Introduction
While there are hundreds of web sites and blogs for mobile devices and applications targeted at the consumer, there aren’t any “serious” websites that serve as a community for the mobile application developer for all platforms and hobbyists.
When I talked to Rafi Ton, the founder of Mobiledevworld.com, he felt the mobile industry lacked an open community for mobile developers, professionals and enthusiasts to exchange ideas, discuss technologies and explore this exciting field of mobile technology.
Rafi Ton also heads Vufone, which provides a service of back up in the cloud. We have also reviewed Vufone at BestofSymbian.
Rafi Ton further says, “During the years I’ve been involved in mobile development the issue of organized resources, code examples, deal flow leads etc was a major problem especially for small and starting companies – I would like to create a service (again, free) to help all these small developers and companies who are trying to get in to mobile technology, development and marketing.”
For the mobile enthusiast who wants more than just un-boxing videos, device specifications and reviews, I find mobiledevworld.com to be the definitive place where one can find in-depth Opinions and Articles, Code Examples, News, Presentations, Press Releases, Resources, Sales and BD, Tutorials and many more.
There is also a phone database that contains information that’s highly focused at developers. Mobiledevworld.com is not limited to a single mobile platform. That would defeat the purpose of an open community which facilitates the meeting of various professionals. It is growing into a vibrant mobile social community. Read on for a detailed interview with Rafi Ton.
Interview
BestofSymbian: Tell us about Mobiledevworld?
Rafi Ton: MobileDevWorld is our attempt (as professionals within the mobile industry) to create a social network where professionals within the mobile industry can find answer, discuss with other professionals any issues relating to the mobile industry. There are many sites and blogs about mobile technology, but most of them are not targeted to mobile professionals. MobileDevWorld is actually not a “site” or a “blog”, but rather a community or a social network of mobile professionals who can share, discuss and create opportunities to promote the mobile industry. Our users can create blogs and post their thoughts and ideas, they can participate in forums and groups, look for projects or jobs, get the latest specs of more than 2300 mobile phones or read the latest industry news – all from a professional point of view.
BestofSymbian: What’s the motivation behind creating MobileDevworld.com?
Rafi Ton: I’ve been involved in the mobile industry for more than a decade – worked for and founded companies in this industry. In every company (small or large) there was always one issue that bothered us all the time – information. Information about mobile phone specs, leads about deals, information about finding the best agent for a country we wanted to expand to. MobileDevWorld tries to create this community where information about the industry will be available freely and openly to all members. We are not trying to make a commercial service, but to create a service where we can exchange information freely and openly.
BestofSymbian: What are the kinds of visitors who frequent Mobiledevworld? How is the traffic like?
Rafi Ton: We currently can see two major groups of users that visit our community regularly: developers of software for mobile phones and sales/marketing people who look for the latest news and updates relevant to their worlds and seek to exchange information about deals, leads etc. With respect to the traffic – it exceeded my wildest expectations. We just launched the service, only friend-brings-friend and the traffic grows exponentially on a daily basis. And most importantly, these are users who visit mobiledevworld almost daily.
BestofSymbian: What are the highlights of Mobiledevworld?
Rafi Ton: I can summarize it in one line. “A free social network made by mobile professionals for mobile professionals”.
BestofSymbian: How many members do you have now? Can you give a break up of members for specific mobile OS technologies?
Rafi Ton: As I noted, we are very young and didn’t even start to actively promote the service. As of today we have about 120 active daily users but these numbers are growing very rapidly. We plan to start marketing the service next month and our target is to get 1000 active mobile professionals in the first month.
BestofSymbian: What’s in it for the smartphone consumer?
Rafi Ton: Every smartphone user who would like to dive into the world of mobile technology will find a lot of interesting content in our service. Moreover, one of the items I’m promoting is writing simple tutorials to convert web developers to mobile developers. Today we have the right technologies such as Nokia WRT for Symbian, PhoneGap for the iPhone and the Palm WebOS which allow web developers to write mobile applications using html, css and javascript. This can really turn mobile apps to become the next Web.
BestofSymbian: Are there any other websites similar to Mobiledevworld.com?
Rafi Ton: To the best of my knowledge there is no single site/service that is doing what we are. There are many sites about mobile news, many sites for developers but they are all fragmented. mobiledevworld is building a community and a network of mobile professionals to help each other.
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