Lessons to be learned

Funware Development sold

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:09:52 +0000

Funware Development is a small startup I started a year and a half ago to develop games for social networks. A few weeks ago I pulled the plug and sold it to a company from Moscow.

Funware Development was a really lean startup. So lean that the max number of employees working for it (myself excluded because I didn’t get salary) was 3. Nevertheless, we delivered over 10 games and applications to Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir and VKontakte social networks. The total number of installations of these apps is just under 14 millions. Several months ago we were among the top 20 companies (for Russian social networks) based on these numbers. Despite the large number of users, the monetization didn’t go well, and eventually it became clear that the thing just wasn’t worth the trouble. If you are interested in numbers, the total revenue (including the sale of the company) was about $26K with all the costs totaling in about $26K. That’s right, the total profit over the startup’s life is about zero. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because most startups don’t even recover the money that were spent on them.

We surely made many mistakes along the way, and it is clear that we could really make it work. The hindsight is always 20/20 though. I’ve learned so many new things that no amount of reading other people’s blogs could deliver. Lessons learned, moving on.

The picture above is an actual screenshot from the site before I took it down.

MobileNoter SE for Android updated

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:45:10 +0000

Our MobileNoter SE for Android was just updated in the Google Android Market. The main reason for the update: inking capability has been completed! The users can draw sketches, outline important places – one of the most loved features of Onenote, something that’s not available to Evernote users. Needless to say, this feature will be available in the HD version very soon, iOS versions of MobileNoter to follow.

Apple reinvents education?

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:26:16 +0000

The release of educational platform is a strong move by Apple. Not only it’s a market that hasn’t seen any significant innovations for years. Getting young people hooked on the iOS platform early is a great way to ensure they’ll be willing to buy Apple stuff when they grow up. However, it might be a bit too soon for Apple to celebrate. I expect the same move by Amazon in a few months. Eventually they will ship a better tablet than their current Kindle Fire is, and with the clout they have among traditional publishers, they’ll be able to grab the lead in tablet-based educational market.

Amazon is becoming a super-monster company of the new age. Their cloud services were basically the first large-scale commercial cloud available, and it seemed to be a bit weird for them to move into it. These days, after their strong tablet debut, it won’t surprise me if Amazon releases a personal cloud platform (think gmail and Google Docs), a browser (take Chromium), a search engine (becoming a commodity too), ad platform (hello AdWord). This all can happen thanks to their deep penetration into consumer market and democratic (think cheap) pricing. Now this is a threat that Google might not survive.

Cybercrime pays well…

Oleg Kokorin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:04:07 +0000

… until they get you and your cars…

Courtesy of TechCrunch.

MobileNoter in 2011

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:15:24 +0000

2011 was a monster year for MobileNoter. We didn’t get to our goal of 100,000 customers by the end of 2011, but still we are several tens of thousands users in. If you decide to compare these numbers to other services, like Evernote or Catch, remember that these are paying customers we are talking about, not people who download free stuff with the intention of never paying. The 100,000 customers milestone is postponed to the year of 2012 now.

Microsoft released Onenote for iPhone in January and then Onenote for iPad in December 2011. What’s good about these releases: first, they determined the price and trial terms. It will definitely influence our decisions in the future. Second, their release allowed us to differentiate our product from theirs pretty easily. Microsoft provides basic access to their Skydrive stored notes, which is totally free for everyone except power users. MobileNoter gives you full access to the notes stored on Skydrive, Dropbox, your computer, while preserving all graphics, drawings, and provides complete Onenote for Windows experience on the mobile devices. The release of Onenote for iOS from Microsoft has some positive and negative impact on us. Overall, it is a somewhat neutral event.

Android was our top platform in 2011. The sales of MobileNoter for Android went from zero to more than that of for iOS during the year. Two factors helped: exceptionally great releases of MobileNoter for Android and skyrocketing growth of the platform itself. Even MobileNoter sales in Amazon Appstore showed significant growth despite a slow start. The Kindle Fire is to thank for this.

