Feature
Web: www.degel.com Developer Profile: Degel Software Ltd.
By Richard Bloor
January 6, 2004
Degel Software has been involved in the successful porting of several major Palm applications to Symbian OS, including iambic's Agendus and Electric Pocket's BugMe! This work has also been showcased on Forum Nokia. No mean feat for a small consultancy, particularly when they are based in Israel and several of their clients are in the US. We talk to David Goldfarb, CEO of Degel, to find out how they have become Palm porters extraordinaire.
Degel Software was formed by David Goldfarb, as vehicle for his contracting work. David had moved to Israel in 1985 and initially worked as a contractor utilizing his expertise on Symbolics workstations, having worked for Symbolics before leaving America.
In 1996 David had started to give serious thought to growing Degel; however at the same time he also got the opportunity to take the role of CTO at 2AM. 2AM specialized in developing multi-player games for the Internet and ran successfully from 1996 to 2000 when it succumbed to the bursting of the dot.com bubble. David used this as an opportunity and invited a few colleagues from 2AM and other recently closed companies to join Degel. At the same time, a contact at Sun (who had turned down a job with 2AM a few months earlier) came shopping for resources and Degel soon became involved in the porting the J2ME infrastructure to several different platforms.
"Degel had never focused on any one single technology. I had started working with Lisp then switched to Windows development and multimedia," said David. "I always wanted the company to be working on leading edge technologies, those technologies that companies want to use but didn't yet understand sufficiently to support in-house." By 2001 it was clear to David that Windows was no longer the cutting edge. The fact that most college computing graduates thought they could program in Windows also meant that the market was full of people who could do a good enough job which made it very hard for companies like Degel to sell excellence in development skills. David however saw that in 2001 mobile technology had already reached the point that Windows was at in 1990. So the contact with Sun gave Degel a significant push in the direction or wireless technology.
From the starting with Sun Degel progressively focused more on wireless applications and by the end of 2001 almost all their work was in the wireless arena, mainly in Symbian and J2ME, with high-visibility projects including porting the ICQ instant messaging client to Symbian OS.
David sees working on the leading edge as being where Degel gains its competitive advantage. "We are always striving to be one step ahead of the standard tools," said David. "For example the natural set of Java development tools doesn't make it easy to create applications which work across platforms, on multiple J2ME devices. So we have developed our own tool based on the C preprocessor and some other components which let's us do very efficient cross-platform development from a common code base."
Similarly with Symbian OS Degel has spent a lot of time digging into the APIs and understanding the platform. David sees joining the Symbian Platinum program, which Degel did in October 2003, as a way of accelerating the learning process because it provides access to Symbian OS source code. "I hope that this will allow us to gain an even better insight into how Symbian OS works and, as a result, be able to develop even better applications," said David.
Degel has also used more straightforward, but still leading edge, promotion and advertising techniques. A principal one has been Google's AdWords. "The idea behind AdWords is that you can place adverts on the right-hand side of a user's search when they search on words that you, the advertiser, selected," explained David. "The pricing policy is very reasonable; there is no charge for showing an advert, only a charge when a user clicks through to your web site and that can be as low as 5c per click. We have paid less than $1000 for advertising and the work it has brought in has paid for it many times over."
More traditional marketing has also been helpful, and Degel has utilized everything from old-fashioned word-of-mouth to attending trade shows and expos. David recently lectured on "Accelerating the Mobile Development Process" at the Mobile Internet Expo in Paris and sees speaking at this type of event as an important tool for exposing Degel and its skills.
However, good promotion is only as good as the ability to deliver on the advertising and Degel has been able to follow through with the quality of service they promise. This has seen them port not only ICQ but also Electric Pocket's BugMe! and iambic's Agendus from Palm to Symbian OS. A testament to the quality of this work is not only the fact that Degel has satisfied customers but the recognition its work has received. The BugMe! port has been the subject of a case study on Forum Nokia and also won a coveted Handango Champion award for the Best Productivity Application in 2003.
Degel, like many smaller companies, now has several significant decisions to make in working out how to capitalize on their expertise and reputation. David sees three routes Degel could take in growing. One would be to become a manpower house, a second is shift to a product based company and the third approach is to remain, as David characterizes it, a company of experts capable of helping other companies embrace new technologies. "I want Degel to be a modern day corporate equivalent of Johnny Appleseed, (the legendary American pioneer, John Chapman who spread apple orchards across the wide frontier)," said David "So I would like Degel to remain as a company that plants technology apple seeds and helps other companies and the whole industry to grow."
One of the interesting things about Degel is that, unlike a number of "traditional" mobile developers, they have largely ignored technologies like WAP and MMS. "I feel that mobile applications will very quickly move to TCP/IP with programmable smart-phones; the same revolution that took us from the calculator to the computer."
Degel is also focusing on working with customers who sell directly to the consumer, and David has firm reasons for doing this. "I strongly believe that we will see a decline in the power of the mobile operators," said David "The operators only have the ability to evaluate the top content and services that have broad appeal. If the internet has taught us anything, it's that consumers want diversity, and I ultimately don't believe that operators can deliver this." So David sees the operator landscape changing, while operators will still provide premium wireless services, they will increasingly become bit pipes and in David's view within 5 years or less the mobile telecoms industry will resemble today's ISP industry.
Degel has been able to grow steadily over the last three years through the strength of its technical skills but also by carefully exploiting new promotion opportunities created by the Internet. It is focused on leveraging technical know assist developers and enterprises come to terms with wireless technology, Java and Symbian OS in particular.
You can contact Degel at info@degel.com.
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