27 November 2009: Fighting off stiff competition from 15 other companies, mBricks came out as this year’s winner of the Telenor Partner Prize and NOK 100,000. In collaboration with SuperOffice, mBricks developed an ideal solution for providing PC solutions on mobiles. In the partner competition, mBricks put forward a framework for the development of applications for mobile phones and demonstrated the use of the framework with a solution that it had developed with SuperOffice.

mBricks’ technology is designed to enable PC solutions to be provided on mobiles. The technology helps developers to create a single application that can be used on the great majority of mobiles phones, with a very good user interface, and that makes use of the mobile’s various resources, such as its camera, memory and GPS.

“We are very grateful for the recognition that the jury has given mBricks with this prize. We are now looking forward to continuing our exciting collaboration with Telenor in order to realise our common goal of making our companies’ PC solutions available on ordinary mobile phones, both in Norway and internationally,” mBricks’ CEO Svein Therkelsen says. “Telenor is one of the leading operators that both stimulates innovative solutions and, very importantly, actually implements new technology for its customers. We value our collaboration with Telenor highly and we are making every effort to continue to develop technical solutions that will provide user-friendly services for its customers,” Therkelsen continues.

“With mBricks’ technology, developers can create a solution that functions across all mobile phones that can operate Java, and in so doing to reach the great majority of mobile users,” says Frank Elter, who heads up the jury at Telenor. Elter believes that mBricks’ development platform will stimulate the development of advanced mobility solutions. The collaboration with SuperOffice shows that such solutions are now commercially mature. Developers can focus on a single platform instead of producing adapted solutions for the great variety of different types of phones. The solution also has a potential for internationalisation. “The jury believes that this solution will enable a great many companies and users to benefit from mobile solutions both in Norway and internationally,” Elter says.

The Telenor jury consisted of Stein Tømmer, Pål Normann Johannsen, Hans Christian Hauglie and its foreman Frank Elter.

When I first read e-mail and updated contacts and calendar on my first Microsoft mobile phone, I was amazed. The company’s Exchange server pushed data smoothly to my beautiful Qtek 8010 some five years ago, and I understood my way of working was about to change. Independent of time and place I was connected to the pulse of communication in our company. The trend was significant, and companies like BlackBerry paved its way to success with secure access to e-mail. Actually, PIM-services became essential features in all business phones.

However, work is far more than personal information and communication. Companies depend on a wide range of enterprise software applications. These are collaborative tools of larger systems, often referred to as ERP. Such systems are business critical and efficient access for employees is vital for business. When these systems become available on regular mobile phones, we’re talking about a new shift to mobility for enterprises.

In Europe, no CRM vendors have a larger installed base of customers than SuperOffice. With 11000 enterprise installations worldwide their position remains unrivaled. For almost twenty years they have been chasing ease of use for their customers, and with their newly launched product SuperOffice Pocket CRM, they set a new standard for accessibility to enterprise systems.

SuperOffice Pocket CRM is built with mBricks. We provide technology for development and operation of mobile applications. With mBricks you develop one application which runs on most handsets available. Our mission is to enable the shift to mobility for enterprise software companies, and you can’t get a better proof of that concept than this week’s launch of SuperOffice Pocket CRM.

Similar to my experience with the Qtek phone years ago, I’m now facing new changes to my way of working. Being a SuperOffice user I have instant access to our CRM system on my mobile phone. I can monitor my colleagues’ sales pipeline, their weighted sales forecast, change meetings and contact details, add pictures from my camera phone, send SMS and e-mail and much more, everything in the same, familiar user interface of SuperOffice I know from my computer. This is the next generation of mobile enterprise services - and I’m using it already.

Svein Therkelsen, mBricks CEO

Press release from SuperOffice and mBricks

Today I am handing over my beloved phone to a colleague. I have had the pleasure of using an Android for some time now, and I must say that I am really happy and impressed by the usability and performance of this phone.

I have done testing and development on the Android to see how it will support mBricks applications. The Java based Android platform is a perfect match for mBricks. The idea is to keep all the business logic, message layer and most of the UI in mBricks, then use Android native API for the functionality that needs higher performance and integration towards the hardware, e.g. web browsing and maps. This will ensure a very cost efficient way of creating high performance applications for Android. My colleague will continue the work with Android and mBricks. I think its going to be a important platform for us.

