Greetings:


Can any of my Canadian friends out there have knowledge if there is a Canadian company that develops or will develop Mobile Internet Devices for Canada?

The company can be just a concept developer to a full turnkey solution developer.

To date I know of one company in Montreal who manufactures motherboards from concept.

Regards Robert

Greetings:

There must be someone out there who knows of a Canadian company that's developing Mobile Internet devices, yes.

Lets hear from you.

Regards Robert

Research In Motion from Waterloo is very big. Maybe you've heard of there Blackberry product.

Greetings SmackPotato:

Yes I know of Research in Motion and the Blackberry.

But I'm looking for a new startup Canadian Company that is into concept development of Mobile Internet Devices, or do Turnkey Concepts of deploying Mobile Internet Devices.
I working on a hunck here.

Regards Robert

If the goal is to create a protitable business, I would presume that a startup would target the most widely distributed mobile internet devices -- and regrettably, that is not the ITT yet.

I suppose that the canadian companies developing PalmOS software in the past 10 years could migrate to MIDs -- but I expect that they would select a finite set of targets from the prolifiration of mobile OS: Windows Mobile, Symbian, RIM and others.

Until a Linux based tablet achieves the same level of penetration as the iPhone, I doubt that there is enough of a market for VCs to fund startups. Regrettably (or maybe this is good...) we are not in the late 90s where money was flowing for any new idea...

But I am certainly interested in actvities in this area (as an ex-PalmOS and embedded software developer)...

Robert B.

Greetings Robert B:

Thankyou for your message, it really shed some light into MID's for Canada.

When you state that you have experience in embedded software does this mean experience in Symbian S60 platform?
I'm looking for a student in the Montreal area that can develop a symbian application. Do you know of anyone I can contact?

Its really too bad that Canadian companies don't see the potential Mobile Internet Device have.
But in about 5 years from now many in Canada will be using some form of Mobile Internet Device.
Robert I hope that there would be more of us from Montreal interested in Mobile Internet Devices.
If there were about 10 of us we could have had a meeting at a cafe and maybe who knows that's the way startups begin.

Regards Robert C

What about Datawind? They are the designers of the Pocket Surfer1 and 2 and they are from Montreal (555 Rene Levesque West).

http://www.datawind.com/html/about.htm

Greetings Dont:

I took a look at DataWind, this is a very thin MID, wow, watchout Iphone.

So there are MID companies in Canada, that's great to know!

Maybe with the new CPU from Intel called Menlow, there will be more startups in Canada for 2008.

Regards Robert

No, I have experience in writing software for custom embedded circuit boards with varying types of MCUs (MCS51, HC11, etc.) with or without access to an RTOS, and writing software for mobile devices (EPOC16, PalmOS)

Sorry, I do not know of anyone working in this space. You would think that any developer with access to a device/emulator and the SDK should be able to implement something. I remember years ago ordering the Nokia 9110 SDK and playing around with it -- although I didn't have a 9110.

I do not think that this statement is correct. Canadian companies (or future companies) do see the potential that these devices can have. The key issue is to figure out a way to make it profitable to be in that space. Keep in mind that most entrepreneurs will keep their ideas close to their chest in the gestation period so it is difficult for us to determine the true interest in this technology.

Years ago (in the early 00's), I was researching the possibilities of developing a home based MID. We had a pretty good idea, and a neat prototype, but couldn't convince VCs of the market potential. At the time, the BOM was quite high for items such as LCD screens and wireless chip sets. Today the idea would require tweaking as the prolifiration of wireless gadgets has rendered some of its functionality redundant. It was fun while it lasted and yet no one was aware of this potential product. I am certain that this happens every day -- we simply do not know about the efforts.

But hey! Canadian entrepreneurs are a crafty lot. I have the utmost confidence in their ability to see potential and make it their vision happen.

I believe we are already there -- most cell phones have some Internet-capable feature (mind-you the experience is not very pleasant). And just like in the '80s, we are all struggling to find the "killer" mobile application -- see Google's effort with Android and catering to the iPhone users...

I am a bit far from Montreal (I live in the Gatineau hills, North of Ottawa) to have coffee, but I could drop by virtually :-)


Robert B.