Hi All,

I see a lot of discussion regarding relation between Empower and Mobylo. I could not post this earlier as I had to get some clearence from Mobylo ppl.

I guess everyone knows by now that Empower is a development effort by a group of university students. We learnt our bb programming at sessions conducted by Mobylo, which happens to be a hot startup by an alumni and is incubated within the same campus. Hope this clarifies the relation.

We started Empower project with a dream. A dream to create software that can replace the stone age software that come preloaded on blackberry. And keep it free. forever. As soon as we come out and offer our free product, we find strange things happening.

People ridicule us by saying things like "they are a bunch of kids", "if you use their software, who will support it", and "see where you put your money'?

People compared feature by feature an alpha version of our free product with the final version of paid product and suggested why buying that product is a better decision.

I could not understand why people would pay for something when they can get it for free. But we were stepping on someone's chances of becoming a millionaire.

I can now understand all that has happened, in retrospect.

With all this happening, we felt that a free Empower will not go anywhere, and we finally gave in to Misha's pestering about making it commercial. If people want to pay for software, so be it. But now our offer to give out free licenses seems to have gotton on someone's nerves. I guess they are viewing it in the wrong light. Empower will only be free for the first 10,000 users and not everyone. This should be a cause for them to cheer up and not feel threatened.

At this moment, I feel very lonely. Mobylo ppl are upset with us for creating this mess which is hurting their image. And whatever support I had on BBF would have been taken away by some vocal people who care so much for products they own and like, that they can't see anyone else bring out a similiar product.

As the day dawns on Monday, we will start working on the final version. And we will keep our promise of giving a free license to everyone on BBF who cares for our software.

Lastly, the Empower dream is older than what some people think. Please read the following dated 2nd March, 2007.

http://www.blackberryforums.com/afte...tml#post468451

Thank you all.
Ani.