Interview: Ivo Jansch

As part of our focus on mobile this week, here's an interview with Ivo Jansch, the founder of mobile technology startup Egeniq. We featured one of his presentations in one of our 'Slideshares of the week' posts not too long ago. Ivo is also an author and speaker, and is a PHP/iPad/iPhone/Android developer. Previously, he was CTO of ibuildings, a PHP development agency, for 10 years. 

 

1. You worked with PHP agency ibuildings for over 10 years - that's a long time! Tell us about your time there as CTO - what interesting projects did you work on?

My time at ibuildings was great. ibuildings is one of the bigger pure PHP companies and I learned a lot there. As the CTO, I was not often directly involved in projects as a developer, but on the other hand I was involved in every project, since I had technical responsibility for everything that happened. So I had exposure to a lot of projects, ranging from well known customers such as the BBC to lesser known but often equally interesting smaller companies across Europe.

2. Here at Made by Many we primarily work with Ruby on Rails. What's your opinion on Ruby vs. PHP?

I like Ruby as a language. When I first learned Ruby I wrote a blog post 'I know Kung Fu!' (a quote from The Matrix) as I suddenly had this incredibly beautiful and powerful language under my control. I do see some significant disadvantages though, and those have nothing to do with the language, but more with adoption. Ruby's been around for ages but it's incredibly hard to find good Ruby developers and even harder to find companies that can offer commercial services around it. In that respect, PHP is still a clear winner, despite the fact that Ruby as a language is much prettier than PHP. 

3. What was the biggest challenge you faced while starting up Egeniq?

The start went actually a lot smoother than we anticipated. The biggest challenge for me personally was giving up a great job as a CTO of a flourishing company to venture into the unknown. In other words, from a situation of job security and financial stability to a situation where I wouldn't know if I'd even be able to attract customers. Luckily I have quite a big network so once I plunged into the deep, we managed to stay afloat pretty soon. I'm proud to be able to say that we've been profitable from the start with no outside investment whatsoever. 

4. Egeniq's core offering is around mobile - a great space to be in right now. Name the best mobile website and iPhone app you've seen recently. 

On the iPhone my favourite app is an app called 'appie', which is the app the national supermarket chain Albert Heijn released. It is a perfect example of an app that is simple, efficient and uses the core properties of mobile: it is contextual (it offers features that are helpful both when I'm at home making the grocery list and when I'm in the store to direct me to the right locations in the store); it is what I call 'snappy' (it just works). I think every supermarket should have an app like that. On the iPad (because I consider tablets part of the mobile ecosystem too) my favourite app, by far, is Flipboard. Flipboard is a social magazine. It turns your Twitter and Facebook feeds into a very visual digital magazine. It's a very pleasant reading experience. The people at Flipboard understand the tablet use case and they understand how people like to read content these days. They've combined this into an app that is shiny, just works and is a pleasure to use.

I don't really have a favorite mobile website. On my phone I tend to use apps more than the mobile browser. Perhaps because many mobile websites are implemented so poorly. Many mobile web developers think mobile browsing is just a matter of having a smaller screen. To me, mobile is more about 'access to any data, anywhere, anytime', so I'd like to see more sites become contextually aware.

5. Could you tell us a bit about your current projects? What does 2011 look like for you?

At the moment we're focussing on creating a stable basis to build from. We're working on some interesting projects for clients, for example a mobile authentication platform that is quite innovative. Also we're working on some products of our own. Since the mobile development ecosystem is so young, we see opportunities to create tools to help developers be more efficient. One we're currently working on is a tool that automates building distributions for the iOS platform. We built this tool to make our own life easier, but if we have the tool anyway, why not offer it as a service to other developers. 

In general, we want to be working on the technologically challenging aspects of the mobile ecosystem. There are many companies that are starting to build apps, but there are very few that focus on the hardcore technology. So far we've been able to help app developers with performance, security and scalability issues, so companies that could be our competitors have actually become clients. In many ways, it's like the state of the web 10 years ago: many people dived into building websites, few got further than the brochure website. Software engineering skills often are an afterthought. It's what's happening in mobile development now as well.

6. The mobile authentication project you worked on for SURFNet looks interesting (allowing users to log in to websites without using their usernames and passwords) - what were the security challenges you had to consider while building this? 

