Messaging's Missing Link

Wireless2Web has a message for the mobile phone community: The mobile phone shouldn't become a desktop computer just yet. In fact, Martin Schwartz and Rich Helferich, co-founders of the Chatsworth, Calif., company and business partners in the wireless industry for more than 20 years, think that messaging-capable mobile phones should work a lot more like pagers.

Pagers. Isn't that a quaint notion? Schwartz, the operational guru and financial magistrate, and Helferich, the technology chief with several hundred patents to his name, don't mean that quite so literally, but what they do mean is that mobile devices shouldn't be the information collection devices they are in danger of becoming. The messaging revolution is bringing short messages, photo messages and soon multimedia messages of all kinds to mobile phones, potentially allowing mobile enterprise professionals to work more efficiently when they're not at their offices. However, more doesn't necessarily mean better, to which any victim of information overload can testify.

Schwartz and Helferich believe that device users — rather than receiving the fire-hose blast of messages and attachments that fill up devices like the Research In Motion BlackBerry — should receive something a little bit easier to manage: a hyperlink.

The company's new LinkPush technology sends a hyperlink to a mobile phone that briefly describes the content of a message. The customer has the freedom to choose whether or not to click the link to download the message or not.

“The content is not yet in the device at that point,” Helferich said. “You could open attachments on your cell phone, but why would you want to?” Users can choose to read the message, forward the link to someone else, or — having seen the information in the descriptive link — could even decide to ignore the whole thing and go back to what they were doing.

“RIM's devices forward you all the messages that come into your e-mail, and you may not want all this information crammed down your throat to your phone,” Schwartz added.

Wireless2Web is still early in the commercialization of its LinkPush technology — so early, in fact, that finding industry analysts or carriers familiar with the LinkPush concept is difficult. Those who have heard about it think the technology sounds viable. “It's an interesting solution, and it seems to be a practical one,” said Andrew Cole, senior vice president of the wireless practice at consulting firm Adventis. “It's all about optimizing mobile messaging.”

Still, the sector LinkPush would be most useful for — mobile professionals — also is being targeted with mobile corporate e-mail server/application solutions developed by vendors such as Visto, RIM and Seven, all of which have strong ties with carriers.

“They're up against some fierce competition,” Cole said.

Helferich, though, thinks LinkPush could complement the broader solutions those other vendors offer.

Schwartz and Helferich have worked with handset makers before, and they think that might be the easiest way for their technology to get in front of carriers. However, they'll also market directly to carriers, and even to content providers looking for an efficient and non-intrusive way of marketing their content to mobile users.

For example, record companies could use LinkPush to send messages containing new music samples, allowing them to reach potential customers wherever they might be, just before the music goes on sale.

“The mobile handset was never designed for you to do what you do on your desktop,” Helferich said. “It was meant to be a communications device that you can put in your pocket. This technology can make carrier devices easier to use, but it also means that you don't need so much device memory, and the customer doesn't have to use so much airtime retrieving and opening messages.”

Who in the carrier/vendor/content provider food chain picks up on LinkPush first isn't as important as the technology getting noticed. Schwartz said Wireless2Web knows that other companies can do a much better job of marketing with targeted applications in mind than the company can on its own.

“We started Wireless2Web keeping in mind that other larger companies could license our technology and probably do more with it than we could,” Schwartz said.

LinkPush is the latest solution to come from Wireless2Web, a curious venture that seems to have flown under the industry's radar thus far, despite the dense resumés of its founders. “They are very well-respected guys, from what I've heard,” Cole said.

Helferich has 14 U.S. patents to his name in just the last few years, which resulted from 540 patent claims, some of which were filed as long ago as the 1980s.

“Developing and patenting a technology is like making wine,” Helferich said. “You're developing something for five, six or seven years in the future, hoping there will be a market for it.” Helferich has other patents pending, and many more awarded to him during the previous three decades of his career.

Schwartz has the wireless business in his blood. His father, Buz Schwartz, was responsible for importing pagers from Japan in the 1960s to provide Motorola with its first competition in the paging business. The elder Schwartz later sold the business to NEC, but continued to provide warehousing, logistics, technical advice and post-sales support for the Japanese company.

