Rove makes Top 10 list

Rove was recently selected by IDC Canada to be part of the report "10 Canadian Wireless Companies to watch". This IDC Study profiles 10 Canadian wireless companies that IDC believes are worthy of highlighting and have the potential to make a substantial impact on the industry.

"New devices, applications, and infrastructure in the wireless market are changing the very nature of how we live and work, and bringing greater efficiency, productivity, and engaging interactions to businesses and consumers. The Canadian companies featured in this report, including Rove Mobile, have developed intriguing wireless solutions to address our needs and challenges both today and in the future," says Krista Collins, Analyst, Canadian IT Innovation and Export for IDC Canada.

The IDC study provides an overview of each company and offers guidance on how they and other innovative wireless companies can create and grow successful businesses in Canada and worldwide.

Rove Mobile together with nine other companies selected for this study have been isolated from a wide pool of Canadian candidates tracked by IDC. The rationale IDC used in the selection process included:

• Clarity of vision (including product differentiation and value chain proposition) of both vendor technology and business evolution
• Development of partner ecosystem to sustain and expand opportunities
• Strength of Customer base and prospects to sustain and expand growth
• Understanding of and ability to navigate competitive environments
• Overall market growth trajectory and particular segment opportunities

"Judging from our customer demand, the market is becoming increasingly ripe for the type of mobile enterprise solutions that Rove offers," said Rob Woodbridge, CEO and President, Rove. "We are extremely pleased that Rove's efforts have been recognized by IDC, the premier global provider of market intelligence in the technology sector."

Emerging Canadian businesses are changing the dynamics of the information and communication technology (ICT) market. IDC's Canadian Technology Innovation Watch report series profiles emerging companies, examining their technologies, go-to-market strategies, partnering approaches, and customers. The series also highlights common challenges of bringing new technologies to market and the successful strategies and best practices theses companies use to overcome those challenges.

The services brings IDC's research and insight to senior managers of ICT companies, providing them with best practices and partner leads; to investors, identifying leads and promising new markets; and to government organizations and ICT associations, providing examples of successful ICT commercialization in their regions. This service also provides leads to professional service providers serving small ICT companies.

Every Laptop Left Behind

My company is located in an historic part of Ottawa, Canada, called the Byward Market. Named after our city’s foremost engineer, Colonel John By, this tourist-heavy area is as known for the things it has (quaint shops, hundreds of restaurants and hotels, street vendors and musicians) as well as for what it doesn’t: telephone poles and over-the-ground wires.

Today, Byward Market only has a few public telephones – replaced by the ubiquitous cell phone or smartphone – a result of one of the most amazing business model vision failures since the telephone was invented. According to the Federal Communications Commission, there were more than two million pay phones in the United States in the year 2000 but by the year 2006 there were fewer than one million – has anyone even noticed?

This complete disappearance of an industry should be a warning to technology companies around the world, regardless of the business type. How could some of the largest companies in the world, with some of the brightest brains in the world, miss such a tectonic shift in the way people communicate?

This should be the question laptop makers must ask themselves today or risk the same fate as the public telephone. 

According to Gartner, by 2012, 50 percent of traveling workers will leave their notebooks at home in favor of other devices.  How could there be such a sizable decrease in laptop usage in just a few short years?

The parallels between the laptop and public phone industries are strikingly similar with the common enemy being the cheap and powerful cell phone or smartphone. These devices have become much more than a means to talk (although that is still the killer application).  As their transistors have multiplied, their uses have amplified.

The laptop is a stopgap, a bridge to the next level of mobile computing. The first laptop on the market, though revolutionary at the time, had less computing capability than today’s Nintendo DS, and cost fifty times more. For the most part, these devices were used to connect traveling business people to their office networks so they could be productive on the road. Productivity didn’t truly arrive until the computers were small enough, powerful enough and WiFi was pervasive enough to really be as close to ‘always on’ as possible. While manufacturers of the laptops tried to cram more functionality into a 25-year old form, handheld device manufacturers such as Apple, RIM, HTC and Nokia were starting from scratch and innovating from customer demand into a product.

