Hmmm, That’s Curious
By: Josh Newman | July 18, 2001
The wireless industry is becoming increasingly fragmented with everyone busily
trying to carve out their own little footholds.
David Cutler, co-founder and CEO of Curious Networks, one of several wireless
firms in the burgeoning Silicon Prairie of Chicago, is hopeful that the Curious
niche will be with conservative midwestern companies that don’t feel comfortable
dealing with the hundreds of new mobile solution companies and consultants.
In Cutler’s view, many companies are finding that they prefer dealing with
a familiar face and are therefore turning to their existing software vendors for
answers. Yet, as these software companies scramble to meet the growing mobile
demands of their enterprise clients, they are finding that they lack the resources
and experience needed to efficiently and affordably provide viable mobile solutions.
That’s the opening Curious hopes to fill.
Curious Networks this week introduced their Continuum Embedded Edition,
the first mobile-enablement solution designed to help software manufacturers
quickly and easily make the leap to wireless. Already, Curious has signed deals
with software providers’ eGain Communications (Nasdaq: EGAN) and Interface
Software to help them test-drive an expansion of their existing solutions
to include all variations of Internet-enabled mobile phones, Palm, RIM, and
Windows CE devices, and voice recognition capabilities.
Key features of the product include cross-platform compatibility to run
in any environment, support for all major devices, including all mobile phones,
PDAs and voice
technologies, open architecture and APIs to allow for simpler integration and a
development model that significantly reduces implementation time.
The question in the end for this Curious strategy is how big a piece Curious
can cut for themselves with their larger, more established customers. It’s not
really a channel partner that Curious wants, so much as a lumbering giant under
whose nose they can wave some smelling salts.
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