Interview with Snaptu

Well its interview time again and this time I bring to you one of the brains behind Snaptu, which is by far one of my favorite applications. I’ve had the pleasure of communicating back and forth with Simon and I must say he’s one funny guy. Without further ado, I present to you Simon Davies

Hello and welcome to NokiaMobileTalk its great having you here.

My pleasure, and thanks for tweeting me the invitation (and doing it from Snaptu, very diplomatic!)

Tell us a little bit about your background and what lead you to get involved with Snaptu?

Well, I used to be in tech venture capital in the run up to the dotcom boom and out the other side. We floated the company and one morning I woke up and I was rich!! The next day the markets tanked and it was back to bread and water; car brochures in the bin. I’ve since been in operational management, most recently in the area of ‘virtual application’ provision across corporate networks; the same technical principle behind Snaptu’s consumer service.

How did I get involved in Snaptu; the best way… I went to a party. Actually it was a barbecue in August 2007 held by a rowdy bunch of Amazon employees. I ended up in a fascinating conversation with a guy called Ran Makavy who said he could make an iPhone like application experience that would work on absolutely any phone, with no bespoke device optimisation work required. One of my VC portfolio companies had tried and failed to achieve this back in the late ’90’s, so I was very impressed when by December he’d done it. By February I was on board.

Can you introduce your Team and give an overview of your overall news aggregation habits?

Sure. While Ran and I were chewing on burnt chicken wings, there were three other great guys working on the concept; Lior Tal, Barak Naveh and Micha Berdichevsky. Between them they cover legal (patents), business development and amazing software and communications technology skills. Anecdotally I will tell you that in their mysterious pasts they have designed SMS systems for military jets (sounds crazy, I know), flight simulation systems and mobile IM. Ran was part of mobile IM company Followap that sold to Neustar for $139m in 2006.

News aggregation habits? Well you’ll forgive me for plugging the Newsreader app on Snaptu here. Basically it has a fairly extensive feed catalog, or you can just enter a url. But the best thing is a Google Reader import feature; so I pressed one button to pull in my top ones (All About Symbian, Best of Symbian, CNET, Engadget Mobile, Into Mobile (did you read Stefan Constantinescu’s return piece!!),  Mashable!, Mobile Entertainment, mocoNews.net, Techcrunch… and of course Nokia Mobile Talk, which is in our catalog btw). I generally read all these from my Nokia 5800 when I’m in bed, at the airport or generally having to wait around. Anything I like I hit the tweet button.

My antidote to all this industry stuff is the blog of a friend who is travelling the world for an undefined period (www.luddo.net), and also the blog of one of our Snaptu fans, “The Longest Way Home”. He’s been travelling for four years looking for a place to settle. Last post was about eating pig faces in the Philippines! He’s great for a chat on Twitter (TLWH).

What are your favorite Symbian applications? Can you list your top 5 and why you like them?

I can honestly say that 90% of what I need is on Snaptu (Twitter, Facebook, News, cricket, soccer, pub guide, movie reviews, Google Calendar and Picasa, Sudoku, Accuweather…). The one thing I really use outside these are GPS enabled map apps; Google Maps or Nokia’s pre-installed Navteq; I’m not fussy which.

What can we expect from Snaptu in the future?
One of the key strengths of Snaptu is that all the applications actually run on central servers. This means we can (and will) add new applications and features, improve look and feel and present all this to the user without any action on their part whatsoever. In the next few days we’ll be seeing some new Twitter features which will all appear “as if by magic”.

What else will you see? We’re getting some serious sounding enquiries from network operators from all over the planet, so I expect to see some of them offering a pre-installed white label version at some point. What they particularly like is the consistency in speed and user experience we give from a smartphone down to an old S40 “dumb” 2G device, and also the fact we can design and launch applications very quickly. Snaptu as a platform is a market/marketing led organisation’s dream.

Which Nokia phones have you used in the past and which one/s are you currently using?
My main phone is the 5800, which I’m really pleased with. Sometimes it flips into landscape when I’m least expecting it and I have to ‘flick’ it to get it back to portrait. In my drawer I have an N73 and going way back I fondly remember what I called the ‘banana phone’. Was it the 8110? My first phone I remember was the 2110. If you look on GSM Arena it’s the very last Nokia phone listed. It was THE only phone to have in those days. Life was so simple!

What are your two favorite Nokia smartphone of all time and which Nokia smartphone are you looking forward to use.

The 5800 has been a lot of fun, but I think rather than the N97 I would like a turn with the E72. At the end of the day emails are the main order of the day (and tweeting now), so a full qwerty job, and no need to rotate the phone sounds good.

Mac or PC what kind off guy are you?

The PC has always been the workhorse of any job I’ve had. But I will confess to trying to write a space invader game in Assembly Language for the Apple II!

What is your favorite color, movie, music band, and sport?

Navy Blue, Little Miss Sunshine made me laugh most recently, still searching and cricket. Before my two little kids came along I was big into paragliding, going as far as living in Chamonix in the shadow of Mont Blanc for a wild year!

Thank you so much for joining our club, I really really enjoyed this one and I look forward to the continued development of one of my favorite applications – Snaptu

To download Snaptu just point your browser to http://m.snaptu.com and prepare to enjoy the ride

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