Everypoint enables apps for mass-market devices

Although application storefronts on high-end feature phones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s G1 have gotten the most attention this year, Everypoint emerged from stealth mode today to bring mobile apps to what it believes to be a huge yet untapped mass market. Through its mobile-specific platform dubbed Nemo, developers can create, distribute and manage mobile apps on consumers existing Java-enabled mobile handsets.

According to Everypoint founder, president and Chief Technology Officer Allan MacKinnon, these devices make up more than 1 billion Internet-enabled mobile phones from manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola. While all the handset vendors are facing struggles ahead, smartphones are no longer top of mind for many cost-conscious consumers opting for low-end handsets instead. The Nemo platform can provide vector graphics and full push-sync capabilities for this range of Java-enabled handsets, mimicking the high-end graphics of the iPhone’s app store, MacKinnon said.

“What’s unique about [Nemo] is it unleashes the power of 90% of the world’s phones,” MacKinnon said. “All these phones out there – the mass-market devices – people have forgotten how powerful they are. What this platform does is bring some very high-quality features to these mass-market devices. Specifically, we have a totally portable, high-performance graphics engine, so the same look and feel you see on the G1 and iPhone, we have an equivalent level of rendering and display for fonts, graphics and general purpose animation and text.”

Nemo also contains infrastructure that MacKinnon said allows developers to immediately develop apps that leverage the Internet through RSS feeds that push out relevant content updates in real time. Only the changes are sent, so the handset is not overwhelmed. The data can then be shared across applications and users. The platform uses a new scripting language on top of the Java device, downloadable over the air to access the presentation layer and the infrastructure layer.

“It lets developers quickly script a high-quality, good-looking app and distribute it to these devices in a sane way, versus the traditional way, which is a very painful process of developing a decent size team, porting to 400 devices, etc.,” MacKinnon said. “The combination of these things is what the Nemo platform is all about – unleashing the capability of devices that are out there today and shipping in great quantities tomorrow.”