UIEvolution Aims to Start a UI Revolution

September 10, 2007

Mobile application developer UIEvolution might consider adding the letter 'R' to its name. That's because it's working on a solution to one of the elusive Holy Grails of mobile application development: how to write code once to operate seamlessly across a growing armada of mobile devices running various operating systems. Currently, developers need to port their code from one OS to another, in order to ensure it works across the multiplicity of devices offered by their mobile carrier partners, and this can be time-consuming and expensive. By solving such a challenge, the company could rightly claim to be fostering not just a mobile UI evolution, but a veritable UI Revolution.

UIEvolution first took aim at creating a solution to help mobile gaming developers find this Holy Grail. But its ambition was not limited to helping only interactive media developers cross this deep and difficult chasm, but to bring similar solace to a vast and expanding universe of companies aiming to distribute their software solutions to mobile users, ranging all the way from the entertainment space to the enterprise.

A Middleware Approach
Since its launch in 2000, UIEvolution has been working to solve this complex and often-times painful problem by developing its own proprietary software that helps companies distribute apps on mobile devices regardless of device type or operating platform. Its solution is UIEngine. Travis Beaven, Director of Consumer and Service Provider Products at UIEvolution, explained that UI Engine "creates 'middlware' for lack of a better word that allows easy translation for developers to the native OS on a device," providing a cure to this huge headache faced by mobile app developers.

Now, they've got to not only write code "in their language for their OS" but they then "have to rewrite apps multiple times" for the various operating environments their apps are deployed to, and this can be "costly, time consuming" since developers now "have to update and change it many different ways," a chore Beaven noted has proven so daunting that for many vendors, "in the end people really don't bother." He explained that mobile application development is still an "emerging technology," and "doing massive deployments, with massive development, is really prohibitive to getting anything done." UIEngine's technology approach "allows developers to write in one common language," and translates, handles the native parts of the app in common ways for the developer."

The Holy Grail: Write Once for All Devices and OSs
For instance, Beaven explained that if a MySpace user wants to upload photos from their mobile phones, they've locked into the OS running their device, so "if on Verizon, they use Brew, if on Cingular/AT&T, they use Java, they have to do it that way." Similarly, "Motorola handles it one way, Samsung, LG in another way." But with UIEngine, the developer need only "write once, UIEngine translates it for the device" and "rewrites parts of the application," so the developer may "write one time, and deploy across a lot of different platforms."

While UIEvolution's solution is logical, Beaven noted that "the catch is asking developers to write in a common language, a proprietary language — ours. We do the translation for them." To make it work, programmers "can't write in Java — they have to write in a common language as well." That means asking developers, who "get used to writing in a familiar language," as well as "development teams built up inside companies," must "move to a new development language," and Beaven noted that "asking them to move is painful," especially at the outset "without seeing the real value in doing it."

Beaven has found developers "may not be excited to move at first" but he added that "once we reach out to the development community," UIEvolution's approach is easy to explain, "here's what you need to go, what you need to get there." And, Beaven noted, the "potential is so high" because this is something "so hard to do with the language they're working with," since "mobile is so fractured." He has found that there are "really a lot of companies in a position where they need multiple languages going on," and when it comes to mobile application development, they're "not purists" as they "have to deal with new languages when all is said and done anyway" -- so UIEvolution offers a "pretty strong value proposition right now."

Developers' Response: Smoother Than Expected
With regard to app developer adoption, Beaven has found things to be "smoother than we thought," explaining that "if we go to a company adopting a technology, if they understand the offset, the problem, the pain you have in mobile," then he finds "a lot more embracing the technology early on." Case in point: ESPN, and MySpace, two of UIEvolution's major customers. As Beaven explained, UIEvolution "built them up the same way." Both found that after being "in mobile for a while," that they "have the horror stories of having the development schedule a year or more off to get a product out the door, and when they do, they're already behind," and then, with the arrival of new handsets, they must "start with dev all over again! If company came from the perspective of having lived with these problems, they see this technology and they're very happy with it."

Beaven explained how, as "with anything, we've got to train the developer, show them the value" inherent in UIEvolution's model. "When we do go in, we get a lot of great feedback from what they like to see, the sort of problems they want to solve." Beaven noted that "device manufacturers are always coming up with new and cool things on the phone," as they're "listening to the market" to find what users want to take advantage of from their phones, as witnessed a couple years ago with the rapid adoption of camera phones. "Today, as in any given year, there are a lot of new features and functions to go after," and UIEvolution "listens very carefully to our customers to find the right ones to support."

Working with top-tier partners like Disney, ESPN (80% owned by Disney and 20% owned by Hearst), E! Online, IMDB (an Amazon company), and MySpace (a Fox Interactive Media company) has been helpful, as helping such blue chip entertainment vendors roll out their mobile apps on a multiplicity of devices and operating platforms "allows us a lot of credibility." According to Beaven, UIEvolution has "worked with a lot of different people" over the years, including "Disney, that whole family, all their properties," and it's also "done a lot of work with IMDB, owned by Amazon." Beaven added, "We've got a long list of customers" and have "produced 80 to 90 apps -- a lot of apps," and have developed "a lot of technology relationships with people, here in the U.S. and also overseas."