Martin Schwartz learned the business first hand during that period, working at NEC's factory in Yokohama, Japan, and even living in the NEC employee dormitory while taking time off from his studies at the University of California in 1973.

In some respects, LinkPush is reminiscent of paging's original incarnation as a short-message push technology, which incidentally always allowed pagers to remain inexpensive, low-memory devices. The later evolution of paging as a two-way messaging technology is much closer to what mobile messaging is today — only much more popular than two-way paging has ever been. But that might be because two-way paging was ahead of its time.

Schwartz and Helferich know the feeling. A few years after Schwartz was living at the Yokohama plant, he founded a pager repair operation called Minilec Service, a third-party maintenance firm working with paging carriers and device makers.

Helferich, who had operated his own electronics firm in Cincinnati, came out to California and joined Minilec in 1983. The bond that years later led to Wireless2Web started there, as Helferich began inventing his own solutions to some of the pager problems Minilec was seeing.

“We had our niche in the paging business, but Rich started getting patents and I backed him on that,” Schwartz said.

Over the years, Schwartz and Helferich have been part of several ventures — sometimes together and sometimes separate, sometimes successful and sometimes not.

Some of Helferich's initial patents included a voice-storage capability for pagers, as well as compression technology that improved overall pager capacity, solutions that are similar to the capabilities of modern mobile messaging technologies. These developments led the pair in the late 1980s to found Activis, “which was really a short-lived company that never got off the ground,” Schwartz said. Early on, Activis had an intellectual property dispute with Motorola, which was solved with Motorola acquiring the technology from Activis.

Minilec remained in business during that period — in fact, Schwartz remains president and CEO of the company to this day.

Helferich took a somewhat different path. In the mid-1990s, he was lured to North Carolina to join a company called Readycom that wanted to make a splash in a promising new business: two-way paging.

“I had patents in that area, and in 1996 I was very excited about seeing something happen with them,” Helferich said. However, after about a year, he had parted ways with Readycom, and was back in California.

Schwartz added, “The big idea with Readycom was that it was voice mail in your pocket, but it failed.”

Despite the misconnection with Readycom, Helferich wasn't about to dismiss the advantages of two-way paging. “After Readycom, I continued to develop the technology until we saw this need coming as messaging was becoming a [mobile phone] feature,” he said.

By 1999, their notions about messaging took shape in the founding of Wireless2Web, and if the aim of their latest venture eludes the understanding of some industry watchers, it's because Helferich and Schwartz are hoping that a market interested in the company's technology will help it establish a direction.

Right now, Wireless2Web is more or less a proving ground for many of the patented and patent-pending technologies invented by Helferich. Besides LinkPush, the company's other productized solutions include TalkBack, a multi-modal feature allowing mobile phone users to create verbal, automatic responses to the text messages they receive.

“[Wireless2Web] appears to be something of a holding company, and these guys might strike you as happy billionaires waiting for something to happen,” said one observer who was aware of the past exploits of Helferich and Schwartz, and attempted to size up the current venture.

Actually, Wireless2Web is more of a marketing and service engine that is attempting to commercialize the technologies, Helferich said. The company that holds the intellectual property is a separate venture started by Helferich and Schwartz called Wireless Sciences.

Schwartz nearly laughed himself out of his chair at the description of he and Helferich as billionaires, but they did fund Wireless2Web and Wireless Sciences on their own income reaped from past businesses and patents. Schwartz also bared his teeth at the notion of working with venture capitalists.

“We have not gone to VCs for help,” he said. “I have mixed emotions about that group. If you have [intellectual property] and you go to the VCs, you're asking to be taken advantage of.”

Though Wireless2Web has yet to fully navigate the landscape of potential partners and customers for its technology, the company has set up friendly users with which they can test the solution. With that feedback, Helferich expects that the company can prime the market for LinkPush, with the hope that it could be widely commercial in some form within 12 to 18 months.

“The increasingly interesting picture messaging market is something that will help,” he said “We're trying to learn how it will develop from looking at how these initial users use it.” Meanwhile, Schwartz and Helferich remain open-minded about the future of a venture that many people may just be discovering.

“Wireless2Web is really a huge testbed for our technology,” Helferich said. “But if it becomes super-profitable, we'll keep it.”