Rafe Needleman found a startup company which solved a problem that's vexed mobile-application developers for years, namely "the ability to manage your e-mail from any handheld computer." This is old news, are you saying. Not so fast.
Peter Mansour's current startup, Sproqit Technologies, Inc., is based on a very simple observation: Microsoft's e-mail server, Exchange, has a rotten relationship with wireless handheld computers. Only a few handheld devices, such as Good Technologies's G100 products, provide the e-mail experience you expect: the ability to read and reply to any message and manage corporate mail folders as if you were sitting in front of your network-connected desktop. Most wireless handheld e-mail applications work with only a few folders, like the inbox, and don't allow you to do e-mail management.
Sproqit appears to have solved this problem and, along the way, created a general-purpose platform that has important implications for the future of handheld apps.
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)
Mansour's company makes a platform that sits on a desktop or server computer and streams applications over the air to handhelds. Sproqit's e-mail app appears to be unique in the way it separates the programming from the user interface. While Java and J2ME, Sun Microsystem's Java for mobiles, allow any application to run on any compatible device, with Sproqit the apps not only are portable but also look "native" on each device, be it an iPaq, a Palm, or a Symbian-powered Ericsson P800. The magic happens in a 200-kilobyte middleware module that Sproqit has tailored to each specific handheld.
The application handles not only e-mail, but also manages your calendar and your contacts. Here is a nice little picture of cell phone displaying contacts.
Sproqit's e-mail product effectively replaces Pocket Outlook. But Mansour's real goal is to sell the PC-side software that lets you stream and manage communications with a wireless device (the license for the software that runs on handhelds is free). He wants to make it possible for corporations to run their wireless applications on multiple devices without having to rewrite applications.
Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
For more details about this product, visit the Sproqit Applications page.
Source: Rafe Needleman, Business 2.0, March 6, 2003.