Mobile Sorcery, a Swedish startup founded in 2004, provides cross-platform mobile development tools. The company’s product is called MoSync, which allows developers to write single source code and then launch their applications on a wide range of mobile devices with different platforms, like Symbian, J2ME and Windows Mobile. Mobile Sorcery has gotten SEK 1.5M (around EUR 150k or USD 211k) funding from Swedish early stage VC STING Capital last year.

The key business benefits of MoSynch are reducing porting costs and time to market. For developers MoSync offers access to many existing C/C++ libraries even when targeting J2ME and other platforms and existing device profiles of hundreds of handsets. There are some clear feature weaknesses at the moment, though, which seem to be on the list for MoSync’s next release: touchscreen support and SMS sending support.

It’s a tough market out there. The existing players in the mobile industry have already porting frameworks and tools in use, and there are quite a many similar competitors as well. Less established companies or those entering the market currently might find Mobile Sorcery’s offering quite interesting, though, as it can enable you to focus on building the actual product or service instead of worrying about the device fragmentation. MoSynch is available at no cost for non-commercial use, commercial users will have to contact the company for getting a license.

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel is a product by Webmedia Ltd, an Estonian firm, which has been the fastest growing software development company in the Baltics.

ZeroTurnaround JavaRebel improves developer productivity by reducing the “turnaround” time it takes for the programmers to see the changes made to the code in action. Turnaround time refers to the time it takes to build, deploy, and initialize changes in web development to see the actual result in running application. With web development it might take several minutes, or more, for the programmers to see the changes made to the service. Big software development teams having many deployments per hour are wasting a lot of time and money with developers waiting for the deployment process to finish. The people may have hard time concentrating, and the overall productivity may be low. With JavaRebel the deployment process is claimed to take maximum 1-2 seconds. The company also offers JSP Weaver product, which interprets the JSP files used in web site development on-the-fly and thus reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times down to milliseconds.

Webmedia recently announced that LinkedIn Corp. has licensed JavaRebel for all its Java engineers. According to Ivo Mägi, Chief Development Officer of Webmedia, JavaRebel has currently more than 10 000 users worldwide, and it is the first step in conquering enterprise Java development market.

The company offers JavaRebel as open source for “qualified Open Source projects” and with commercial licenses.

[Via Toivo Tänavsuu's TigerPrises.com]