Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Zimly Dreams To Build the "iTunes for Android"

Zimly's mission is to create an awesome mobile media experience. Today Zimly, in a nutshell, is a media player for Android devices. Its homepage introduces Zimly as:
Zimly was designed and crafted for your Android device. Zimly is an easy to use, feature rich media player, wrapped in a beautiful custom interface. The idea for Zimly was born out of a need for a better media experience on these devices we love.


But in the long term, Zimly aims much higher: Build an iTunes-like service for mobile devices, with focus on openness and social (i.e. media sharing experience). Andre Deutmeyer, an American expat who joined the two initial founders (Thomas Jung and Ryan Eee) to build Zimly, says "I would guess iTunes.com service would remain confined to the Apple platform, so our freedom to build for multiple platforms is an advantage."

The company behind Zimly is called Nomad Connection. The company has actually been around for 5 years. Nomad Connection initially set out to build an Open Source video client called Chameleo, but the company was boostrapping and had to branch off to other efforts to make ends meet. It's been a long road, but Nomad Connection is now back to its first passion, namely building a killer media software.

Zimly's first target platform is Android and it seems to be a good choice: Recent figures show Android is fast catching up on iPhone in terms of number of devices shipped, and unlike the iPhone, Android has more open developer environment. And yet, as Andre says, "Android is a little lacking in the media player department," which means a good opportunity to create something useful.

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