Day One of Symbian Show
Quick summary of what people have said to me on the first (of two) days of the Smartphone Show 2006. Bit of a braindump, sorry.
- A certain phone manufacturer’s tools team reckons their engineers have not been asking them for the tools I’m doing. Implication: I’m unlikely to sell them to this phone manufacturer.
- However an engineer within the engineering team of the same manufacturer reckon these tools would be very useful, and is going to get me in touch with some more of the engineers there.
- My friends from another manufacturer reckon they would definitely pay for the tools I’m developing, and think I should sell to them just by talking to them as I did today. Once they’re done…
- Apparently my name is getting mentioned a lot within Symbian circles. Allegedly there is even somebody posting on the internal databases with my name. It’s not me. Either Symbian’s hired a new Adrian Taylor, or I’m a victim of identity theft, or it’s a mass hallucination.
- People aren’t convinced I did the right thing by spending time patenting stuff. Neither am I. Shrug.
- Lots of emphasis on static code analysis tools. Apparently the existing products aren’t good enough. I still can’t quite get my head around this: there are various products out there by big OS-agnostic companies, and at least one Symbian-oriented product which fell flat. So how can there be a market here? But I have now twice been told that this is a better idea than doing debugging tools. Hmm.
- Question put to me: if this doesn’t work out, am I going to find another idea, or am I going to go back to full-time employment? I thought the latter, but apparently that’s the “wrong answer” because too many “entrepreneurs” are too wedded to their ideas and should be more willing to find other ideas. Fair point.
- Lots of people have asked me if I’m glad I made the move I did. Yes!
- Lots of people have asked me if I’m enjoying my part-time contracting job. Also yes! And various have offered me other contracting roles. We’ll see… None are tools-related at the moment which is a shame.
- Developing my tools for the Symbian OS emulator doesn’t sound like a long-term viable solution. It sounds more and more likely that the Symbian OS emulator will eventually be replaced with a proper phone “simulator”; but personally I just don’t believe this is going to happen any time soon. It’s not clear to me what I should be aiming at. Need to think…
I suppose – on balance – not a bad day. I’ve shown a few slides to some people of what I’m up to, and the response has been 2/3 positive.