What a problem to have....

Jason Lackey

While things are dark and gloomy in some places and some are even talking about a double dip recession, we have other problems here at InnoPath.

Phones and the services that run on them are becoming increasingly complex. No longer is voice king, data and data driven services are important parts of the revenue pie.

InnoPath is not the only company that sees this. Handset makers and operators see it to. That is why they are all looking for ways of managing the smartphone boom and it also is why they all seem to be knocking on our door, seemingly all at the same time.

While this is good in many ways, good for the subscriber who will end up with better service. Better for the handset makers and service providers as their offerings will be better and more cost effective, it also puts us in a bit of a bind.

We need more people.

Now.

A couple of the really hot positions that we are hiring for (multiple openings) include Customer Support Engineers and Field Deployment Engineers. Expansion and progress on the customer side have created multiple career opportunities. Generally we are looking for senior/expert level pros who are intimately familiar with Sun/Solaris, Oracle, Weblogic, web/java front ends, TCP/IP networking and large system deployment and support at large telcos. Beyond just hands-on skills, we need people with solid project and communications skills - the kind of people who are comfortable and effective in front of customers.

The full list of jobs is here:

http://innopath.com/jobs/jobs.shtml

See you at the interview!

Innovation at InnoPath

Jason Lackey

Silicon Valley is a special place. Few places on earth have the concentration of diversity, entrepreneurial spirit and technical acumen to pull off the constant cycle of technological rebirth which we see in the valley. Indeed, from the good old days with people pulling silicon ingots in their garages (and occasionally blowing up said garages in the process) to late nights coding in front of glowing screens, both flat and in the bad old days CRT, the Valley has a history of innovation.

Part of the strength of The Valley comes from the wild profusion of different ideas we get here as a cultural, business and technical nexus where some of the best and brightest from India, China, Japan, the US and Europe come together and create new technologies, new products and new ideas.

InnoPath is proud to be part of the culture of creation. We actually help write the book, so to speak, by means of our active participation in standards creation with OMA, the Open Mobile Alliance. While standards are nice, it is also vital that there be some meat behind the specs, thus we are particularly proud of our patent track record, with 22 US and 2 Japanese patents awarded and a large number pending.

Anyway, to those of you busting your butts every day trying to build new things and blaze new trails, we salute you. To those of you busting your butts every day trying to build new things in wireless, we recruit you! InnoPath is hiring and we are looking for the type of talent who can come up with new and patentable ideas who can make new and wonderful technology do cool and useful things in production networks.

The iPad, Surface and How Microsoft Missed Apple's Bogey

There are few things any sadder than wasted potential not realized. Microsoft's very juicy, lovely Surface effort, like many GM show cars, was nearly an example of missed opportunity and waste, but fortunately Apple seems to have "gotten" it and they threw in a little Cupertino magic twist - they added mobility making for a very compelling device.

Read Dave Ginsburg's post on this topic on TMCnet here.

InnoPath's Dave Ginsburg interviewed by Rich Tehrani on TMCnet

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, however InnoPath's own Dave Ginsburg's interview with TMCnet's Rich Tehrani is one of the exceptions. While some were manning the booth, doing live demos on the show floor, others were living La Vida Loca doing interviews with the likes of Rich Tehrani. The video is here.

InnoPath: Keeping That Which Happens in Vegas Safely on Your Smartphone and Off the Internet

Jason Lackey

Smartphones are both a blessing and a bit of a curse. We have talked about ARPU and support related issues around smartphones in the past, but the increased capabilities of these devices also have other implications, some potentially large indeed.

With vast storage and the ability to open files like Word, PPT, Excel and the like as well as photos, videos and movies, there is no doubt that a smartphone is much more like a pocket computer than a phone. There is also no doubt that the loss of a corporate roadmap, compensation information or compromising images and the like would be a much more serious blow than the exposure of phone numbers, which is pretty much the only thing you would lose on an older voice-only terminal.

When the service provider can lock and wipe a lost or stolen device remotely, over-the-air, this potential exposure is limited and in some cases eliminated, helping keep that which happened in Vegas safely in Vegas, or at least on the phone.

See you at CTIA. We will be at Booth 3749. In the meantime, check out our press release here: http://innopath.com/news/press_releases/2010/2010_03_22_ctia_rim.shtml

InnoPath Named CTIA Emerging Technology Award Finalist

Jason Lackey

Well, delivering the green is no longer the exclusive domain of leprechauns and the like. While some of the advantages to FOTA and other OTA update technology are fairly obvious, things like preventing recalls, heading off support calls and in-store brick and mortar visits, enhancing subscriber satisfaction, squashing bugs and so on and so forth, some of the advantages are not always immediately obvious.


One of those is the environmental impact, or lack thereof, of doing updates remotely, over-the-air.

Let me explain.

When you need to ship or hand carry a device somewhere to get it reflashed, this is going to take some non-zero amount of fuel to fire up the family truckster or whatever and get the phone to the store. When using technology like InnoPath's Mobile Update, the phone stays next to your bed and gets updated in place and the family truckster stays in the garage and the co2 stays out of the atmosphere and the oil stays in the ground and generally everything is incrementally better, cleaner and greener.

May not seem like much, but by our calculations we saved 33m kg of co2 emissions in 2009 with the numbers for 2010 looking to be considerably larger.

Evidently the folks at CTIA agree with us that this is kind of cool stuff, we are CTIA Emerging Technology Finalists because of these energy savings, something that we announced in a press release today, "InnoPath Software Named CTIA E-Tech Award Finalist".

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Helping Carriers Sleep Better at Night

The industry is both delighted by the rise of the smartphone (or as some like Om Malik or Rob Glaser are calling them, the superphone) and horrified. They are delighted because they bring people into the stores, they create a lot of excitement (iPhone, Moto Droid) and they help keep subscribers. The service providers are also horrified - they are horrified because smartphones cost more to support and are hard on their wireless networks.

RCR Wireless recently interviewed our Dave Ginsburg on how InnoPath is helping the carriers sleep better at night. You can watch the interview here.