The Market Maker

Bob Egan: Jolted into wireless as a child. RF engineer and innovator turned premier wireless analyst at Gartner. Left to rediscover invention at CoreChange. Left there to return to influencing the industry (specifics TBA). Promoting wireless as a way of life.

I've been playing with radios since I was a kid. The first real spark I had in the world of RF energy was when I reached in to touch the horizontal plate cap on an old TV and got blasted across the floor. I've been interested in wireless ever since.

I spearheaded some of the early development work in wireless LANs and mobile IP. I'm one of the original authors of the 802.11 standard, and about 10 years ago I helped demonstrate wireless LANs over cable modems.

Back in those days, we were thinking the wireless LAN market would take three years to become a profitable, mainstream marketplace. After 10, it's still now only at the dawn. It's taken an upswing in the Internet economy and the world becoming a more connected place to realize that wide area networks can't support high end-user population densities indoors.

I looked at Gartner as a two-year parking place that allowed me to look at the mobile business, which I knew was going to be huge. Mobility is not a style of technology, it's a style of life. People are instinctively mobile, and a lot of corporate decision-makers are fascinated with mobility. There is a groundswell of interest in what mobility can do for companies as the pace of their business accelerates. Large enterprises are identifying mobility with the core business initiatives of their companies.

Two years became six. Gartner has the greatest intellectual capacity of any company I've ever been associated with and provided an environment for me to foster my analytical skills. The downside is that in my 25-year career I have never, ever worked as hard as I did as a Gartner analyst. I literally gave up my life.

I didn't leave Gartner because I didn't like what I was doing. I wanted to go back to the contentment of being able to point to something and say, “I built that.” That's why I went to CoreChange. But CoreChange's primary focus is not mobile, and my passion is very much rooted there.

Now I'm going to go back out and chase my passions of being an influencer and a thought leader. I missed working with a diverse group of companies and helping build a whole new marketplace that will help naturalize the Internet, better people's lives and grow the overall economy.—As told to Jason Meyers