In the next few weeks, you’ll notice yet another new advertiser here at Symbian-Guru.com, SBSH Mobile Software. You probably know them as the Calendar company, but they also just released their first S60 game, called LuckyCoins, and they’ve also recently launched a security suite called SafeWallet Pro. We’re excited to have them on as advertisers, and wanted to take a minute to introduce them to you, our readers. We caught up with Amit Regev, the CEO of SBSH, to get an idea of who they are:
Q.SBSH is pretty new to the S60 market. Can you give our readers a short overview about the company?
A. SBSH started 6 years ago with its first application that was designed for Windows Mobile devices called Calendar Plus, which was later renamed to PocketBreeze. At the first days I was working alone and SBSH was only a side project.
Today our team constructs of 12 developers along with 6 team members in charge of important surrounding activities such as support, product design and making sure our users are up to date with all of our latest news and releases.
Q. How about some details about your S60 division activity up to date?
A. About two years after I started working on the “SBSH-Project” (back then), we released our very first application for S60 devices called: SBSH Papyrus, which was recently renamed to SBSH Calendar. SBSH Papyrus was our first footprint in the S60 market offering a robust Personal Information Manager for Nokia phone users.
From that initial release of SBSH Calendar, our S60 activity was almost on hold up until recently, and most of our activity included new updates for SBSH Calendar, but without new applications or special activities for our S60/Nokia users.
Starting Q4 of 2008, our S60 development shifted to higher gear and we started working on several great new applications for the S60 market, with the recently new release of SafeWallet as our second application for S60 devices and three(!) additional new applications and games just around the corner, all planned for release within Q1 2009.
Q. We would love to hear some more about your upcoming plans and developments for S60 phones. Any details about upcoming developments you can share with us at this point?
A.As hinted above,some exciting news is arriving for the Q1 2009. Following the recent release of SafeWallet Pro a few weeks ago, we have introduced our very first game for S60 devices: SBSH LuckyCoins.
LuckyCoins offers mind and speed challenges and is highly addictive, so users might want to be careful before loading it on their Nokia phone ;) LuckyCoins release is planned during January 2009 so there’s a good chance it will be already released at the time this interview gets posted.
Towards the beginning of February we plan to announce a new exciting productivity application. Unfortunately I still can’t disclose too much about this upcoming application, but I can state that this application will offer a robust reminders solution which will replace the built-in reminders and snoozing mechanism shipped with Nokia phones with a much more powerful solution! We’ve received many requests from our users looking for such solution over the past few months and I’m positive this will become one of those must-have apps for any Nokia phone owner.
Getting closer to the end of the Q1 2009 we plan to introduce our fourth productivity application for S60. This project is especially exciting and involves joint work with one of the major Windows Mobile players. We are working together to introduce a port for one of the most exciting utilities available in the Windows Mobile market today, such that will allow users who move between the different platforms to continue using the same utility with any of their Smartphone devices! Since this project is still in early stages I’m afraid I still can’t disclose much more details, but I’ll be glad to come back for a follow-up interview in two months from now with much more details!
Q. Can you try and define the “SBSH Vision”, or give some overview of the company main goals?
A.Our first short term goal is to increase competition in the S60 software market. Up to date the S60 software market is controlled mainly by one major company and the direct result is over-priced applications for S60 users. We hope that during 2009 we will manage to introduce some new key-point applications to the market that will be decently priced, similar to our pricing model up until today. The direct result of this increased competition will of course effect our competition too and will play directly to the hands of users.
We hope that users will see our upcoming developments in a similar way and together we will be able to enforce some more competition in this market, which is mainly ruled by the activities and developments for one company up to date.
At the same time we plan to continue focusing our efforts on our support team, doing our utmost to deliver the best level of support for our users, both through our email support and our online forums community where users are invited to post questions, bug reports or feature requests directly to our developers! Users can find our forums at: http://forums.sbsh.net
Q. What is your every-day phone?
A. I usually try to switch between several phones from different platforms to stay familiar with all new innovations on the different platforms. This helps me review in an every day usage the offerings of each of the platforms and see where we can introduce new helpful solutions for the different platforms.
My current S60 phone is the Nokia E71. The E71 delivers great business experience and packed with the BlackBerry style I’m so familiar with. I’m using it along with our latest SafeWallet Pro on my PC and E71 several times a day and I just love the user-experience with this phone. Design-wise the phone is really chic and fun to use!
This phone increases my confidence with Nokia’s development direction. It will be interesting to see the upcoming new innovations from this major player!
Q. Where do you see SBSH in five years from now?
A. 5 years from now, SBSH will offer a much larger catalog of high-quality applications wrapped with our topnotch support division.
We will offer several new innovative services, which are one of our new main focus areas these days, due to yield initial results towards already at the end of 2009.
Users who will visit our web-site will find various high quality applications for any Smartphone platform with multiple offerings for different categories, including our current productivity focus, more focus on games and much more!
Q. Anything else you would like to add?
I would like to thank you for this great opportunity to bring the S60 community and Symbian-Guru readers just a bit more details about our work and upcoming activities! Of course we invite all S60 users to check our applications at our web-site: http://www.sbsh.net.
Thanks Amit, for taking the time to share with us, and for being an advertiser here at Symbian-Guru.com! Readers, you can check out SBSH’s apps in the Symbian-Guru Store, or cruise on over to SBSH.net to check out their own site.
