During the weekend I was browsing the internet, just to look for some stuff around Microsoft mobile story, and while doing that, I spotted Evan Williams' blog, where he writes about Ten Rules for Web Startups. When I was reading it, I actually realized, these rules apply for mobile(and perhaps many other consumer oriented) startups as well. Let me take the rules and comment them from the mobile perspective:

#1: Be Narrow - definitely true for all startups and even all projects - it is much better to focus on a narrow area and do it right, than try to save the world and very likely fail.

#2: Be Different - your application have to attract the users. They need to talk about it and everybody have to download it, jut to try it out. This drives the volume, which is the only way how to succeed in the mobile world.

#3: Be Causal - this is even more important for mobile startups - a lot of the business in mobile space is driven by things like ring tones, wall papers and recently also Java ME games - all of this is quite causal stuff. Mobile applications have to be causal in the first place - users have to feel good when using them.

#4: Be Picky - being picky on features is very important - mobile applications cannot be overengineered - its much better to make one feature perfect than several of them hard to use - nobody would use such application.

#5: Be User-Centric - mobile world is completely different from the computers world. Many people does not know how to operate computer, but they own a mobile phone and would like to use it. The mobile applications should be usable enough, so even such people can use them (you want them as customers, right?).

#6: Be Self-Centered - a perfect thing about mobile applications is the fact they are often being created as a painkiller for your own problems. For example these days I'm trying to find a good solution which will be able to synchronize calendar and task list on my phone with my desktop computer. Unfortunately I'm not using Microsoft Outlook and all other solution somehow do not work for me - it looks like I'm going create my own solution, which in the future could help other people as well.

#7: Be Greedy - definitely true for mobile applications - its always a good business model to offer the application for free and charge for additional services coming with it.

#8: Be Tiny - most of the companies doing mobile applications I had a chance to meet were started as a quite small projects of two or three people, usually without office, doing most of their communication over the internet and outsourcing many tasks (e.g. web design, graphics design) to other, similar in size, startups. This works even when dealing with device fragmentation problems - there are actually companies specializing in porting application to devices - so you can still design and develop application in a small team and then let the other guys to port the application to all required devices.

#9: Be Agile - As new devices with new capabilities coming to the market, the potential for the application is changing rapidly - I dare to say even more rapidly than the internet where the situation on the browser side is rather static these days. In the next year a lot of devices with Location API (JSR-179), SVG (JSR-228) or Payment API (JSR-239) is going to appear on the market and if you want to succeed, you need to be one of the first utilizing these APIs in your applications. And there are many more such APIs - Mobile Service Architecture (JSR 248 for CLDC or 249 for CDC) is defining 14 such APIs and many others are coming. You definitely need to watch the market and change your plans when needed.

#10: Be Balanced - this is more than truth, but I bet you already know that. Actually this blog is one of the things which helps me being balanced .