Wireless Knowledge makes headway

Wireless Knowledge is forging ahead with carrier relationships, recently announcing a trial with Canada's Bell Mobility, which in August will launch the first commercial offering of Wireless Knowledge's Revolv.

Wireless Knowledge also teamed up with Metricom, the mobile wireless data operator. "It's a perfect fit for us," said Roger Nolan, vice president of strategic alliances for Metricom. During the past year, Metricom has changed its focus from consumers to mobile business users," Nolan said. Metricom's goal is to allow business people with a laptop or a personal digital assistant to complete all types of work while mobile that they can accomplish while in the office and connected to a LAN.

"If they are using Microsoft Exchange, what we do is further enable the availability of that information by providing access to it," said Dave Whalen, vice president of sales and marketing for Wireless Knowledge.

Wireless Knowledge will offer two services to appeal to large corporate users and small businesses. Both offerings require Microsoft Exchange. The first serves enterprise users with Microsoft Exchange and hardware in place. Wireless Knowledge hooks its data center into a corporation through the company's firewall. The second service will appeal to smaller businesses that may not have Exchange in place. Wireless Knowledge can offer hosting services for them.

Wireless Knowledge and Metricom can gain large numbers of users quickly by targeting multiple users in companies. "In one blow they get all the possible people in that company to become subscribers of the service," said Naqi Jaffery, wireless analyst at Dataquest. Half of Metricom's current customers are individuals.

The growth also is reflected in its partnership roster. When Wireless Knowledge launched, it had nine carrier partners. It currently has more than 30 operator partners worldwide that are either under contract or are evaluating the service, Whalen said. Wireless Knowledge expects four more rollouts, in addition to Bell Mobility, by the end of the third quarter.

While Metricom plans to charge a flat-rate premium over its existing fee for Revolv, some operators have discussed charging per minute for use, bundling the product into other data services or even offering it for free to high-end customers, Whalen said.