Flutterby™! : wireless 2000-08-09 17:28:33+00

wireless

2000-08-09 17:28:33+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Todd and I went to the Churchill Club last night for a panel on wireless. No real surprises, Ben Waldeman, VP of mobile devices for Microsoft, was pushing the does everything with lots of flash model, "somehow we've always found a way to use additional CPU". Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm was much more focused on function. The bright spot was Venk Shukla, CEO of Everypath who seemed to understand that design, and not technical limitations, is much of the problem. Jacob Christfort, CTO of OracleMobile was pushing "single source, many renderings", while Yankowski and Shukla both seemed to realize that the nature of the data that people are looking for varies from device to device, and tailoring the information to the use is important, Palm seems to think that machine solutions to clipping the useful bits seems to be necessary, something that brings up all those copyright issues that web based proxy browsers have been dredging through. And there was also a clear split between the "one device should do everything" and the "every device has a purpose", but little pondering on what BlueTooth and other technologies might mean for interoperability.

I was at the same event. If you knew something about wireless (and I presume most people who attended were there for a reason) then you didn't get much out of it. Nobody knows the way it's going to play out.

Yeah, I don't want to hold my breath on BlueTooth, but the idea of not having to drape a wire from my Palm to my cellphone really apeals, enough that I'm willing to endure a little reality distortion. Given the state of applications development in some of the companies that Everypath is pandering to they might last longer than a year, but like you I'm dubious. Pointing out that Palm

makes organizers and not communicators screams to me that there's a business opportunity in a database architecture that scales better than Exchange, is cross-platform, and built to do the sorts of things that people do on their organizers.

I was probably too cynical -- you deal with wireless vaporware every day and it gets to you. Everypath has put together a good team, financing, and partnerships. It's the viability of the other 293 wireless transcoding ASPs I worry about. As for bluetooth, I think the biggest hidden gotchas when it gets here will be: vendor interoperability, promiscuity/security, and RF interference. What if the electronics get cheap & small enough that it makes more sense to embed another phone transmitter inside your tablet/palm device than to bother to have them talk to each other? And betting against Exchange makes you a braver man than I am ... current trend is wireless middleware on top of it, a la Wireless Knowledge, ThinAirApps, BlackBerry, InfoWave, and Microsoft itself. There absolutely have to be better ways to organize personal data, whether wirelessly or not. eg, I think Peramon Lexicos is interesting -- putting your email through a text indexer so you can search it via your WAP device -- but as I said, I'm not betting against Exchange.

On BlueTooth, one of the biggest issues I see with some of the most promising applications is spam. And since most of these devices are too light weight to run Perl, there are going to have to be some good filtering technologies in place 'til it becomes viable as a way to indiscriminately exchange business cards. But I will buy a cell-phone/Palm combination that lets me use both, if Palm partnered with Motorola on the matter, everyone else would be forced to play catch-up. (Aside: Todd, you reading this? Hint, hint!) Betting against Exchange isn't bravery, it's the last hope of the desperate. Although having seen what happens in a company when Exchange decides to puke, if that happens more than two or three times I figure a third party suite to replace it starts to become very viable. In the particular case these people were just absolutely helpless given that they'd based so much of their communication on that centralized architecture.