We expect to have some great releases of MobileNoter of iOS in 2012, so this platform is not to be ignored. The dominance of iOS over Android is however evaporating and soon it will be gone forever, as more as more developers find their income from Android growing over that of from iOS.

Our plans for BlackBerry lost some priority as the year of 2011 clearly demonstrated that the platform is struggling to survive. If the enterprise mobile users move to Android/Windows 8 and leave RIM products, then those Blackberries may never see a native MobileNoter and thus receive access to their Onenote notes.

Finally, 2011 was the year when MobileNoter as a startup reached several important financial milestones. If you ever ran a startup, you know what I’m talking about. We never doubted that the day would come, but it’s nice to actually experience it.

Microsoft releases Onenote for iPad

Oleg Kokorin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:45:53 +0000

Microsoft finally released Onenote for iPad, almost a year after they released Onenote for iPhone. While it seems to be pretty nice looking, the users complain about the following problems:

- Does not work without a Skydrive account;

- No inking support, neither read or write;

- No text formatting (bold, underline, etc.);

- No ability to move or resize images;

- No ability to create new sections or notebooks;

- No ability to zoom in/out;

- Links/hyperlinks don’t work;

- No file attachments.

To be fair, MobileNoter doesn’t completely cover this list either, but at least we have most of it. The latest update of MobileNoter for Android just received inking “read only” support. The ability to draw on Android phones and tablets is coming out pretty soon too. But the biggest news is a totally new release of MobileNoter for iPad coming out beginning of 2012. Some competition is good for the users.

Microsoft money machine

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 08:55:36 +0000

Just in case you wonder where Microsoft takes all that money, here is its business split up, brought by Business Insider. These are mostly not official numbers, just analytical estimates:

Windows (desktop)	$19.0B
Office	$15.0B
The Xbox and all its related businesses	$8.3B
Windows Server	$6.0B
SQL Server database software	$3-4.0B
Online advertising on Bing (including Yahoo Search), MSN, and other properties	$2.3B
Exchange Server	Over $2.2B
SharePoint, collaboration and portals	Over $1.5B
Skype	$1.2B
Dynamics, CRM and accounting software	$1.1B
Visual Studio, software development tools	Over $1.0B
System Center, server management software	Over $1.0B

Microsoft Office is coming to iPad

Oleg Kokorin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:46:13 +0000

According to various sources, including The Daily, Microsoft Office is coming to iPad in 2012. It seems as Microsoft finally admitted the importance of iPad platform. On the other hand, releasing MS Office for iPad is a bad strategic move for Windows 8 based tablets and therefore for Windows 8 that will also appear in 2012. If the Windows 8 tablets were the only to offer the super popular office suite, it would have been a serious advantage for them, especially in the enterprise field. Even more surprising is that Microsoft will start paying the “Apple tax” – the 30% Apple takes from all sales in their Appstore…

It is taken for granted that the iPad Office suite will have Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It is interesting to see if it includes Outlook and Onenote as well. The latter is somewhat important for us, because we are going to release huge updates to our MobileNoter for iOS pretty soon.

Kindle Fire is a firestarter

Oleg Kokorin — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 08:24:32 +0000

Amazon released their Kindle Fire only about a week ago, but the sales our MobileNoter in Amazon AppStore have exploded. They are still not as big as those of the Apple’s or Google’s appstores, but an increase by 5 times is a nice thing. Amazon AppStore is definitely getting some traction after all. That’s why we are going to release our HD version into Amazon – it should be approved any day now. Also, we are going to do an update to our Android versions of MobileNoter with some really nice features in December this year.

MobileNoter turned two!

Oleg Kokorin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:35:36 +0000

It’s been 2 years since the first commercial version of MobileNoter was released. Even though it’s still far from perfection, the recent release for Android Honeycomb received a lot of love from the Onenote admirers. Anyway, we haven’t reached our goal of 100,000 customers yet, so nothing to brag about. This goal is postponed to the next MobileNoter birthday party.