Interview with Antti Lammi of RaceChrono
I recently interviewd Antti Lammi, Founder and Owner of RaceChrono. This is an exciting interview as Antti shares his experinces developing the application and future product roadmap.
1. First, tell me a bit about your company. How long have you been in business? How did you get started in it?
I started writing the RaceChrono software in early 2007. This was just for hobby without much ambition. After some months me and my friend realized there could be business potential, so we founded RaceChrono Oy in early 2008. RaceChrono Oy is currently a small start-up owned and financed by its founders.
2. Talk about RaceChrono and what does it exactly do?
RaceChrono is a GPS based lap timing software. The software gives the user immediate feedback of laps and to provide a way to analyze the laps without transferring any data to a computer. The software is particularly aimed towards recording and analyzing laps in motor sports, but it has also a lot of users for example in down hill skiing, bicycling and horse racing.
RaceChrono is currently available for Symbian (S60 2nd, 3rd and 5th editions) and Windows Mobile phones. We have also plan on doing Windows CE version very soon. Currently we are thinking of Android and Maemo platforms too, but not considering iPhone platform right now as it does not support connections to standard Bluetooth GPS receivers. The internal GPS’s tend not to be sufficient for motorsports use.
The download count from Ovi Store is currently 54,000, and this is even though the application was removed over two weeks as there was some QA confusion over the new version. Last 7 days shows 14,000 downloads, so it seems Ovi Store user base is growing. The total overall download count for RaceChrono is somewhere close to 200 thousand right now.
3. What technology did you use to create your app and why?
RaceChrono is written in C++, and compiles to both Windows and Symbian from same source tree. All the cross platform stuff are written by me, and we are not using any cross platform frameworks. The C++ was chosen only because of personal reasons. I’m not sure if the decision would be different if it was made because of commercial reasons.
4. Are you expected to make additional apps available to the Ovi store?
With this company, RaceChrono Oy, probably not very soon, but we will probably go to Microsoft Marketplace and other application stores.
5. What are some of the things that you would like to see improved in the Ovi store?
Well, what I really would like to see improved is the DRM for the applications distributed trough Ovi Store. I guess the complete solution would require changes to the platform as well, but that cannot be easy to achieve as Ovi Store supports platforms that date to 2005. Also the ‘quality feel’ of the native Ovi Store app needs improving, and the web site search seem not to work for all applications.
6. Since your app is free to download, what is your monetization and marketing strategy?
Good question. For now we have only been focusing on getting a large user base. We will always have free version of RaceChrono like we do now, to keep our users happy, get free publicity and grow our user base. Maybe this could translate to advertising revenue later. Also with the Ovi Store and other application stores appearing, and providing us quite easy route to monetization, we must consider ‘RaceChrono Professional’ with some extra features compared to the current offering.
7. Must have Symbian apps?
RaceChrono, Gravity, PuTTY for S60 Touch and Google Maps.
8. Any tips for other developers that are just starting out on the Ovi platform?
Just go for it. Ovi platform is absolutely the best way to get publicity for your S60 application. Just write a quality app and you will have no big problems having in Ovi Store. Also make sure you support at least all of the following: N95, N97, 5800 and E71!