More than Mobile Phones: Music, Gaming Devices and Beyond
While the mobile phone market has been central to UIEvolution's work thus far, Beaven observed that "we're also getting into some new markets beyond the mobile phone," and now doing "embedded work with MP3 players," though things are at an early stage so he "can't name specific companies" -- yet. But the day when UIEvolution can announce this new work is "very close." He added there are "a number of music and media device manufacturers we'll be announcing very quickly," including an on-demand TV project in Japan. As Beaven explained, it's "key to go all the way back to the technology story," as "our intent was not to solve just the mobile problem," and enable customers to "write and go to mobile," but to also work in "cable box, TV, even the PC," using UIEvolution's paradigm to "write for one, run and update everywhere. Because the mobile market is so fractured, so many different platforms, there's been a lot of good opportunity to be had." But, "as years go by, next year or so, you're going to see us start to tell our story across a lot of different platforms all at once: picture MySpace launching simultaneously on mobile phones, portable media players at once."

Beaven noted that new devices are converging in multiple ways, and old boundaries between device categories are starting to blur. The iPhone, he noted, is "a phone," but it's "certainly blurring the line" with its blend of features. Similarly, some of Sony's newest PSPs come equipped with its Go!Messenger VoIP communications package, with which they can increasingly "function like a mobile phone." These examples illustrate how "we're going to see a convergence with a lot of these different devices," especially since "if not a phone device, putting a phone onto it is not terribly complex." And, by the same token, "if you are a phone company, you want to start adding things like iTunes."

UIEvolution is now "seeing it all come together," sitting in a sweet spot of the convergence wave. "Unfortunately — or fortunately of us — this is going to create pain, and make life painful for developers: if you want to ship a product on Verizon, you have to hit specific devices that range across a lot of different platforms and technology. This makes a developer who has a great game idea, it makes their life very difficult" as they "have to hit all these targets" -- since "carriers make developers hit their full lines," and this is "going to continue to make life difficult. We're hoping we can help alleviate that pain."

Beaven observed that the iPhone is an "interesting thing," but "just how that is going to effect the global market, what features it's going to start pushing the OEM manufacturers to enable — a lot of gimmicks and tricks on the iPhone are interesting — time will tell which offer a good user experience before the dust settles. Right now there's a lot of hype, 'everything is great!' Or lousy. Or overblown. While there are good things about the iPhone, some really good functions it is putting out, as make their way into the mainstream, we'll start to take advantage of that as well."

Seeding the Market
Beaven described UIEvolution as "a technology company" first and foremost, noting "we offer our technology as a product," and "can even do professional service work for a content provider, using our technology to build them their solution." Beaven expects that "as our company becomes more widely known," it will "do less and less of the actual building of the products," so while at first "we have to seed the market with our own products," he explained that "we're a technology company at heart: technology is our product, and we sell it in a lot of different ways." As a technology company, UIEvolution aims to introduce a new standard, "taking industry where there is no standard, no hope of a standard, and bring them all together in a hopeful way."

That means we can expect to see UIEvolution evolve well beyond mobile devices into such areas as enterprise IT. Indeed, he recalled that UIEvolution's "initial plan and intention was to be in the enterprise space," but found the entertainment industry was poised to leap into the mobile app development arena, and could thus benefit from UIEvolution's value proposition. As such, Beaven explained "the entertainment model was a means to an end — we fell into the entertainment piece more than the other way around" because "we offer the software solution, and this ability," and as it turns out, "the companies that will be most interested in this solution will probably be big media companies, offering entertainment type products."

Beaven noted this is "how Microsoft started, which is where I was before I came here." Before coming to UIEvolution, Beaven served as a Lead Program Manager within the Exchange and SQL divisions at Microsoft, where he managed product development for the enterprise. He also helped design the software engineering process for the Microsoft, creating several innovations in software development and portfolio management. Beaven noted UIEvolution's founder, Satoshi Nakajima, is "a Microsoft guy too," having been a software architect at the software giant for 14 years, where he most recently served as lead software architect for the Windows shell and IE teams, and whose other achievements include creating the world's first CAD application for the PC, defining the architecture for Windows 95, and overseeing the creation of IE 3.0.

Much as Microsoft has in so many ways succeeded in bringing software to the masses, taking America and then the world by storm, UIEvolution hopes to help solve the "global piece" of the mobile application development challenge. "We help bridge the global gap, to update and do things in a common way, and help to reach a global market, and distribute there. We always look to distribute globally." He noted UIEvolution already "did a couple titles to try to distribute globally" with its MySpace partnership and more are on the way.

Back in January 2004, UIEvolution announced that it had successfully raised $10 million in a second round of venture funding, bringing to a total of $16 million its VC support since its 2000 launch, from several investors including Square Enix, Ignition Partners, and Inspire Corp. Then, in March 2004 one of its investors, Tokyo-based Square Enix, a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment software including the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles, decided to purchase the company outright for $58 million in cash. The acquisition combined Square Enix's interactive media offerings with UIEvolution's proprietary software technology.

