Purple Software Ltd, fresh from scoring $816,000 in institutional funding, is looking to capitalize on the buzz surrounding the wireless operating system championed by Symbian Consortium, by becoming what its chairman calls a general EPOC development resource. The London, UK-based handheld software developer is spending its funding on a research and development center which will be focused, although not exclusively so, on developing a broad range of applications for the Symbian Consortium. The company is currently looking to hire more developers to help with its efforts.
Julian Swallow, marketing director and chairman of the board, said EPOC, the Symbian operating system, backed by Psion Plc, LM Ericsson AB, Nokia Oy, Motorola Inc and now, Matsushita Industrial Co, will be become the major operating system in the small wireless device arena. Swallow claims that it will be close to impossible for rivals such as Microsoft and Palm Computing to catch up with the work that Symbian and Psion have done on optimizing the OS specifically for small wireless communications devices. He also highlights the issue of licensing costs. In the mobile device arena, a few dollars either way can mean that a manufacturer will go with another OS. Symbian is charging $5 a license to use EPOC. Nobody’s quite sure what Microsoft is charging, Swallow says, but he thinks it is likely to be in the $10 to $20 region. Purple is currently developing its PowerBase relational database and middleware for the Symbian platform
Swallow says that the firm is testing Palm software now and plans to announce Palm products in New York next month that will be on the streets in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Purple is hoping to expand presence on the ground in the US but Swallow thinks that the company can successfully compete from its London base through internet sales. He points out that Palmpilot users are accustomed to buying products for the platform from the web.
According to Swallow, Purple was in profit only a few months after it started in 1995. He admitted that the privately-held company had a more difficult time last year, because sales of the EPOC-based Psion Organizers, Purple’s current core market, fell.