Quite a number. First, we don't believe in security through obscurity, so you can't rely on a secret algorithm to build something like this. From the start, we wanted to use open standards and existing proven technology, so that everybody could see and verify that what we're doing is actually secure. Second, we're dealing with mobile devices. The iPhone offers hardware features for storing data in an encrypted form, but what happens if somebody jailbreaks a phone or what if a phone gets stolen? Many Android devices don't offer hardware encryption, so we had to build in software encryption in the Android version. Third, we have to be very aware of the way mobile devices are used. You're not in control of the network connection, you don't know if somebody will be eavesdropping - so we have a lot of security measures in place. Something called 'two factor authentication' which combines something you have (the phone) with something you know (a pin code or a username/password combination). All transactions happen over secure channels. And we use a challenge response system with one-time passwords, so even if somebody intercepts something, it's still useless as the next time the whole authentication will be different.

SURFnet, the company that initiated the project, is going to open source the system in a couple of weeks, which is another way of having peers review it, to verify if the solution is secure.

7. What do you think of Google recently making 2-step verification available for free to Google Apps users? 

That is a great step towards making authentication into Google applications more secure. Since it's optional and buried within the settings, I doubt though if many people will actually use it. But if you want to make access to your email slightly more secure, I definitely recommend turning on this functionality.

In some ways, the solution we've built resembles what Google has done. There are a few differences (for example the Google Authenticator doesn't store secrets on the phone in a very secure way), but the overall concept is similar.

8. In your opinion, which open API is the most exciting in terms of potential to create apps and services that change the way people use the internet?

I don't want to single out an individual API as there are so many, but the fact that more and more data is available through APIs is a very good thing. It allows people to use the internet in ways that the owners of the data haven't even imagined. There's also a trend among governments to open up data access. I know that for example the UK government has APIs that people can use to access data, which is a great step.

APIs allow us to develop niche applications. A company may not have an interest in supporting every imaginable use case, and may want to stick to what 80% of the general public wants. By having an open API, they allow others to fill in the niches to cover the remaining 20%. 

9. We think RFID has a lot of potential to change the way advertising agencies work with commercial brands. Are there any good examples of RFID products in the branded space today that you think are truly inspiring - or if there aren't any branded ones that you'd like to recommend, are there any products or services that use RFID in general that excite you?

You know, whether it be RFID, Bluetooth, SMS, QR codes, it seems as if advertising agencies are always the first to hype a technology so they can use it to market stuff to people. In the end though, most of these efforts fail (do you know any Bluetooth marketing campaign that's still successful today?). I dare say that if a technology survives the marketing hype and is actually able to provide people something useful, it is probably going to get great adoption. Take QR codes. They've been hyped by marketeers, yet all they have ever done with it is create links to websites and marketing materials for products. Now that we are starting to see useful applications with QR codes (the mobile authentication we discussed earlier is an example), we're going to see a better adoption. 

I think the same will happen with RFID. It's useful for things like payments and access control, but will it change the way advertising agencies work? I doubt it. Possibly for a while agencies will try to make it work, but in the end they'll realize that, just like SMS, Bluetooth and other technologies, people are not waiting for yet another method to consume commercial messages.

10. What are your goals for Egeniq - where do you see it going in the future?

Besides world domination? :-) But seriously, first we want to build a stable basis from which we can grow. This means having a solid base of customers, a couple of successful products, and a great team of developers. Then we'll see where we go from there. The mobile ecosystem is so young, anything is possible. In any case, our passion is technology so no matter what happens and how fast we will grow, we will stay focussed on providing technological services and expertise to the market.

Another thing that will help us grow in the future is a set of beliefs we try to embed into the heart of the business. There's a number of things we've adopted at Egeniq such as being paperless (at least as much as possible), distributed (most of us work from home) and lean (risk-averse, keeping an eye on cost). This helps us in a number of ways. For example borders do not exist when you're distributed and not tied to a geographical location. We already have a project in the US for example, even though we're based in Europe. Not having to have to fund expensive offices (we do have an office but only to do things like meetings) means that we can invest more in our employees and in keeping our knowledge up to date. It is my belief that having this solid basis combined with a number of guiding principles and last but not least, a passion for technology, will be what will make Egeniq successful.

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Thanks very much for your time, Ivo. There are a lot of interesting answers here which we're sure our readers will appreciate. All the very best with Egeniq!