Wireless Knowledge Inc. has developed Echo, software that simplifies the process of creating and mobilizing wireless Internet applications that can be accessed on phones, personal digital assistants and laptops.
The product, which joins the company’s other solutions, like Workstyle and Anystyle, targets large enterprises, system integrators and Internet service providers.
Wireless Knowledge said the product is lightweight and scalable and resides in a company’s Web server-whether IIS 4.0 for Windows NT, IIS 5.0 for Windows 2000 platforms, or iplanet, Unix, Linux or Apache operating systems. The company says it will also run on the Mobile Information Server Enterprise Edition once it is released.
Echo translates the HTML output of the requested Web application into the markup language of the device, such as HTML for Palm OS devices, HTML for Pocket PCs or WML or HDML for phones.
“We want to fully remove ourselves from the development environment so that we won’t impose any requirements on the development staff,” said Cullen Childress, product manager, Echo product line, for Wireless Knowledge.
Childress said the beauty of the product is that it is not committed to any proprietary markup language and screen scrapers, giving customers flexibility with their applications. Screen scraping limits the ability of the user to customize materials mobilized into the device, either in size or shape, because it is subject to the original language.
Wireless Knowledge believes developers can design a Web application to meet specific mobile needs without learning new tools or languages.
Childress said Echo enhances time to market and saves cost because customers would not have to transcode servers in the traditional way.
David Bilotti, the company’s director of marketing, said the product’s great strength lies in its capacity to mobilize on the fly corporate databases, whether on enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management, to mobile devices, thus giving users a lot of control over their movement and time.
“The seeds of Echo were sown over the past few years as our engineers researched the latest devices and their browser requirements, learning new development tools, coding and re-coding and coding some more,” said Ken Whitaker, vice president of product development at Wireless Knowledge.
Commerce One Inc., an e-marketing company, has licensed the solution for its customers.
“We believe that Echo complements our existing e-marketplace solutions and will help extend access to e-marketplaces to mobile platforms,” said Mike Micucci, vice president of solution strategy for Commerce One.
