BlackBerryInsight

Continuing with our series of interviews with the CEOs of various BlackBerry software companies, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Keith Pichelman, the CEO and Co-Founder of Concrete Software, to get his insights on the BlackBerry industry.

Concrete Software is a content provider of award-winning, innovative mobile software for hundreds of mobile devices around the world.

1. Tell us a little about yourself

I am Keith Pichelman, the co-founder and CEO of Concrete Software which is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  I co-founded Concrete Software in 2003 with Mike Lehne, who is our CTO.

2. What BlackBerry do you use now and what PDAs have you used in the past?

I’m currently using the 8900 Curve and love it.  I tried using the Storm for a about a month and switched to this phone a few weeks back.  Before that I used the BlackBerry 8800.

3. Why is the BlackBerry a good platform to develop on?

It always makes it easier to develop on a platform when one company owns the devices and the OS, this tends to keep the devices less fragmented.  Coming out with the touch screen and flip BlackBerry smartphones certainly made it a little more fragmented, but overall the OS stays pretty solid and easy to work with across different BlackBerry devices.  RIM also has a great developer program, joining their BlackBerry Alliance program has been a huge help on both the technical front and from the marketing and sales aspect.

4. Other than your own, name your three favorite applications for the BlackBerry.

I’m a big fan of Mobigloo’s games – both Nintaii and Next are great logic games.  I’ve also used several mapping programs, the 8900 comes with one made by Tele Atlas – so I currently use that

5. What’s your favorite trick or feature that you use on your BlackBerry?

I get hundreds of emails a day so deleting mass numbers of emails by highlighting the day and choosing delete prior to delete all emails prior to that date.  It may not seem like much of a trick, but prior to that I always highlighted all the emails to delete.

6. What’s the most important feature that the BlackBerry lacks?

The touch screen Storm is a great idea for consumers, many people really like the touch screen experience – there are a lot of ways I think the Storm could be improved to provide a better experience.  Most importantly better response to touch screen input, it seems the phone still has some slowness.

7. Where do you see the focus of third party programs for the BlackBerry going over the next few months?

I think we’ll see a lot of new titles from bigger companies with the App World launch and more and more carriers starting to provide third party applications to their customers.  This is making the BlackBerry sales channel that much more appealing for companies to bring titles to it.  I also think you’ll see a lot of titles from other mobile platforms, in particular from iTunes.  With iTunes reaching 30,000 applications, there are a lot of ideas that haven’t been implemented on BlackBerry.

Concrete Software: http://www.concretesoftware.com

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