Devicescape CEO Dave Fraser said the San Bruno, California-based ISV was founded in 2002 and brought its first product, the Devicescape Agent for WiFi security, to market in 2005. It has some 60 OEMs for the product, including Nokia, RIM, Palm, and Sharp.
In February this year, it launched the connection manager, Devicespace Connect, which it touts as enabling WiFi connectivity to over 300 networks around the world. The idea is that subscribers to a given service, say from T-Mobile or Swisscom, can connect easily at hotspots with which it is affiliated and be billed by their regular provider.
Fraser said a future version of the client due out in March 2008 will also allow ad hoc connectivity via a credit card transaction, though that will also require deeper relationships with the network operators.
The client is not designed for laptops, but for the increasingly wide range of other devices that are becoming WiFi enabled. Many of them, such as cameras, media players and games consoles, don’t come with a browser, and some don’t even have a screen, so the normal log-on process of clicking on a client and filling in credentials in order to connect is not possible, said Fraser.
The Devicescape Connect agent already appears on the online catalog on the N95 and will soon do the same on the Eseries business smart phone range. Users will think it’s already on there, but in fact the first time you click on it, it is downloaded and you are invited to register for the service, Fraser said.
Nokia is leaving the client with its original product name, whereas most of the other companies to which Devicescape is talking prefer to re-brand it as their own. That said, the back end of the service is still managed by Devicescape on its server farm, and users can notify it of additional WiFi networks they want to add to the service on a web site, which regardless of the branding, reports back to a common database. We can usually another network or hotspot overnight, he said.
Fraser said the Connect software can almost be thought of as the equivalent of an iPass agent but for the non-PC world. However, he said there are differences in the business model, in that Devicespace doesn’t get involved in the billing process, leaving that to the network to which the user subscribes. When it adds the ad hoc connections, he said it will become a financial intermediary and will thus need to deepen its relations with network operators.
Fraser also talked of GPS devices as potential carriers of the client. That way the device could download maps and route info over a home WiFi connection, in the morning before the car has left the garage, he said. The GPS guys are also looking at downloading news that could be read by text-to-voice technology while the subscriber is driving.
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The real target for the client is the legion of CE devices getting WiFi-enabled of late. Fraser talked with enthusiasm of Nikon’s MyPictureTown service, where its digital cameras upload data to an online photo library rather than storing pics on the device, with the potential in future for the process to happen automatically, whenever a WiFi network is in range.
There will clearly also be business and enterprise applications for the connection manager, however. Today the client works on Linux, Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile, but a BlackBerry version will be out in due course, according to Fraser, and of course, globetrotting BlackBerry users are sure to want WiFi connectivity wherever they can get it.
