
Fred Brunel, at WhereCloud office on St-Laurent, with the Yellow Pages iPad Application
As most of you knows, Fred Brunel (@fbrunel) and Martin Dufort (@mdufort) were the first interested in iPhone application development in Montréal. Fred Brunel had an unconditional faith in all things Apple, while Martin Dufort was a big believer in mobile and location apps. The collaboration gave birth to WhereCloud, with a first twitter application for the iPhone.
Fast forward to mid-2010, they have developed 5 different iPhone applications, ranging from location-based, business to reference to tourists, with their Yellow Pages application rated by more than 50.000 customers. They have also developed in the same time an expertise in product development, with an eye on UI design and product strategy. Projects are abound, to the point they have the luxury to carefully select their next customer. Their headcount is now 4, but they work frequently with freelancers, for instance to work on cross-platform delivery.
Fred Brunel tells this is just the beginning for them and mobile developers, since current apps currently under-exploit the iPad or iPhone 4′s capabilities. The application store with its end-to-end delivery mechanism gives also Apple an edge to Android. For Fred, the Android platform is less mature, and attracts developers who will create sloppy, buggy and aimless applications, typically hacked open source “hello world” apps. Apple’s strict QA will instead offer useful, beautiful and solid applications, while at the same offering a strong and reliable business model.
From video game developers to classical desktop apps and web developers, mobile apps seems to be the immediate space to move to. The prospect of using software on the go brings new challenges and opportunities, just like web2.0 was trendy, a few years back. However, compared to web2.0 and social media, the produced software is a tad more useful, with millions more potential users, and a sound business model. Something to think about, if you are an entrepreneur or a developer.