Mobile application development pioneer, Cascada Mobile, today announced iPhone and Android support for its popular Breeze mobile development platform, adding to its existing support for BlackBerry and Nokia smartphones. Now developers and publishers can use the Breeze Platform to easily create and distribute rich mobile applications that work on billions of mobile phones around the world, including iPhones and Android handsets, without having to rewrite their apps for each individual platform.
Cascada Mobile today announced a partnership with Polar Mobile to utilize Cascada’s Breeze mobile development platform to quickly and easily extend the reach of Polar Mobile’s platform beyond smart phones to Java-based mobile phones. The first Breeze-built mobile app will be for The Hockey News, a leading hockey publication.
Award Recognizes the Country’s Most Promising and Innovative Technology Companies
MONT-TREMBLANT, QUEBEC and TORONTO, ONTARIO – September 23, 2008
Cascada Mobile (www.cascadamobile.com) announced it has won the Red Herring Canada Top 50 Award
The Red Herring Canada Top 50 Award honors the fifty most innovative and promising private technology companies in the country.
Cascada Mobile was recognized for their innovation and development of the Breeze mobile application development platform, the simplest way to create, test and distribute mobile applications.
With Cascada Mobile’s Breeze platform, developers can create mobile apps in as little as 15-minutes that can take full advantage of the functions and features of mobile phones and smartphones – from the address book and camera to the BlackBerry’s scroll ball.
Breeze-built mobile applications are tested and ported to operate on hundreds of different device makes and models as well as hundreds of networks around the globe, making Breeze-created applications available and ready to run on well over a billion phones worldwide.
Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated the nominees on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem.
This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.
“Cascada Mobile’s innovation is its development platform which levels the playing field for content owners and developers with web skills to harness the enormous market potential for mobile applications that serve the 2 billion plus Java-based mobile phones already in use today around the world. The business opportunity for Cascada Mobile’s development platform, Breeze, and its mobile application portal, BreezeApps.com, coupled with the company’s management and execution of strategy impressed our panel of judges and made Cascada Mobile a clear choice for the Red Herring Top 50 award.”
Alan Lysne, CEO of Cascada Mobile
“As we’ve seen with Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, consumers worldwide want useful and engaging off-deck mobile applications for their phones, as long as there is a clear way to get the application on the device. Cascada Mobile enables developers with the most basic Web development skills to create, test, and distribute feature-rich mobile applications that work on the more than 2 billion Java enabled mobile phones in the market today. Breeze bridges the extensive gap between web and mobile application development and is delivering to consumers the fun and practical mobile apps they are seeking for the mobile phones they already own.”
About Cascada Mobile
Cascada Mobile offers the simplest method for creating and distributing mobile applications for the more than 2 billion mobile phones in use around the world. Cascada Mobile’s Breeze platform eliminates the enormous complexities of writing and distributing mobile applications to run on hundreds of different handset models and across more than 100 wireless operators worldwide. For more information on Cascada Mobile, the Breeze Platform, and the BreezeApps Store, please visit www.cascadamobile.com.
About Red Herring Canada
Red Herring Canada 2008 is an exclusive event, welcoming hundreds of technology leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, senior corporate executives, businesses, industry analysts, and observers from Canada and around the world.
About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology newsletters, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.
New mobile application development and distribution platform makes it easy for almost anyone to create, test and distribute mobile applications
TORONTO, ONT. – June 30, 2008
WHAT IS BEING ANNOUNCED:
Cascada Mobile (www.cascadamobile.com) announced today Breeze, a new development platform that can transform ideas into globally distributed mobile applications in as little as fifteen minutes.
There are more than 2 billion mobile phones already in use around the world.
Cascada’s Breeze platform provides anyone with knowledge of even the most basic Web programming languages the easiest method for creating, testing and distributing mobile applications to phones anywhere in the world.
Breeze-created applications are subsidized by mobile advertisements making the service free for anyone to use.
WHAT IS THE MOBILE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE:
Unlike the “write once, run anywhere” world of Web programming, where a single set of code can work universally on any computer, operating system and Web browser, mobile application development is fraught with complexities.
Mobile phones can have different screen sizes, button and keyboard configurations, and other features that impact how a mobile application runs.
