Wireless backer Ignition to fund mobile Internet firm
totaltele.com
16 October 2000
Ignition Corp., a firm launched by several Microsoft veterans to cultivate wireless ventures, revealed on Monday it is funding Avogadro, a company that is working on ways to merge service on cell phones with the everyday, PC-based Web.
Based in Seattle and started by several other former employees of software giant Microsoft, Avogadro is creating software tools to let telephone companies and Web sites integrate mobile and fixed Internet services, Avogadro Chief Executive Thomas Reardon said in an interview.
Although it is the third deal to be announced by Ignition, Avogadro was actually the first investment by Ignition, which led a $7.5 million funding round back in April, about two months after Avogadro was started, Reardon said.
Launched in March, Ignition has also publicised deals with etrieve, a mobile phone e-mail service, and UIEvolution Inc., which is working on technology for playing video games on mobile phones.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Ignition has made several other undisclosed investments, mostly in San Francisco-area companies, said John Roberts, managing director of Ignition.
Reardon shied away from giving details of Avogadro's technology, but said the first product would launch in a few months and focus on real-time messaging that could send a user different information based on location and context.
For instance, the service could sense that travellers are approaching their hotels and prompt them to check in through their mobile phone. Or it could deliver a flight delay notice to a traveller's office computer before he or she left for the airport.
"We think we are the first of the next wave of companies that will build deep integration between the wireless Internet and the wired Internet," Reardon said. "We are trying, on a platform level, to try to solve the problem of how users tend to see the wireless Web as independent from the Web on their desktop."
Avogadro would also develop business uses that would help a company's employees keep updated with the latest information whether in the office or working in the field, Reardon said.
Reardon said he expected that telecommunications companies would make up a third of Avogadro's customer base, with Web-based ventures accounting for the rest.
Avogadro's backers include Rob Glaser, chief executive of Seattle-based Internet media software company RealNetworks Inc., and Neal Stephenson, author of best-selling science fiction novels "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon."
And the name Avagadro?
It comes from 19th-century Italian chemist and physicist Amedeo Avogadro, who formulated Avogadro's Law concerning the properties of gasses and Avogadro's number, which is 6.0221367 times 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
"We love companies that have a bigger vision and Avogadro's number was about the biggest number we could find," Reardon laughed. |
