Seattle's Wireless Reign

You'd think the Seattle wireless community would lose sleep over its wireless carrier defections. First McCaw Cellular attracted some of the finest wireless entrepreneurial talent in the world, only to see them “sent to reform school” (per Craig McCaw himself) at AT&T. (Apparently the lessons didn't take, and they've now ended up in the big house in Atlanta.) US West New Vector long ago checked into the Hotel California, which turned out to be part of a New Jersey chain with significant foreign ownership. Nextel wanted to get closer to Lobby Hill and moved East. VoiceStream's accent became Teutonic. And Western Wireless is heading south to “y'all” land.

So why aren't we worried? Because every carrier “defection” has strengthened Seattle's position as a center of wireless entrepreneurship. Some of the local talent stayed behind and helped their new parents prosper, while others moved south, east or Far East, introducing their Seattle friends to new friends all over the world. Still others remained in Seattle to start an amazing array of new carriers, supporting services and groundbreaking wireless applications — more than 70 new wireless ventures and $700 million in venture capital over the past five years alone.

Not all of those wireless ventures succeeded, and many that did are now part of larger companies. But even the ones that failed created older and wiser entrepreneurs, and the ones that were bought out often brought us more talent. Tegic taught us to type with T9 and brought us AOL, 4thPass moved a little Motorola to Seattle and when @Mobile became part of Openwave, Openwave became part of Seattle. And let's not forget the AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile and, in the future, Alltel contributors that either already have or will move here, fall in love and stay.

Other Seattle start-ups are reaching out nationally and globally. InfoSpace and Mforma are helping define the mobile value chain, acquiring content publishers from Europe to Asia. Qpass is close to handling 1 million real-time content transactions a day in a digital supply-chain management business that didn't really exist three years ago. Wireless Services Corp., with roots in McCaw Cellular and Microsoft, is forging new ground in contextual message delivery and control. Clearwire may become the world's first large-scale wireless broadband provider. Wildseed may end up showing the world what interactive phones are all about. And SNAPin will help carriers launch smartphones without launching customer care costs into orbit.

Seattle's wireless pioneers had help in creating this entrepreneurial machine. The larger carriers imported talent and challenging problems to solve. Boeing introduced RF design and systems integration capability, while Microsoft trained the world's largest single pool of merchant software expertise. Most important, Seattle is home to more than its share of scarred dot-bomb survivors — we have more per-capita resident expertise in what worked and what didn't in the brave new world of connected commerce than anywhere else I can name.

Right now, Seattle companies ranging from Microsoft to unheralded kitchen-table start-ups are building products and applications that will help create and capitalize on ubiquitous mobile IP connectivity. Others are launching MVNOs and innovative hybrid/converged carriers. Seattle feels like the ground zero of the economic battle between companies that create the content, companies that make the content relevant and useful and companies that make it accessible. The only reason anyone is sleepless in Seattle is that we're just too busy.

Tom Huseby is chairman of Qpass and managing partner of SeaPoint Ventures.