Wavefront builds global relationships to better BC’s wireless and new media cluster

Wavefront, the commercialization centre for British Columbia's wireless and new media cluster, has inked a series of agreements over the past several months that will enable the organization to bolster the chances of success for start-ups and budding entrepreneurs in the region.One of the more significant deals will see the centre become the training facility for Mobile Distillery on the west coast of Canada and the United States. The European company has developed a set of tools that allows wireless applications and content to easily be ported onto approximately 1,000 different mobile devices.This was a big coup, according to Wavefront's president Jim Maynard. "The fact that we could build a relationship like this with a European company and offer it to our marketplace ," he tells Report on Wireless. "It creates an interesting opportunity for our Vancouver community - both for our gaming community and for the wireless developers - to really get some productivity boosts in terms of their ability to bring product to market."As part of the arrangement with Mobile Distillery, Wavefront will hold a free one-day training session on its Celsius development platform on October 2. Chris Scholefield, president of Inception Software Technology, will lead the seminar. He says the Celsius tool allows wireless developers to write the code for an application or content once and then port it to a whole bunch of different devices, helping solve the fragmentation problem in the wireless device space."The ability to take a single J2ME source (a trimmed down version of Java) and implement it on each of these different platforms is a significant breakthrough," Scholefield says. Previously, developers would have to spend days or even weeks trying to figure out how to port an application written for Symbian for example onto BlackBerry, Windows Pocket PC and Palm, he notes.Tira Wireless, a Toronto-based wireless company with operations in the US, was once in the business of providing this type of service. But according to some reports, the company has closed its doors.The Mobile Distillery product will save emerging companies a significant amount of money in their product commercialization cycle, allowing them to spend in other areas such as marketing and business development. According to Maynard, these types of development costs could drive testing and certification expenses for these applications and content developers up more than 200%, limiting their ability to release products in a timely manner."The costs of testing certification and test gear was a huge inhibitor because these companies are at the point where funding is very difficult for them to raise and if a disproportionate chunk of it goes into testing, it really takes away from their ability to launch and engage into the marketplace," he says. "So what we're able to do is actually defray that through a shared model that allows them to either raise less capital or take the capital they've got and push it more towards marketing expansion."Wavefront not only provides the technical tools small companies and developers require to take their product to market, but it also provides "connection" services that help these startups get meetings with the carriers. Maynard says he has already established relations with a number of industry associations and clusters in Europe, which will give companies in Vancouver a better chance of landing a deal with a carrier.Wavefront, founded by the Wireless Innovation Network of BC (WINBC) last year as a bridge to help wireless and new media developers commercialize their products and services, provides its services for free as a result of previous funding from the province and the federal government. In November 2007, the BC government chipped in $5 million for start-up and operational costs. The federal government, through Western Economic Diversification Canada, contributed $1 million in June.Being well-funded allows the organization to offer its services for free, but Wavefront is exploring a variety of revenue generating opportunities. Maynard says programs to accelerate product validation with carriers and infrastructure providers as well as assisting the enterprise community with mobile services and content developments are examples Wavefront will be looking at to generate revenue. But this won't replace giving startups access to free services."We want to give the small guys access to our handsets, access to a certain portion of our network and access to some of our marketing services for free. As they get funded and start to become more serious about entering the marketplace, then we're going to have tiered levels of service that will fit more the maturity of the company and its ability to contribute."

Wavefront builds global relationships to better BC’s wireless and new media cluster

News | 09/18/2008 6:00 pm EDT

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