Wireless start-ups show their stuff

PHOENIX - Forget about reinventing the wheel. The hottest new wireless companies took center stage at this week's Demo 2002 conference and said their plan is to simply repurpose it.

Many of the more than 65 presenters at the IDG Executive Forums event showed how they are shying away from products and services that require costly buildouts or forklift upgrades in favor of those that take advantage of existing infrastructure and technologies.

"Only 1% of the wireless capacity is being used today," said Roland Van der Meer, a partner at investment firm ComVentures. "That is highly inefficient." The key, he said, is getting more users onto the nets that exist.

Among the companies addressing this inefficiency was talk-of-the-show Boingo Wireless, which introduced its Wireless Internet Service, an offering designed to help mobile users with IEEE 802.11b cards locate nearby wireless LANs.

With software that can be downloaded free from the Web, users can "sniff out" wireless LANs in cafes, airports, hotels or buildings. Boingo, which keeps a directory of wireless LANs across the country, charges users up to $75 a month to then connect to these wireless LANs via its broadband service.

While Boingo's service is aimed squarely at more populated areas, Space Data's new offering for wireless service providers has a more rural focus.

The company plans to take advantage of the twice-daily launching of weather balloons to increase the reach of existing wireless networks. Space Data will attach wireless repeaters to weather balloons that will hover at about 100,000 feet. It will then charge wireless carriers for the use of these repeaters to extend their services. CEO Gerald Knoblach said making use of the weather balloons will keep operating costs down and provide for more widespread coverage than cell towers or satellite systems.

Another company, ClickServices, showed software that companies can use to add mobile access to old and new applications. The vendor's Movera Server and Studio products, which work hand in hand with popular application servers, enable developers to create content once and then provide access to it via different markup languages, like the Wireless Markup Language, and protocols, such as the Wireless Access Protocol.

Yet another vendor, Mitigo, is exploiting the digital camera technology already found in the latest mobile devices to enable new applications. "Users were not having much luck using that equipment for videoconferencing," according to Sanford Squires, senior technical consultant at Mitigo, which claims its CodePoint software lets cell phones and PDAs recognize bar codes that can be used to conduct e-commerce transactions.

Squires said one use for the service would be if someone needed to hail a cab. The user could point his or her cell phone at a bar code on a taxi stand sign and within seconds, receive confirmation of a pickup and an estimated waiting time. The service would even enable the customer to pay using the mobile device.

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and Demo presenter Linden Lab, said the wealth of new wireless offerings is evidence that companies are not being stymied by worries about security.

"Wireless companies are going to do well," he said. "There is internal demand from the line of business folks that will compel IT to figure out how to best integrate wireless technologies."