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Report from BAMF Sept 2004 meeting on Brew

Bay Area Mobility Forum’s September meeting gave an overview of the technical and business model underpinnings of application development via Brew.

As I learned, Brew is the primary development platform for Verizon and several other US carriers. Qualcomm provides all the back end and billing support for developers. End users just download applications to their phone and are charged on their monthly billing cycle. In contrast to the J2ME market, there are significant barriers to entry for developers, including building relationships with Qualcomm and Verizon as well as the maintenance and service requirements serving such demanding customers.

This is a miserable system where some application vendors are making some money, but jumping through a lot of hoops to do so. Carrier lock-in and total ownership of the system is a huge problem and stifles innovation: carriers are saying ‘no’ to applications just because they have one that already does about the same thing.

I made a valuable contact with a fellow researcher in the Masters CS program at Berkeley, Hong Qu. He is studying this space and trying to determine its future shape as well. There may be opportunities for him to work with our researchers at Stanford as well.