My new phone is going to be a BlackBerry Bold, not a bad exchange I would say. I think that BlackBerry will get increased marked shares in Norway and with their strong focus and appeal for business users it fits mBricks perfect. I will start porting some of the mBricks applications to the Blackberry platform, I will keep you posted about how development for Blackberry proceeds.

Pål Berg, CTO mBricks

A good friend of mine ask how to include bugfixes in the Scrum sprint, Scrum - the way I like to do it. We have also struggled with this at mBricks, the bugfixes always seems to take attention from the planned tasks since their priority is often valued higher. We have had a couple of strategies to avoid this at mBricks.

First we tried to put one person responsible for bugfixing according to their internal priority. This strategy gets the bugs done without interrupting the sprint, but it is not very including for the person that is responsible for bugfixing, and often also discussions with the rest of the team is needed, which in turn results in unwanted interruption of the sprint.

Then we tried a strategy with defining one sprint to be a bugfixing sprint, but we were not fully satisfied with that either. The bugfix sprint came to seldom for high priority bugs and also we lost progress in new development.

Now we are trying a new strategy, which is to include the bugfixes in the sprint. Actually we do not differ between a bug/issue and other development tasks. They are all priorities according to their value for the end users and of course weight against their required effort.

Our Product Management tools

There is a lot of different tools available for product management. The one that we re using now is JIRA, which is a system for issue tracking and release planning. It can be extended by a well of different plugins and addons. There is two important plugins that we use:

1. Subversion for source control reference
2. GreenHopper for scrum planning

It was important for us not to have to many different systems to maintain. Now everything is nicely integrated and build around the JIRA core.

GreenHopper

GreenHopper is a great tool that gives us the possibility to plan the new releases of mBricks divided into several smaller sprint releases. All the tasks are different issues in JIRA and the workflow is mapped to the Scrum process. The only missing functionality that I see is to flag an impediment for our stakeholders.

This is the planning board:

This is the burndown chart:

The issue mapping and workflow definition:

As I started by saying; we now do not handle the bugs any different than the rest of the tasks in the Scrum. They are all the same in our system.

Pål Berg, CTO mBricks

The Java Verified program is good news for mBricks partners! The program is about testing of Java ME applications and issuing a certificate/signature after successful test. The Java Verified certificate is widely available (as root certificate on mobile devices) and it may be mandatory to use in the Nokia Ovi Store, see Shai’s blog. Signing applications also makes the user experience much better by reducing security prompts.

The Java Verified certificate is thus tempting, but can prove expensive. The developer must pay to have each application build or configuration, know as a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), tested individually. Some applications have many SKUs, see Why 25,000 SKUs is good news

mBricks reduces the cost of Java Verified, each mBricks application only has one SKU that runs on all devices. The differences between devices are handled at run time by the mBricks platform.

This is how the Java Verified program defines testing a single application on multiple devices:

1. Single Application Testing (one jad / jar pair)
a) One SKU targeting one device
• The full test criteria is used for the testing.

b) One SKU targeting multiple lead devices or multiple device groups.
• A full test is only required on one of the targeted lead devices per device platform. The test house will select which lead device to use.
• The SKU must also be tested on the other targeted lead devices in that platform but only with a reduced number of test cases.

So with mBricks you can get a Java Verified certificate with a minimum of cost, just testing the lead devices (alternative b). I will take one of our demo applications through the process. Stay in touch to see my experience.

Pål Berg, CTO mBricks

Earlier this week I presented at the Mobile Payments Conference in London. A range of very different experiences from Visa, MasterCard and Western Union, Gemalto, Payforit and many more left no doubt. Mobile payment is maturing; it’s taken in use in running operations worldwide. At mBricks we advocate secure, user friendly and rich banking and payment applications. For more than four years we have investigated special purpose applications for this kind of services. Early SMS and WAP experiences have paved the way for richer applications with intuitive user interfaces, like the ones built with mBricks. In our latest 2.8-edition payment service providers are able to show their PCI compliant web pages inside a java application on the handset. This makes development of built-in payment services inside the application context easy to do.

At the conference podium, mBricks was the only one to demo live applications from the handset. We’re actively pursuing payment and banking opportunities. Our efforts fit the very obvious trend of mobile applications taking over for more traditional web approaches. Actually, we’re strong believers in user friendly and secure banking and payment services. Maybe you’re a believer too? Maybe we should meet?
Svein Therkelsen, CEO