Wireless Scars
This evening I attented a great networking event organized by WirelessWednesdays. In addition to networking Chris and Greg organized a few speakers who told their wireless war stories. It was refreshing to here smart small companies finding creative ways to deal with the current state of the wireless market. Typically presentations at these events are more hype than anything else. Two companies really stood out FrogHop and SuperWings. FrogHop started out a wireless game developer and then realized it wasn't going to get anywhere with that once the VC got down on wireless. By accident they found a niche market for their gaming platform with makers of massively multiplayer games. You would think that a company like SuperWings which focuses on wireless apps for field sales engineers would have a clear market. Instead they found that customers didn't really know what they wanted from wireless and VCs weren't going to give them any more cash till they started making some money. Their team saw an opportunity in creating a terminal application that could be used to remotely log in to unix boxes from wireless devices and now they are pushing that application until the market and the technology catch up to the point where they can create more complex solutions. It's not sexy, but it works. These two examples illustrate Cris Bjelajac's words of wisdom from his experience at Zed, "Know who your customers are, listen to them and then build what they want." Sounds so obvious, but few people think this way when getting a business going.
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