iPhone rival gets $20 million in VC funding

I think they should be as Apple only enters a market when they are prepared to go all or nothing and have been unstoppable in recent years. Competition should be scared in the short term, but in the long term this will be better for consumers.

More on what Apple should do with iWeb and .Mac to further iPhones dominance on my blog, if you care for the read.

Richard

http://RichGetz.com

It is just dreadful what Apple did to music - they made the process too easy and put the consumer first. How dare they do that! What would really move the industry forward is if everyone on mobile phones was limited to the microscopic mobile web and WAP/WML. (I am being sarcastic, of course)

How dare you provide a usable product where no one else was much more than vaguely competent!

What horrors await us from this mighty behemoth? The Apple iNternet® ?!!!?! :P

What a sad waste of VC. Action Engine. Making the web safe to charge you even more money for stuff you already have access to.

What they don't get is that throwing money at something doesn't create an amazing product that just works. Look at Microsoft.

It's about passion, amazing creativity, and interoperability.

...for these guys from Action Engine -- essentially, they created a company with the sole goal of being bought out by competitors that are scared of the iPhone.

Brilliant insofar that they just need to create enough hype to be bought out, and then never have to do anything else -- since in most of these cases, the giants buying them screws up the whole model anyway, lets it languish, and then buries it to hide their failures -- on that note, Google won't be buying them, but more than likely Yahoo or Microsoft.

No idea why the moron editors from MacNN refer to this venture as a 'rival' seeing as how the venture has nothing to do with a competing phone, or service -- more likely a service to provide mobile enabled websites that work on other phones.

they developed a portal product for portable devices and this is supposed to rival the iphone? don't make me laugh. an okay portal on a crappy cell phone is still a crappy cell phone. besides, just how is apple cornering anything by offering the world standard internet access? the internet is an open platform, right?

The world sits with its collective thumbs in its butt,THEN, ahoy!!! Apple thinks up a great idea. Rush to market by competitors that actually cannot even imagine where Apple is going with its products, so they end up up fu##ed!! And, so it should be, because if you are going to compete you should go one, or two, better and not simply make a loathsome 3rd rate copy.

Their goal, so clearly enunciated, is to be taken over. Product quality and innovation are simply side-effects! May they fail! Competition is about raising the bar-- not burying the living!!!

Seriously, can one of the moronic "editors" of MacNN please post here a description of the thought process that led to describing this bundle of glorified web design house, press releases and "strategic partnerships" as an iPhone rival?

Last I checked, the iPhone is a combination of hardware, operating system and applications. One of those applications renders the web "as is", making this type of software/service unnecessary.

If the "editors" of this site aren't even going to read the articles they link to, might I suggest you change the title of this article to "Hucksters in dying market grasp at one last straw by working 'iPhone' into press release"

I'm glad MacNN posts this stuff. No matter how moronic the content, I want to know what others are doing—stupid or not.

These guys are using golden gloves to grab at straws. Eventually, it may pay off for them (as the non AT&T market is still a lot of straws).

What they are depending upon, is that a lot of other companies (Motorola) will be building a phone that can do "some" of the stuff the iPhone can. But they still need the infrastructure to handle the cool interoperability. Keep in mind, the iPhone wouldn't be nearly as cool as it is if AT&T didn't do their part.

This idea is just trying to do what Microsoft did many years ago, make an open standard so all the phones can do this stuff and the hardware makers (or the phone companies) don't have to worry about this. We'll just take our cut.

That's where I don't think it will be as successful. Minutes are minutes and people only want to pay so much for them. Once again, Jobs gets it right. Low,easy pricing, all inclusive. That alone destroys the competition.