Openwave's David Peterschmidt and how Inktomi saved Yahoo; OQO--caught between a PDA and a notebook is a hard place to be; Gail Redmond, SozoTek's image enhancer; Audio Bar targets the anti-book masses; Lost my Treo brick and found it (sigh); ipsh! text message marketing king.

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

It is CTIA week in San Francisco, and this wireless conference has brought in a lot of mobile technology companies. Mobile is definitely the hottest space right now in tech, and also the most challenging.

You need powerful software that can perform wonders in a device with limited resources. If you are a device maker, you have to have highly integrated chips that sip battery power yet can handle, Swiss-army-knife style, a wide range of communications standards, display and audio demands.

And you have to have great design too. Because for consumers, a cell phone says a lot about its owner, so the way it looks, sounds and the personal information it contains are important.

This point was made well by David Peterschmidt, chief executive of Openwave, when I met with him Monday evening.

Openwave is an interesting company in itself, but Mr Peterschmidt interests me more because he is one of Silicon Valley's legends. He has built many large businesses groups here and he knows more about the inner workings of Silicon Valley, (and where the bodies are buried ;-) than almost anyone else.

To most people, he is probably best known as the former CEO of Inktomi, which he grew from 20 people into the hottest search engine company of its time. Inktomi's search engine technology continues on, but under a different brand: Yahoo.

Inktomi was sold to Yahoo in 2003 and Mr Peterschmidt firmly believes that "if it wasn't for its acquisition of Inktomi's search technology, Yahoo would not have been able to compete against Google so effectively."

Openwave is best known for browser software that enables mobile phone companies to deliver a large number of applications to customers.

This is a key, strategic position in the market. And Openwave is determined to strengthen it further; this week it announced the acquisition of Musiwave for more than $121m, which adds a variety of digital music services capabilities to its portfolio.

OQO-the "pocketable" PC

I ran into Virginia Jamieson from OQO and I got to see a rather nifty mobile device the company just introduced, the OQO 01+.

It is an "enhanced ultra personal computer which comes with 512MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, USB 2.0, internal speaker, improved pen-based digitizer, car/auto charger." Here is more info...

It's described as a PDA with all the functionality of a Windows XP notebook. Which means you don't need to learn a new interface. The OQO is perfectly placed between a PDA and a laptop, yet I don't think that's a good place to be because of the form factor.

It is too large to be a PDA and too small to be a decent notebook. It has all the price ($1900) of a notebook but without the functionality. Yes, the guts are the same, but the keyboard is a thumb keyboard. I can thumb on my Treo 600; but I can't do it for long.

I'd rather have a 12-inch Centrino notebook sans optical drive. And the OQO doesn't even have a camera(!) I'm clearly not the target market...

Here are some enthusiasts though, at Engadget...

SozoTek: Fixing camera phone images

Imaging is a large theme at CTIA; and phones are coming out with ever-larger mega-pixel cameras built in. The image quality, however, is not that great. But SozoTek has an interesting solution.

I spoke with Gail Redmond, the president and CEO of this Texas based company, who said the solution to better camera phone images lies within the carrier network.

"Our technology dramatically improves the image when you send it from your phone to someone else," she said. The technology sits on the carrier's servers and intercepts images on-the-fly, using sophisticated image enhancement technology developed at Kodak and IBM.

There is no denying the market size and hockey-stick growth projections around mobile phone imaging, and such services might help wireless carriers differentiate their services. But SozoTek is the lone provider of such technologies which means it has to educate the market, and the user.

That's a tough position but Ms Redmond seems tough enough from prior leading positions at Sprint and Telespree, to name a few.

Soccer and Manja at Germany's Audio Bar

German soccer fans are a primary target for Audio Bar, an interesting German startup. Erbil Kurt, who at one time was Deutsche Telecom's youngest-ever board member, has put together an interesting portfolio of images, ring tones and video clips--all designed specifically for small screen mobile phones.

And what I saw was very good. Mr Kurt has personally created most of the ring tones, images and audio himself. And he even traveled to Istanbul so that he could come back with a rare interview with one of Germany's top soccer personalities.

But it is not just soccer fans that interest Mr Kurt. "Did you know that 40m Germans have never bought a book?" he asked me. That's what surveys have revealed; and that is a business opportunity.

That's because it is a market that consumes its stories and information through images. And Japanese manja is the inspiration for several "story book" projects that Audio Bar hopes to sell a chapter at a time.

The demo I saw was very good, and reminded me of the Aha video "Take on me." It worked well in that small screen form factor.

Lost my Treo...

It's ironic that I seem to have misplaced (lost) my cell phone at the cell phone show, or rather during the evening festivities.

But, I can't say I'm sorry to lose my Treo 600--a brick of a phone and one of the least reliable devices I have ever owned. I got one of the first ones, but within a year, I was on my fifth Treo 600.

And it was not because I'm harsh on phones, it was because they would stop working. When I look at annual cell phone shipment unit numbers, I now wonder how many of those units are replacements for shoddy units...

And now I found it! Literally, as I finished the above sentence, my land line rang and my phone was found on the bar at 111 Minna.

ipsh!--marketing through short text messaging

And speaking of 111 Minna, I must mention my hosts ipsh! who threw a fun party at the art gallery.

The company is using SMS--short text messages in innovative ways in marketing and promoting events. And Ellisa Feinstein introduced me to some interesting people there that I'd like to follow up with at a later, and quieter time...