Despite the fact that J2ME, the mobile version of the Java programming language, is supported on billions of phones in the market today, an application that runs on one phone may not work on hundreds of other phone models, even if those phones are similar in design or come from the same manufacturer.
To ensure that an application works on all handset makes and models, it must be tested.
The daunting task of testing applications on hundreds of different phones by itself puts mobile development out of reach for a great many developers.
Beyond the testing, global application distribution requires dealing with more than 100 different wireless carriers and network operators.
HOW BREEZE SOLVES THE MOBILE DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE:
The Breeze platform takes code written in HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and automatically converts it into J2ME code, also known as the Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME.
As a result, any Breeze created application can run on hundreds of different mobile phone types.
Breeze enables Web programmers unaccustomed to mobile development to add important functions that don’t exist on the Web, such as using the built-in camera, accessing the contact list or even adding an exit button for their applications.
Once the HTML and JavaScript is compiled into J2ME, Breeze produces a mobile application that can be distributed to phones anywhere in the world, and will automatically detect the correct version to send to a phone.
Developers receive a simple line of code they can embed onto their websites, blogs or social network pages allowing people to download their new application directly to their phone over their wireless service provider’s network.
The Breeze platform reduces the testing of mobile applications for hundreds of different handsets down to a single run on the Breeze Simulator.
Developers receive a simple line of code they can put on their websites, blogs or social network pages allowing people to download the application merely by entering their mobile number.
Breeze also takes care of distribution via SMS, WAP Push and direct download from a mobile phone, ensuring the right version of the application is sent to each end user’s phone.
WHAT BREEZE CAN CREATE:
Breeze offers developers the ability to create fully integrated mobile applications, and not merely mobile “widgets.”
Increasingly common, mobile widgets are small applications that usually require a separate widget container to be installed on your phone, in addition to each widget.
With Breeze, the result is a standalone application that installs on a phone with its own icon.
Breeze gives developers a full range of HTML, JavaScript and CSS capabilities, plus the ability to take full advantage of the features on mobile phones, such as built in cameras or contact lists.
The only limitations are imagination and the capabilities of mobile phones.
WHAT ELSE:
During Cascada’s three month closed beta, developers used the Breeze platform to easily create applications from Tile Puzzles to Image Slideshows and News Readers.
With today’s announcement, Breeze is now available to anyone who wants to create applications for mobile phones.
The Breeze platform is free for any developer or programmer to use to create and distribute their mobile applications.
To subsidize the cost of distribution, Cascada Mobile ad-enables each application.
End users of Breeze-created applications will see mobile ads while using the applications.
Options are available for developers who wish to pay for their use of the Breeze platform in order to offer ad-free applications to end users.
Craig Mathias, a principal with the wireless and mobile advisory firm Farpoint Group (Ashland, MA)
“The mobile handset is very clearly the critical application platform going forward. But building mobile applications has traditionally been difficult and expensive due to complex programming environments and the wide diversity of handsets and mobile platforms. Cascada Mobile’s new Breeze Platform enables anyone with knowledge of Web programming to build mobile applications quickly and inexpensively, and equally important, to distribute these apps to a broad range of handsets easily and efficiently.”
Alan Lysne, CEO of Cascada Mobile
“By removing the complexities inherent in mobile application development, we believe we’re going to see a new era in mobile application innovation as the mobile platform becomes available to literally millions more developers. Now that we’ve simplified the creation, testing and distribution of mobile applications, we expect to see evolution in the mobile arena akin to the evolution on the Internet that became Web 2.0.”
About Cascada Mobile
Cascada Mobile offers the simplest method for creating and distributing mobile applications for the more than 2 billion mobile phones in use around the world. Cascada Mobile’s Breeze platform eliminates the enormous complexities of writing mobile applications in J2ME – the most widely used mobile platform, now known as Java ME – and provides a one-stop-shop for mobilizing applications to run on hundreds of different handset models and distributing them across of wireless operators worldwide. Using basic HTML and JavaScript, any Web savvy individual can create rich J2ME applications though Breeze. For more information on Cascada Mobile and the Breeze Platform please visit www.cascadamobile.com.
