June 2008 IssuE
Feature
The Wild Wireless West
The rush to wireless keeps building momentum, but Alberta has found a way
to get — and keep — small- and mid-sized companies in the game. And large companies are happy with what the Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies has to offer, too
BY BILL CORBETT
Freelance Writer
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WIRES FOR WIRELESS |
Companies hoping to catch the latest telecommunications wave are increasingly going wireless. But cashing in on this exploding global market means much more than just pulling the plug on the wired world.
The technical and marketing challenges are considerable in the rapidly evolving wireless industry. For one thing, companies must choose a wireless standard suitable for their product.
TELUS cell phones use CDMA technology. Over at Rogers, the standard is GSM. Among the others out there are Bluetooth, 802.11 and the emerging 802.16.
As well, wireless developers must ensure their application — say, the ability to download movies onto cell phones — works with various styles of phones and will communicate seamlessly with all the links in a network.
“The whole wireless industry is still in its infancy,” says Duane Sniezek, P.Eng., chief operating officer of the Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies, or NEWT for short. “Amazing things are going to happen in the next five to 10 years that we can’t even imagine at the moment. But right now, it’s still the Wild West.”
NEWT is a not-for-profit wireless development centre in northeast Calgary, providing hardware design, software design, implementation and test support, all on a fee basis, to developers of wireless products and services. It is Alberta’s leg-up in the burgeoning — and highly competitive — wireless industry. Dozens of companies, large and small, have ready access to the world-class expertise, labs and equipment it offers.
NEWT’s 85 member companies include wireless firms in the United States, Finland, Germany, Singapore, China and elsewhere in Canada. The majority, however, are based in Alberta.
“Our focus is to help accelerate the development of wireless products that are ready for the market,” says Stephen Mroszczak, P.Eng., NEWT’s engineering manager. “We can help companies do it a lot faster, cheaper and more on target. If we weren’t here, people would do it more slowly, not do it at all or fail.
“You want to maximize the chances your product is working before you take it to the market. It’s much better than testing it on your customer. That can be catastrophic if it doesn’t work properly.”
Not Born Yesterday
The services Mr. Mroszczak describes make plenty of sense today. But believe it or not, the seeds for NEWT were planted about a decade ago.
Nortel was looking for other companies to share its underused CDMA network testing facility in Calgary, so it approached the Alberta Government to help. The province was intrigued. So too was the City of Calgary, which had already identified wireless technology and telecommunications as one of several economic development clusters poised for rapid growth.
Both governments wanted to go further and promote a more diversified wireless development lab than Nortel’s. So in 2002 NEWT was created, with the support of 10 founding members. Among these founders were Alberta Innovation and Science, Western Economic Diversification Canada and industry heavyweights Hewlett-Packard Canada, IBM Canada, Nortel, Sun Microsystems of Canada, TELUS and TRLabs.
NEWT is, in fact, a division of TRLabs, Canada’s largest independent research organization for information and communications technology. At the time of NEWT’s arrival, TRLabs was already doing wireless research in its Calgary location.
Adjacent to TRLabs’ operations, NEWT’s lab houses some of the world’s most technically advanced wireless equipment, backed by a technical team of radio frequency engineers, software developers, system administrators, network architects and project managers.
“With more than 200 engineers working on the development of our products, we knew that having an organization like NEWT nearby would have a positive impact on us,” says David Martin, executive chairman and co-founder of SMART Technologies, one of NEWT’s member companies.
Big Reach for Small Companies
NEWT isn’t just for large players, however. Says Mr. Sniezek: “Three-quarters of our members are small- to medium-sized enterprises that are trying to get wireless products into the market. We help them develop and test products, and we also help them identify potential technologies and whether a product they want to develop will fit in a market.”
Calgary-based Emscan Corp. is a typical small NEWT member. A leader in developing magnetic, near-field measurement technologies, Emscan produces tools that enable companies to quickly evaluate and optimize the design of antennas in portable wireless devices.
But as a small company, Emscan lacks the resources to fully test and market its products. Fortunately, NEWT is just 10 blocks away.
“They’ve done a number of things for us that would normally be out of reach for a company our size,” says David Gregory, P.Eng., Emscan’s president. “For one thing, we were able to access a piece of elaborate wireless test equipment, as well as NEWT’s expertise in using it. This has helped us reduce our time to market and to demonstrably validate product performance claims.”
Mr. Gregory continues: “They also helped us with informal marketing support such as product naming, and provided ideas on lead generation. And their connections helped us reach potential customers in Canada and the Far East.”
Like Emscan, the majority of NEWT’s Alberta members are clustered in Calgary. A few are located elsewhere, however.
Meta4hand, for example, is an Edmonton firm that allows customers to access large, complex amounts of data via cell phones or personal digital assistants by linking these devices to “dumb” larger screens in homes, offices and public places such as airports. NEWT helped Meta4hand test its technology on GSM frequencies to ensure the smooth introduction of the company’s software products into European and other global markets.
SMART Technologies — a world leader in developing interactive whiteboards — is a large Calgary company that has several times used NEWT’s lab and equipment to test and analyze the performance of its instructional software. One such application is its Senteo interactive response system, in which each student in a classroom has a wireless remote for interacting with the teacher and a whiteboard.
The remotes send messages via radio frequency technology to a central receiver, allowing the teacher to instantly and electronically quiz, survey and assess students.
SMART used the NEWT lab to test early versions of the Senteo system, along with such issues as bandwidth constraints and the quality of radio frequency signals when many wireless devices were being used at the same time. By troubleshooting the system during its design and manufacturing phases, SMART was able to fully test the product before it was shipped to customers.
“Like all technology companies developing products for a global market, speed is critical,” says SMART’s David Martin. “It’s not very efficient if you have to jump on a plane to California and be one of a bunch of people in line to access test equipment. You can resolve a problem a lot more quickly if you can jump in a car and drive over to NEWT.
“We know their people, and they know us. It gets to the point where they understand who we are and what we need to test. We can start a sentence and they can finish it,” he says. “We certainly expect to continue using their equipment and people.”
More Info
Shift Your FocusTo Finding Solutions “A lot of companies fail because they try to sell a technology they’ve developed,” says Duane Sniezek, P.Eng., chief operating officer of the Calgary-based Network for Emerging Wireless Technologies. “But what customers want is business solutions to their problems.” In other words, you have to give customers what they want, not what you think they need. This can include identifying market and technology trends, analyzing the competition, targeting products to the right markets and developing strategies for managing the life cycle of products. NEWT experts can also help members establish business contacts with potential customers around the world. “We help make companies consciously incompetent. That means we help them become aware of what they don’t know,” says Mr. Sniezek, who has started a dozen companies during his 27 years in the technology sector. “Typically, what kills companies is what blindsides them. So we help them understand things that are potential roadblocks for them.” |