My New Year's Resolution: A Home in Silicon Valley

A year ago, we announced that we were moving our headquarters to Atlanta. We hired people and set up an office there - yet here we are now in Silicon Valley. Some of you may wonder: Why have people like myself and my family, Darren Dunn and Ian Berman moved their offices here?

The answer is that once moving became a reality, I realized it couldn’t be any other way. This is the place to be, the place that is critical for our future as a company.

WorldMate is a company with a unique heritage: We began as a bootstrap ten years ago, and were creating the earliest and best mobile apps back when they were still called “PDA Applications.” We recognized the particular needs of business and executive travelers, and the necessity of merging the “fixed” and “mobile” internet.

That is our past and present. Our future is in Silicon Valley, which is special in two important ways.

The first is very simple: When the best people in the industry gather in one place, that place will become the best. When I’m in a café in the Bay Area I see, within minutes, executives from Google, Apple, Yahoo! and others passing by. Even key people who aren’t based here are constantly traveling here, and the result is that Silicon Valley is a hotbed of innovation. The best ideas start here. And the trends are set here. When you're here – you see the waves as they start rising, not when they crash onto the beach.

One example is the iPhone: We had 8 years of experience and we've seen mobile platforms come and go--Palm OS, Windows CE and Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME…We've seen them all rise, and sometimes also fall. When the iPhone was released we looked at it from a technological perspective, seeing it as an evolutionary improvement of existing technology. Touch screen? We've seen that. GPRS phone with some music and app capabilities? We know dozens of those – and not from Apple, a company with no track record in the cellular market.

Because we were not in Silicon Valley at the time, we didn’t realize what a marketing phenomenon the iPhone would become. As a result we entered the market late, losing the "top iPhone travel app" space which we held on Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile to cheap copycats. Had we been in the Bay Area then, we'd have moved early, an imperative for success given the iTunes App Store dynamics.

Silicon Valley is also special in that the products that come from here are the ones that tend to succeed. This tight-knit community gives preference to its own products and helps them succeed—and as we’ve seen, when you succeed in Silicon Valley, it easily becomes a trend that spreads rapidly to the rest of the world.

One example is the Android operating system, which was conceived as one of the leaders in the market long before it had real commercial traction on actual devices in consumers' hands, while systems from companies who sold hundreds of millions of phones (e.g. Nokia's Symbian) or have at least the same penetration in the OS space as Google (remember Microsoft) were already considered irrelevant – at least by app developers.  Yet there is no clear technological reason to say that one platform is superior to the other, no strong business indicator that one system will succeed while the other will fail—in fact it’s the other way around – unless you consider this "PR momentum". Google's ability to attract the local developer community and the local blogger community and impress upon them that through them Android will be a success, almost by definition caused Android to be a success before it was even available in the market. At the same time it caused the competitors to lose ground and be seen as a thing of the past.

Tripit is another example, and closer to home: A web app that mimics ours and is in many ways inferior caught on because of the influence of local media and bloggers, and the local buzz radiated outward to the national market.

So where do we go from here? We intend to embrace the culture and values, to immerse ourselves in the local dynamism and improve our product and our standing as much as we can. The brand new web app we've just released is an example of our commitment to the web as our next platform for innovation and growth. We are already forging new relationships to enhance the product and distribution, but the most important thing is that now we are part of the vibe, we are listening, and we will move quickly with it.

Comments

[custom shirts]

Silicon Valley is a finance center and is highly developed,it is reasonable that you and your family and your office moved to there to work.Good action.

[Carlos]

Just a comment.
It happen I do have to use two blackberries, one for the Us and the Other one when travelling in Latam.
Please let me know when instead of having two different Accounts with you I could have only one.
Carlos Naibryf

[DHD]

So, are you or are you not going to make WorldMate available on Android? You mention the platform almost as if it's a joke. I really urge you to release WorldMate on Android. WM is such an outstanding product. I have TripIt which is indeed inferior. VERY inferior. But it's available on Android. Could you please at least let us know 1) if you are planning an Android release, and if so, 2) what the timeline is?

Android is not a gimmick. It is not going away. And besides, I NEED WORLDMATE!! :) Chutzpah? No, just the truth. :) Please expand your customer base to Android!! Thanks!!

DHD

[Nadav Gur]

I believe we've already stated that Android is coming. We can't say more. Yet.

[Stephen Rouse]

I have to agree with DHD. I decided to leave Blackberry after multiple battery incidents which burned me, and now have an HTC android phone. Tripit simply does not suffice. I was a WorldMate Pro user for a long time, and miss it horribly. Is this in the works???

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[home business opportunities]

I guess you've learned a lesson of striking while the iron is hot. In order to take advantage to what is in is to ride on with it and never let yourself be involve late like you did in iphone.

You are right a place would become special if people there, are special. Therefore, it's the people that makes a place beautiful and a place to stay in.

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[home builders]

I'm guessing you're a techie person too. We share the same dream. I have been looking for home builders in the area. Unfortunately, I'm not having any luck.

[home builders]

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[jaydrawmer]

Big Rons X rated commentary a few years back was hilarious, with of course Richard Keyes and Andy Grays bonus commentary, more recently, had me in stitches. I just wish there was a lot more gaffes like that, pure and unrehearsed comedy.

[leisia]

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