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The author urges us to watch his company: "Definitely one to watch in the months ahead.". Sadly, there has been little to watch since the Hutchinson 3G deal (any revenue yet?)- which predated the 6/28/2002 message. OK, there was the non corroborated Amena story. The Hutch deal gave the company a PR injection. And it rightly milked the PR opportunity but Elata has since robustly failed to make an impression. Its competitors have secured numerous deals. The company lacks clarity of vision and a sense of purpose. Its web pages give an impression of an immature dot com focused around technology with little understanding of the market place. And even at that it isn't a technology leader (not that it needs to be to be the leader to be successful).
CEO, Freed, look at your technical/marketing team and do something or you'll be goners. The market is tough but that is no excuse: Hackneyed cliches and grandslamming are no substitute for understanding customers and having a viable business.
WF
Well, it was expected. How long can a spin docter employing 50 guys last with limited resources? The company was known as hype masters with a dotcom management who did not have a clue about the mobile industry or OTA provisioning space.
They have done everything except commercially deploying their platform while all the others in the industry have been quietly gaining new operators.
Their al-Sahaf alias CEO has been saying since 2001 that they have some trials with some very big operators. Probably the longest trial ever.
Elata also has a marketing guy called Mat Hoopster who went around saying GÇ£Operators have to decide now or they will die! GÇ£
In terms of customers, Amena in Spain has commercially deployed and launched services using elata senses software (covered by Unstrung), to join 3's global affiliates and, although currently unannounced, elata are deploying the platform commercially where it has already been selected over competitive offerings.
Gavin Freed
CEO - elata
Drop CSR, and add another UWB silicon startup - a fabless semi called Discrete Time Communications. DTC is bleeding GÇ£early stageGÇ¥ and still seeking their first institutional round, but the two founders there were pioneers in UWB at Fantasma Networks three years before Xtreme Spectrum was even founded. Fantasma unfortunately went out of business because they were simply too early (the FCC took their time approving UWB), but only after 50+ patents were issued and pioneering work was done. Then as consultants, they helped turn General Atomics into a significant UWB player (GA and Philips announced in Jan a deal to co-develop UWB chipsets). Since founding DTC late last year, theyGÇÖve gotten themselves cozy with IntelGÇÖs informal GÇ£multi-bandGÇ¥ consortium, and DTCGÇÖs CEO is widely respected within the UWB community as well as within the IEEEGÇÖs 802.15.3a TG thatGÇÖs currently evaluating UWB.
Taking your criteria, GÇ£a chance of hitting the jackpot in terms of getting bought for megabucksGǪGÇ¥, IGÇÖd put these guys in that category. There are two camps within the 802.15.3a TG currently duking it out for standard supremacy - one lead by Intel and one by Xtreme Spectrum. If Intel wins (who wants to bet against that?), DTCGÇÖs one of only two silicon startups already in IntelGÇÖs camp. That hints of acquisition to meGǪ
IGÇÖd suggest a PHY player, but they are all larger companies. So no matter who wins at the tag layer, check out GlobeRanger (backed by Sevin Rosen and Center Point with a $10.8M A Round). They have just demoGÇÖd a software application at Microsoft's Mobility Developers Conference that enables the efficiencies of GÇ£wirelessGÇ¥ to the process of capturing RFID data within the enterprise GÇô turning this data into information - then tying this info into backend enterprise systems. In real-timeGǪ
No matter what hardware wins in this space, the software player that best facilitates the seamless transition of emerging RFID processes into the enterprise will be a huge winnerGǪ Every enterprise that deals with physical goods will be impacted by RFID within the next several yearsGǪ Tying this into existing enterprise systems will be a huge opportunity, and GlobeRanger is positioned well.
http://www.exi.com/index.html
i guess if it doesn't have the word bluetooth or wifi maybe it's not sexy enough ;)
High-end consumer electronics (flat screen TVs and set-top boxes) will probably be the first applications to be targeted because they are expensive enough to absorb the price of the UWB chipset.
Initially (end-2004, 2005) it seems that the UWB chipset will cost more than a Bluetooth or 802.11 alternative, if only because mass-production will take some time to ramp up.
The impression I get is that the price, size and power metrics of the first generation of UWB chipsets probably wonGÇÖt be good enough to put in cell phones and PC peripherals.
To date I think thereGÇÖs something like 31 different proposals before the IEEE TG 802.15.3a, which makes it tricky to pick a winner among the several UWB start-ups. Everybody is now waiting for the first GÇ£down-selectGÇ¥ vote at the 802.15.3a meeting in July.
People IGÇÖve spoken with are hoping that only 10 (or less) proposals will be left on the table after this meeting. They are fearful that the standards process will drag on for an eternity.
We already have XtremeSpectrum (and Skycross, which does UWB antenna) in the Unstrung 25, but certainly Discrete Time (Roberto Aiello and friends) are well-regarded by their peers.
IGÇÖd be interested to hear your views on multi-band (Intel et al.) versus dual-band (Xtreme, Motorola, etc). The UWB standards battle for looks like itGÇÖs going to get messy.