by Guest Interviewer Matt Scherer
Raven Zachary helps people create, develop, and launch iPhone products and services. He also is a Contributing Analyst with The 451 Group. Raven is Program Co-Chair for the O’Reilly Media conference iPhoneLive, and is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit iPhone developer conference. He is currently advising a number of companies on iPhone strategy and product development. Raven recently lead Platial’s launch of their native iPhone application, Nearby, which was a top 20 free application in the App Store during July 2008. He is regularly quoted by the press about the iPhone and is a frequent conference speaker on the topic. Raven’s iPhone pursuits can be viewed at www.raven.me and he can be followed on Twitter, @ravenme. He’s scheduled to give two presentations at the Austin Innotech, Oct. 16, Austin Convention Center.
Q: How did you get started in the wireless application industry?
I’ve been focused on open source technology for the past six years as an end user, journalist, consultant, and most recently as a technology industry analyst writing about open source and advising companies on this topic. I’ve always been a fan of Apple, having previous written for MacWeek magazine. I managed some of the Macintosh software development projects for Excite while living in Austin in the late 90s. I was at Macworld in January 2007 when Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone. The following summer, I organized iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit iPhone developers conference. With the launch of the iPhone software development kit (SDK) in March of this year and the release of the iPhone 3G in July, I decided to make the iPhone my full-time endeavor. I have been advising companies on iPhone strategy and managing product development efforts. I still have an affiliation with The 451 Group as a contributing technology analyst, and at InnoTech I’ll be doing talks on both open source and the iPhone.
Q: From reading about your work, I noted that you’re a big proponent of the Commercial Adoption of Open Source or CAOS. How will this research service help development in the wireless sector?
There’s not much overlap right now between open source and the iPhone. This may change over time. I suspect that the values and benefits of open source as they exist for software infrastructure technologies can be applied to the iPhone market. Jonathan Wight, my friend and former co-worker, has a number of open source project for the iPhone on his TouchCode repository. These projects are all infrastructure-like, such as data parsers and a web server. WordPress released their iPhone client under an open source license for developers to review the code and offer improvements.
Q: What will be some of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities for those software application developers for the iPhone and other wireless devices?
I believe that 2008 will be known as the year that mobile computing changed forever. We are witnessing the birth of a new class of technology – pocket-sized devices with always-on broadband that understand who you are and where you are. This new class of devices is redefining mobile computing. The iPhone is the best example of this new class of devices and has a significant head start in the market, one that may be difficult for others to catch up to effectively.
There’s a lot of talk about Google Android right now, but the reality is that the Android platform is entering a market with already an estimated 20 million iPhone OS devices (iPhone + iPod touch) being sold globally while Android is launching in October on a single carrier in a single country on a single device. It’s going to take a major push by Google for Android to rival the iPhone. I’m not wholly skeptical of Android, I just think it’s an uphill climb. I think a vocal minority coupled with media hype has given proportionally too much attention to Android.