NEW YORK-AnywhereYouGo.com, which recently opened a wireless applications testing laboratory in Dallas, its home base, has literally taken on the world in its short corporate life.
The company, whose mission is to facilitate development of wireless applications and solutions from as many sources as possible, began operations in February. Its ambitious goal is to fulfill for wireless software the kind of role that Underwriters Laboratories and Good Housekeeping play in certifying various kinds of consumer products.
“We seek to offer deployment assurance of interoperability between gateways and handsets and with multiple kinds of devices,” said Lee Wright, president and chief executive officer.
AnyWhereYouGo.com is an outgrowth of and successor to People Design Technology, a consulting firm for Internet-related issues. One of its largest clients was Nokia Corp.
People Design discovered a huge missing link that AnywhereYou-Go.com intends to provide, he added. There was a paucity of information about how to run various software applications on different devices and gateways.
Its metamorphosis followed the January acquisition of WAPtastic, a large, independent Wireless Application Protocol Web site based in London.
“We do thousands of online tests, more than 18,000 in the last 30 days, although these could be multiple tests on a single application,” Wright said in an early September interview.
“That is the first step for a developer ready to deploy an application, and ours is also the first Web-based tool for testing wireless applications. It does error checking of the code.”
The Wireless Internet Lab for the Americas, like the London-based Wireless Internet Lab, which opened in May, offers the second stage of testing, which involves interactions among software, devices and networks.
“In Europe, where we’ve been testing for several months, our studies have shown that up to one-third of current wireless applications have serious errors,” said James Pearce, founder of WAPtastic and now United Kingdom director of Any-WhereYouGo.com and director of its London laboratory.
“The different phones, gateways and underlying technologies create serious interoperability issues that developers and IT (Information Technology) managers have not encountered when testing Web applications.”
Besides WAP, AnyWhereYouGo.com also works today on Bluetooth and Web clipping technologies.
“Our effort is not a bet on any one technology, but it is very much a bet on a world going wireless,” Wright said.
In August, the company opened an office in Stockholm to serve as “an outpost to scout for new technologies because the Nordic countries are often leaders in this,” he added.
Also last month, AnyWhereYou-Go.com launched its online Wireless Career Center to help software developers and IT managers deal with shortages of employees skilled in the needs of this New Economy sector.
This new resource complements the company’s downloadable training materials and application-development tutorials. Its training team also is in the process of developing more complex, hands-on training seminars for software and IT professionals.
Late this year, AnywhereYou-Go.com expects publication of two books its staff has authored: “Developing WAP Applications,” Prentice Hall, and “Bluetooth in a Nutshell,” O’Reilly.
Wright said the company’s Web site, which also offers newsletters, directories, chat rooms and previews of new tools and tutorials, has readers in 85 countries.
Half of the users of the site plan to launch wireless initiatives within the next six months and 75 percent within the next year. Some 62 percent are in charge of implementing wireless solutions, according to Wright.
