Many entering the wireless application service provider space have concentrated much of their business on wirelessly enabling Internet content. That is, after all, the primary function of a wireless ASP.
Not so, says relative newcomer 2Roam Inc. The company, launched this April, believes optimizing Internet content for wireless transmission is about as exciting as sliced bread.
“Content reformatting is going to be a commodity,” said Bryan Wargo, chief executive officer of 2Roam Inc. “At the end of the day, the ability to provide add-on services is going to make this interesting to the content provider.”
2Roam plans to offer its customers value-added services, such as support for advertising services or monitoring back-end usage reports-which will let the customer track usage of a given site from the wireless device. The company then will follow up with location-based support and other as-yet unnamed services.
“It’s all about value-added services,” Wargo said. “How can you pile more technology on it is what provides the benefit to these businesses.”
But the first step remains wireless enablement, which is what represents the bulk of 2Roam services today. The company was founded in July of 1999 by four schoolmates who graduated from Santa Clara University. The four buddies had been conspiring to take advantage of the Silicon Valley start-up dream for some time, and began looking around for a business need to meet.
“We really liked the way phone company business models worked-revenue from monthly usage,” Wargo said.
After searching out various industries, the group chose the wireless data industry as their play, but approached it from the Internet perspective.
“We saw a lot of one-off applications, but not a lot of adoption,” Wargo said. “In the consumer segment, we saw people were customizing their content on the Internet. The second thing we looked at was whether users would want to access that on a wireless device, and we saw the adoption of wireless devices increasing.”
The situation was that people had personal content on the Internet and wireless devices capable of accessing it. The stumbling block, as Wargo saw it, was the need to reauthor the content into a form optimized for wireless transmission.
“We felt if we could help content providers leverage their existing infrastructure in a quick and easy way, yet allow them to keep the control … there’d be a lot of opportunity.” Wargo said.
So 2Roam developed two platforms from the ground up to meet this need. The Catalyst Wireless Solution Server and the Nomad Wireless Solution Toolkit.
Catalyst is the actual middleware product that handles the enablement process.
“It forms the bridge between the existing HTML environment and the gateways at all the different telecom providers,” Wargo said. It understands the Internet infrastructure and provides those applications, services and content on any wireless device on any network.
The Nomad platform allows the content provider to configure what portions of its HTML site should be wirelessly enabled.
“It’s a graphical user interface tool we give to content providers that runs on their PC,” Wargo explained. “With it, a Web producer, not an engineer, can pull up an HTML site and point to the content, applications or whatever he wants to extend to wireless devices,”
Going further, the content provider can dictate what content he wants enabled for which devices, so some content may be selected for pagers, while other content and services will be available on a PDA.
“You can put it on devices in a couple of hours and know nothing about the technical nuances between two devices,” he continued. “We put control in the hands of the content provider. We don’t come in as consultants. You have the control yourself. You need to have control so you can move quickly, but you don’t need to know code to do it.”
2Roam licenses Nomad for a flat fee, while it charges for Catalyst services on a monthly fee based on a tiered usage system.
So far, the strategy has worked. Barely months after its launch, 2Roam landed eBay as a customer.
“eBay made us,” Wargo admitted.
More recently, the company just completed its third round of financing, raking in another $23 million.
