As I understand it, you are debating whether you should offer weather data as an enabler to mobile apps developers or to develop complete weather apps for consumers.

Consumer services is way outside my radar, but I will brave an opinion on your question. Weather data (temperature and pressure forecasts) are almost always free. Assuming you have access to higher-valued data (e.g. wind pressure and directions near major sea coasts) you could offer any of the following:
- consumer/prosumer apps for specific niche segments (e.g. people in water sports, sailing, boat owners etc) where you deliver information and guidance relative to the weather at the current location
- weather/wind info (without the apps) to network operators as part of a paid subscription, aimed at similar target segments
- weather info to makers of fishing equipment (Airmar, Furuno, etc) which they could combine with their own telemetry for advanced predictions and guidance on screen

As part of your weather services, you might want to consider building or bundling related services on how does the weather/wind direction/etc affect sea men at a specific location, what clothing is needed if you are venturing at a specific location (in collaboration with an outdoor kit manufacturer), etc. My point is that you should build a more complete proposition, whether this is consumer apps for specific segments or a combination of information & guidance specific to the weather.

- Andreas

Your opinion – guidance please. I have a history in the embedded world at Motorola/Freescale. I now work for a weather company and see some parallels. Weather data can be embedded into many consumer applications as a value add feature. Likewise we can data this data and develop complete consumer apps. I see the right answer is to do both, not one or the other. I would like to know if you now of any other examples I could give my mgt team, of companies that did both successfully. (were not afraid to give up the so called strategic IP) and prospered because of this. I realize that I am asking for items that are higher in the OS layer, but right now I can not see the forest from the trees and am looking for another set of eyes

RTOSes are here to stay. Due to the fragmentation and shallow APIs of Java, I would say that both users and service providers are not able to realise the full potential of this 85% of the market. There’s no silver bullet here.

Brijesh,

Good point. I would say that the key success factor for the 100 million club members is having developed a piece of software that’s essential to mass-market handsets and that’s much cheaper/quicker for OEMs to buy than build – for example JVMs, browsers, text engines, codecs, firmware update agents, etc. Plus enough cash to sustain 2-3 year long development cycles and business development cycles, which are typical in the embedded business.

Andreas

Thanks

Any idea?