Some time ago, I discovered an interesting company with unorthodox approach to mobile application development. I’m talking about Funambol, the world’s leading mobile open source company, which was started four years ago from what was then the sync4j open source project.
Funambol offers a SyncML-based mobile application server that provides push email, multimaster PIM synchronization, and management facilities for mobile devices. The company’s solution is also an open source development platform for building and deploying a large variety of mobile applications.
Two major benefits of the open source solution – customization and lower costs are certainly among the top reasons why Funambol’s solution has been downloaded more than any other wireless middleware product – 750,000+ times. The commercial version has been deployed at wireless carriers, Global 1000 enterprises, hardware OEMs/ODMs and ISVs including customers such as Computer Associates.
Funambol is headquartered in Redwood City, California with a development center in Italy. The company has raised $5M in venture funding from top-tier venture firms.