App Movers

3:50 PM -- I could only attend about 90 minutes of last week's GigaOm Mobilize conference. (See VCs: Mobile Apps Need Breathing Space.) But it was enough to encounter two startups trying to make a go at mobile portability. And that's just from standing around for five minutes.

One was a Korean startup still in the phase of two guys in a garage, figuratively -- more literally, a UCLA business student who was at the conference doing market research on the need for an API to move applications to arbitrary mobile devices.

I don't think he happened to meet Dana Li, vice president of business development for Netmite Corp. in Sunnyvale, Calif. Her company has built a platform for porting applications from one smartphone to another. Sounds like the same idea -- and Netmite is a more established company (claiming 80 games published for Android phones) that's been working at it longer.

One idea, twice in five minutes. Coincidence? Absolutely. But maybe it's also the law of averages at work, a sign that there are that many companies pursuing this idea. In which case, I wouldn't be betting on the Korean guys.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading