NEW YORK-Mobileum, a Pleasanton, Calif., start-up, has filed for nine patents and received $45 million in first-round venture funding for its system to simplify communications between corporate enterprises and their mobile workers.
The company’s software platform approach to linking corporate intranets with their employees’ wireless devices offers several advantages over the two primary alternatives available, said Mitch Bishop, vice president of corporate marketing.
“Transcoding, which is screen scraping to translate into Wireless Markup Language is not scalable, does not support different kinds of devices and does not allow you to differentiate yourselves by the look of the interface,” Bishop explained.
“Building custom applications, like 724 Solutions and Aether Systems do, is expensive and takes a long time. And the enterprise customers don’t own or host the apps once they’re built.”
SmartView, one of the modules enterprise customers can choose to add to the Mobileum platform, is designed to simplify deployment of applications. “As an enterprise, how do you create applications acceptable across all devices? That’s an IT department’s nightmare,” Bishop said.
“SmartView provides tools and templates for each wireless device. It’s used at run time to translate into Palm, WAP, etc.”
The loss of an airlink during wireless data communications can be more of an irritant than getting cut off in mid sentence during a voice call. End users involved in transactions involving specific sequences of steps typically must start the process from scratch once they have reconnected.
Mobileum’s SmartSession, which the enterprise customer owns and hosts in its server, “remembers where the consumer was and what buttons were pushed,” Bishop said. This session-management module works independently of device and application.
To simplify the process of logging onto favorite sites, Mobileum has developed its SmartClick module.
“This allows one-button log-on with one user name and password for a large number of Web sites,” Bishop said.
Another module, SmartProfile, brings cookie management under control of the end user.
“Cookies are used in the wireless world in a different way than on the Internet,” Bishop said.
“Cell phones and PDAs are pretty dumb devices, so cookie management is stored in the WAP gateways. These are situated in the carrier network behind its firewall, so consumers can’t see or control them.”
SmartProfile enables the device user to personalize information desired, to guard privacy and to limit access to certain sensitive functions, like securities trading and purchase authorization.
Fortune 500 companies, particularly the early adapters in the financial services industry, are Mobileum’s primary target market. The company also is exploring two kinds of business relationships with telecommunications carriers, as customers and as resellers, Bishop said.
BEA Systems Inc., Mitsubishi International Corp. and TIBCO Software Inc. have become strategic investors in the eight-month-old company, which passed the 100-employee mark in late October. Other investors in the first round of venture-capital funding include Accretive Technology Partners, Doll Capital Management, MC Capital Inc., MC Silicon Valley Inc. and Shelter Capital Partners L.L.C.
Mobileum’s products are commercially available, according to the company.
