Zoom zoom—on your Windows Mobile phone of course. That’s what you can now do with the Zumobi application. Founded in 2006, Zumobi has developed an entirely new way to experience the web-based content on your phone. Its patented Zooming User Interface was initially developed by the Microsoft Research lab, incubated as part of Microsoft IP Ventures, and then spun out as a startup company focused on mobile device content. In mid-December, the company launched the beta version of its award-winning Zooming User Interface and mobile widget platform. It also debuted content from more than 75 mobile widgets or Tiles, including many from Zumobi Beta partners such as Amazon.com, MTV Networks, The Associated Press, AccuWeather.com, Traffic.com, FlightStats.com and OTOlabs, who developed Tiles for Vail Resorts and Fox Television’s “Family Guy."

Here’s our conversation with Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Jim Cooley.

Microsoft Startup Zone: We understand that your company was the result of more than three years of development by experts in human-computer interaction and data visualization, but why did you first choose the Microsoft platform?

Jim Cooley: In our case, we already had some technology we licensed from Microsoft that was on the Microsoft platform. So I was looking at it from the start, definitely in devices. The Microsoft platform has a lot of advantages—such as the tools, and the authoring and debugging process over J2ME and other platforms. Years ago, I used to work in the developer tools division at Microsoft so had experience and familiarity with Microsoft.

MSUZ: What one MSFT technology is most critical to your business model/success, and why?

Cooley: I’d say the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework. One of the key advantages for us was that the compact framework was so close to the .NET Framework for the desktop that we could run our same code on both the device and the desktop. This allowed us to solve probably 80 to 90 percent of the problems in the desktop environment with richer debugging tools and faster processors. And that experience translated very well to devices.

For us, definitely .NET is huge. The developer tools themselves, such as Visual Studio were fantastic too. It’s much better than Eclipse or any of the other debugging environments.

MSUZ: In what way was Visual Studio better, can you elaborate?

Cooley: It was easier to use and set up, and more reliable. A lot of other solutions, especially the open source ones, are really good at one or two things, and then for other things they are just average. But Visual Studio products seem to be really good ALL across the board.

MSUZ: What have been the key benefits of using Microsoft technologies?

Cooley: It definitely helped us get to market faster. I mean, I didn’t do both approaches, so I can’t say how much faster, but my gut feel is that we probably saved at least three months on the development cycle.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support/want to integrate/use in the future, and why?

Cooley: We plan to look at Silverlight. Rendering is really core to our user interface and our experience, so we’re always looking at high-performance rendering. Of course, Direct X and Direct Show, both of those are really interesting technologies to us as well. But Silverlight is interesting because of its high-end rendering engine and scripting platform that is similar to Flash.

MSUZ: If you had to do it over again now, would you still pick Microsoft as a platform for you solution?

Cooley: That’s a tough question. I would definitely include it in the family. Unfortunately, in the mobile marketplace J2ME has broader reach. And so we probably would have started first on J2ME, but we’d definitely do Windows Mobile. We’ve found also with Windows Mobile that it’s more consistent across operating system versions and handsets. With J2ME, there are probably seven or eight primary variants based on OEMs. From that, each phone model is different and has to go through a different debugging cycle.

With Windows Mobile, we wrote for Compact Framework 1.1, that works on Compact Framework 2.0, it works on Windows Mobile 5.0 and it works on Windows Mobile 6.0. So that was just really amazing. Of course there are some minor differences, but it’s nowhere near the same issue.

MSUZ: Anything you’d like to see Microsoft do that we are not doing?

Cooley: We understand that Microsoft is stopping support for Visual J#. We think that’s unfortunate since it is so close to Java, that it would be theoretically possible to write in J# for Windows Mobile and J2ME and use the same code base. That would help porting immensely. 
 

Jim Cooley's Background

Prior to joining Zumobi, Cooley was a member of the Microsoft Intellectual Property Ventures team, where he evaluated Microsoft technologies and helped start-up companies deploy them. He spent more than 11 years in a variety of senior technical roles at Microsoft, most recently as Product Unit Manager in the Windows New Business and Products Group. He held technical leadership roles in many embedded and media projects including Windows CE 1.0, the Digital Memory Project and Services for Smart Personal Object (SPOT) devices. Prior to joining Microsoft, Cooley held senior technical positions at Aldus, Microrim and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

For more information, read the success story: "Zumobi ‘Zooms’ In On Mobile Experiences."