A new horse enters wireless data race

With funding from Intel, Sentica plans to take wireless solution to market faster Not even six months old, Sentica believes it has found the key to making any form of two-way communication and interaction accessible across any application and any wireless device. It might be onto something.

Last month, Intel Capital invested an initial $5.4 million in Sentica, which will help speed up its plan for getting the platform out to enterprises, portals, carriers and other companies interested in making wireless convergence a functional reality.

Last fall Sentica launched in the U.S. and the U.K. Within months, it attracted Intel's attention. Now that it has extra resources, the company believes it is better-positioned to deploy its solution for e-businesses and other companies that need to enable existing applications.

"Data is increasing at a phenomenal rate, and all are talking about how to access data wirelessly," said Ashok Babbar, CEO and founder of Sentica. "We look at it from the standpoint of the user pushing the right data as opposed to the data driving end-user usage."

Instead of wirelessly enabling data, the company has chosen to create an infrastructure software platform that allows companies to map any type of application to and from any type of infrastructure, whether wired or wireless.

Perhaps Intel's initial investment will help the company get ahead. But Sentica is not the only one that benefits from the relationship. Fairly recently, Intel became interested in the entire communications space. With its Intel Communications Fund, it has invested across a broad range of networking and communication product solutions. In terms of the wireless space, the company sees there are ways in which it can contribute to the evolution of next generation wireless services. Wireless falls into the company's Intel Personal Internet Client architecture and Xscale Microarchitecture investment areas.

"As there is a transition from 2G to the next generation, we see the market moving toward areas that are Intel's strengths," said an Intel spokesman. "This is an opportunity to add our expertise. The goal for all of us is to address the next generation wireless client. This is a race to 3G, and the rules have changed. Companies that had dominated the voice market won't be the ones dominating the next generation."

According to Sentica, one of the main reasons the move toward widespread wireless data usage has been slow is because companies have been taking HTML Web sites and reconstructing them into wireless markup language (WML) without realizing that any changes made in HTML are not automatically translated into WML. This means separate changes must be made in the WML sites, creating an extra step and wasting time.

"You have to go to the heart of the application sitting on the back end rather than trying to take it just from the presentation level," Babbar said.

Although Sentica will work with any company trying to facilitate wireless communication, it has a separate product for carriers that allows them to push applications to any client across any phone. It does not matter if the content was created in HTML, Wireless Application Protocol or other protocol. The company hopes its solution will help carriers appeal to more end users and thus make more money. Sentica currently is in discussions with wireless carriers.

"They need to generate more revenue and make more end users interested in [wireless data]," Babbar said.

Sentica also is working to help enterprises facilitate communication, a focus it believes will help carriers better target these types of end users.

"This can impact carriers because it has been a problem for them to service enterprises or other end users who have not been able to get access to the information they need via any wireless device," Babbar said.

Potential wireless investments could include anything that involves: - Digital wireless standards such as GSM, GPRS, i-mode, etc.

- Cellular technology

- Wireless and cellular applications

- Pager or hand-held technology

- Validation platforms and development tools

- Xscale microarchitecture baseband

- RF-related technology and products

- Position and location, including complete solutions or services

Source: Intel Capital