Today’s technology has evolved from one-trick devices to powerful and capable companions, but it really was Apple that created the bookends of innovation with respect to mobile computing. When they introduced their Apple Newton in 1993 they started an industry of PDA development that contributed to today’s smartphones. As other devices were released with the same form factor, same input methods, same functions, same features and same price range, Apple innovated and created a paradigm-shifting device known today as the iPhone – the second bookend.

Devices have become cheap – to build and to own. So cheap in fact, that more people are signing up for mobile phone service and dropping  conventional landlines. Add an entire generation of users who are accustomed to carrying their life in their pocket and communicating with SMS and you have the face of the future mobile professional – where laptops are not relevant for connecting to people and places anymore. All they need is a signal.

Are we witnessing the beginning stages of friction as these two types of device manufacturers steadily move toward each other’s market? The long view would argue that if the same disruptive pace of technological innovation that has been witnessed in smartphone development over the past five years happens over the next five years, and laptops continue their incremental innovation as seen since the first one was displayed; the laptop industry as we know it will be bankrupt.

And you don’t need a quarter to make that call.

Visit www.everylaptopleftbehind.com or read the Gartner Article

Two Rove Products are now Free of Charge!

Rove is proud to announce that two of its popular software products are now free of charge. Mobile File Manager allows users to connect to remote file servers and edit web pages, upload photos to websites, transfer files and much more. Rove Mobile Viewer for BlackBerry, formerly BlackBerry Viewer, displays the screen of your BlackBerry smartphone on a computer screen. Users can give live demonstrations of any application designed for BlackBerry smartphones and much more.

Product Launch: PCMobilizr

PCMobilizr is Rove's first consumer product that allows you to access the screen of your PC and control the mouse and keyboard using your BlackBerry or Windows Smartphone without the hassles of a complicated configuration process. PCMobilizr requires no technical knowledge. Read More or enjoy a 30 day free trial.

Insider's look at Demo 2008

Rove was selected to launch PCMobilizr at DEMO 2008 from a large list of technology companies– there were 77 companies who made the cut out of a pool of close to 600 hopefuls. This was our first experience with DEMO. The only thing we knew was that this was a great opportunity to launch our first prosumer product and we were going to capitalize everywhere we could.

The selection process was a good test for us as we had to give a demonstration of PCMobilizr and define our market for the organizers. Their immediate response was that they had never seen anything like this before. We took that as a good sign.

Once selected, we were brought through a rigorous preparation exercise which included writing the script for the 6-minute presentation and talking it through with their lead producer. This was a great process and, although we didn’t finalize the script until the moment we walked on stage, it gave us a glimpse of how this professional event was run.

The event itself was more than we expected it to be. All our key media outlets – the ones we felt would be interested in covering the product – were there and were interested in listening to our story. Our presentation wasn’t until the final afternoon so we had enough time to watch a number of presentations and hone ours. This included many dry runs and many rewrites. The booth activity was a continuous stream of people we wanted to meet with – media and investors. We were the only company without giant screens and computers which reinforced the message of our product. People stopped by just out of curiosity and were amazed by the software.

We were up on stage just after 2:20pm on Wednesday and before you knew it, we were done. There were about 500 people sitting in the room and many more watching as we were streamed online and, by all accounts, the pitch went well. You can see for yourself if you’ve got 6 minutes to spare.

The highlight of the entire event for me was watching this product get launched from nothing to the immense media coverage we received. We sat in the hotel that Monday morning and watched as our product hit the Internet airwaves. In 4 days, PCMobilizr went from 2 results in a Google search to over 16,000.

DEMO was a great event for us – an unexpected surprise really. We managed to speak to all the media we set out to speak with and met some great entrepreneurs forging some of the most innovating companies in North America. I’d recommend this event to anyone trying to launch their company or product.

Read More PCMobilizr Press Coverage

Customer Story: State of Oregon

The State of Oregon Department of Human Services manages 10,000 users over 250 servers and 900 BlackBerry smartphones. With such a vast network, the department was looking for a solution that would leverage the technology of their wireless handheld devices and give them the increased flexibility to perform their jobs from anywhere. Mobile Admin was their solution. Read the Case Study