The Bluetooth Daily News, Monaco
June 9, 2001 -- A gaggle of venture capitalists gathered at the Grand Hotel down the road on Tuesday afternoon to field a volley of business pitches by high-tech hopefuls in one way or another connected with the conference. While the presentations themselves were hidden away in a high-security wing of the hotel, and with an audience strictly limited to people with enough money to be worth the risk that spilling one’s killer app beans entails, the bulk of the presentations seem to have been in the middleware area. WDC solutions, for instance, is ready to ship a synching middleware layer that uses OBEX with SyncML features to make it easier to write synchronisation applications. Arun Acharya, the company’s CFO, was making the pitch to the pocketbooks on Tuesday. "There’s a big demand for middleware," he said," which everybody seems to be neglecting, because they are going into the stack or apps. We’ve done a stack to learn from it, but it also helped us to build alliances." The company has worked with CSR, among other hardware vendors, and is in the process of finalising deals with several ISVs. Another interesting company pitching its idea was Paris-based BlooPhone. BlooPhone is awaiting delivery next week of prototype voice-over-IP mobile handsets, up to seven of which can dial direct over the Internet from within the Bluetooth coverage area of a PC. It’s an interesting convergence of technologies, although Bluetooth’s lack of a hand-off specification for roaming may put a bit of a crimp in your mobile style. BlooPhone, who isn’t actually exhibiting at the Congress, has planned a hack for this to be implemented later this year.
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