ESPN Goes Mobile with UIEngine under the Hood
To gain some insight into the customer perspective, we spoke with Oke Okaro, Senior Director of Product Development at Mobile ESPN, with whom UIEvolution has partnered to help ESPN reintroduce its mobile sports app, now called ESPN MVP, earlier this year for Verizon Wireless V-Cast subscribers. Those subscribers can enjoy unlimited access to video content on their Verizon Wireless device for $15 a month through Verizon's V-Pak service, which includes ESPN MVP at no extra charge.

With ESPN MVP, Verizon Wireless customers can access sports news, scores, video highlights, and alerts, among other sports-related content including ESPN Fantasy, a fantasy team management game. ESPN MVP replaces Mobile ESPN, a MVNO service that ESPN offered last year.Okaro described ESPN MVP, explaining that it "provides the most immersive and real-time sports experience available in the U.S. today, from a user-interaction perspective as well as a feature functionality perspective, completely unparalleled in the industry," and which has been "heralded by media companies and the press."

He explained that ESPN MVP provides users with a "rich experience, ease of use, intuitiveness, responsiveness, fresh and relevant content, excellent reviews from users and the industry, breadth and depth of coverage." According to Okaro, "ESPN MVP is actually a couple of different experiences in one — one of which UIEvolution actually built. If you have Verizon V-Pak/V-Cast service today, you can get a MVP. The service is collectively known as MVP," which includes "things built by UIE and by ESPN." He added that "there are three applications that make up ESPN MVP," ESPN Sports Information, ESPN Alerts, ESPN Fantasy, of which the Alerts and the Fantasy apps were built by ESPN itself. Okaro added that "the gateway to our experience is through the MVP application itself."

'An Experience We're Very Excited About'
Okaro explained that ESPSN MVP was "re-branded and made available to Verizon V-Cast subscribers" after ESPN's Mobile ESPN offering was discontinued last year, and so far it has been "an experience we're very excited about — the feedback has been excellent from fans as well as from Verizon, which is very pleased with the service and how the service has performed over the last couple of months since it launched on May 15th." Okaro has found UIEvolution to be "a great partner," and noted ESPN has enjoyed a "longstanding relationship with them," and has "worked with them for many years," since back in 2003. Okaro noted ESPN worked "with them through the MVNO stage, and also worked with them here. They are a very good partner and successfully delivered on what we engaged them to deliver on."

In addition to working with UIEvolution, a third member of the ESPN MVP partnership is Moment Design, which worked with ESPN "on the design aspect of the product," particularly the interface design, while UIEvolution worked with ESPN's in-house application developers to deliver on the "development work associated with it." Okaro noted that ESPN "worked with Moment Design on the interaction and graphic design, and with my internal engineering team and UIEvolution on the implementation." He explained, "All apps developed by UIEvolution use the UIEngine. In some cases, the UIEngine helped minimize development requirements and porting time." Since ESPN MVP's launch, Okaro added, "we have product managers and engineers who manage the MVP and an army of editors and producers who write and publish stories, package highlights, publish alerts, create photos and manage every aspect of the content offering."

Okaro described UIEvolution "as software development company that is an enabler of our experience," and clarified that while it "did not design ESPN MVP, it helped us build the product, as it related to the user experience," and that already "feedback is coming from people who like the product." Okaro explained that "UIEvolution uses a proprietary technology for their development efforts," and that its partners "have to build a competency in-house if you want to build upon it," adding "that's something we have decided to do." As he observed, "Whenever you introduce people to a new technology, there is always a fair amount you have to invest from a commitment- and a corporate-perspective. We've had to make a significant commitment." For companies considering working with UIEvolution, "I would say you have to make 'some' investment" in order to develop the necessary in-house capacity to develop mobile application code using UIEngine.

In the few months since its launch, ESPN is happy with ESPN MVP's performance. As Okaro described, "As it related to both ESPN's and Verizon's interests, we are very satisfied with the usage: we have been very happy with that both from the number of people that have actually downloaded, to the number of people who actively use it."

Okaro recalled that "ESPN launched a mobile phone service during the 2006 Super Bowl, but that service was discontinued" last year, but ESPN decided it was "going to re-launch the service and make available to a much larger audience of fans." It thus "entered into a relationship with Verizon," making the new ESPN MVP service "available to Verizon V-Cast subscriber s." Okaro noted it was "essentially the same service, but a new and improved service made available to a larger pool of sports fans" and using a "new business model," through which Verizon has "licensed the app -- it's not our own service now." Okaro has found the new model has improved the service side, since "now Verizon takes care of the sales and distribution piece, their core competency, and we take care of the content and the app itself, which is ours."

Tackling the Device Proliferation Challenge
The complexity of UIEvolution's challenge, and the Herculean nature of its solution, can not be easily overstated. Indeed, a look at its website shows UIEvolution has been able to develop a middleware solution to enable software developers to write once for deployment to dozens of devices on numerous networks, including the following.

Author & Copyright: Berry Zellen, Enterprise Insights
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