depth of the integration into the user profiles would impact the uptake. While taking about MySpace, another factor that needs to be considered is spam accounts. Will this deal result in more fake/spam calls to unsuspecting Skype users that has seen an uptick in the past few days? Eitherway, let’s wait for more details to emerge.

Email is getting lots of developer love these days. Clarizen, Xobni and now Stikkit are just few of the startups working on cool emails addons. While we will talk about Clarizen in another post later today, what we want to talk about is new interesting beta launch from Stikkit, branded as I Want Sandy.

For starters this a virtual Sandy, just in case you were expecting to get some human for hire to help you out on you scheduling and calendaring chores. Getting to the product, concept is pretty simple and straightforward. Next time you want to create a todo, set a reminder, save a phone number, just email  and CC Sandy on it. Although there is a bit of a formatting you need to follow while sending these messages(just as in Twitter), on it’s end Sandy makes sense of this unstructured data and indexes the content appropriately.

The keywords that the app can understand are pretty basic yet powerful. You can easily email in details you want to be reminded about, or want the app to remember, or lookup information you have already stored, or update, or forget, and more. Any appointments you create sending via email end up being in your calendar.

While there definitely is easy to use and saving backed by good concept and implementation, I am not sure if I would end using the app. With todo list already being integral part of my personalized page, I am not sure I would be using email to update it. While Sandy does convenience of updating this todo from your BB or iPhone easily, i haven’t found myself really looking to do that often. Still tools like reQall(review) and I Want Sandy are great productivity apps to use if you get hooked to them.

Got emailed by Opera earlier today about an important product launch the browser company is making in San Francisco, California on October 25, 2007. The email doesn’t give out much details to what is coming up but does talk about 2 indie bands, The 88 and The Binges, performing on that occasion. You can get more information on that by visiting http://rock.opera.com/. As always, us eastcoasters are automatically excused.

Competing with Amazon, the next generation storage and content delivery platform Nirvanix is looking to play the buzz game right. Just last month the startup had announced it’s coming out of stealth mode and today Nirvanix announced beta availability of its integrated media transcoding, image manipulation, and file search services.

For brief overview of the core features available at the storage platform - Webservices enabled Internet Media File System backed by dynamic load balancing for peak performance; intelligent uploading/downloading to accelerate access; clustered architecture for enhanced data protection; global namespace for unlimited scalability; Media Transcoding and Image Manipulation capabilities.

Nirvanix has also added couple of interesting new features it’s core set, which include - File Search and Sideloading. Using the File Search API, developers can enable their users to search for files based on file system, metadata, or tag information. Since Nirvanix is geared more towards media files including photos and videos, this type of file search might not work out pretty well for developers looking to enable full text search on office documents or even text files.

Another smart feature that we have not written about before is Sideloading. Imagine viewing a Youtube video that you want to download and store it to your online storage system. Right now you first need to get the file to your local machine and then send up to the online storage space. Not a convenient process, to say the least, that also uses bandwidth twice. With Nirvanix’s Sideloading feature, developers can enable file uploads to Nirvanix system directly from a hosted URL.

With this beta launch, Nirvanix is also claiming to have successfully tested at more than 80 beta customer sites. Let’s see which startup becomes biggest in town backed by Nirvanix’s SaaS storage.

Although far fewer in number as compared to web, acquisitions and investments keep happening in the mobile space. Earlier it was Google snapping up Zingku and Jaiku, Utterz raising $4 million, Twitter raising $5 million,…and now mobile-entertainment services startup SendMe has acquired mbuzzy, another community-based mobile-entertainment Web site. SendMe delivers casual games, ringtones and text messaging for mobile users while mbuzzy also does similar stuff with few addons.

SendMe is backed by Spark Capital and True Venture. Buzzwire, which had started off as 4thMedia, is another of Spark Capital’s recent investment in mobile space.