About Me

My name is Mark Young and I’ve been in mobile technology for something like 8 years or so now. The early years were spent at Sun Microsystems, working as a technologist on the J2ME platform. I was involved in almost all parts of J2ME, from the JCP specification work in the expert groups to the reference implementation, to Sun’s Optimized Implementation, to OEM ports, to Operator projects. Some of you may even have met me on Sun’s kvm-interest alias or at one of my presentations at JavaOne or Cingular’s WAVE developer conference.

I left my position at Sun on July 4th, 2005, not knowing what I was going to do but knowing I had to get out. The original vision we had for J2ME is not what we ended up with in my opinion - and my own personal experiences with the standards process combined with Sun’s internal lack of innovation or initiative in the space left me so frustrated with daily life that I had to make a change.

After some months of loafing about in my pajamas, I decided that with all I knew about mobile - I could actually fix it. So after convincing my wife that starting my own company was a “good idea” and getting a 6-month allowance from her to avoid getting a real job - that’s what I set out to do, creating Numobiq Inc. with a few folks I knew from Sun. Luckily my wife is an understanding woman, because that was over two years ago now and we are just reaching our Series-A. We are, however, accomplishing what I set out to do, so things are looking up. 2008 should be one hell of a year - it is certainly an exciting time to be in mobile.

Posted by Mark December 2007