Creating industry buzz is easier than you might think.

By Beth Schultz
Network World, 09/11/00

Sometimes, the amount of vendor hogwash I have to sift through as an editor really gets to me. The e-mail pitches, press releases, Web presentations and other miscellany. One day, after a morning full of it, I cracked.

Pushing away from my desk, I grabbed my Nikes and headed off to the Y to purge my brain through sweat. But after 20 minutes on the Stairclimber, I still couldn't shake the buzz. With each up and down, another favorite public relations catch phrase whirred through my head - "best-of-breed functionality," "ubiquitous system support," "e-business solution" - argh!

Then, it came to me. I am a good writer, and that's all it seems to take to cash in on the latest technology trends. Surely I could come up with a product scheme worthy of some big venture capital bucks.

So I thought - up, down, up, down - and I thought some more, and came up with a revolutionary product concept that would leverage bleeding-edge systems to transform the way brick-and-mortar businesses architect mission-critical infrastructures. The product would guarantee extensibility in today's Web-enabled world and viability in the Internet Economy.

Like most of today's savvy e-entrepreneurs, I decided to forego trivialities such as lining up product engineers. Instead, I jumped right into the press release:

PRE-IPO START-UP TO TRANSFORM ENTERPRISE

NETWORKING WITH PARADIGM-SHIFTING E-BUSINESS SOLUTION THAT LEVERAGES LEADING-EDGE IP, WIRELESS AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGIES

CHICAGO - MindlessNetworking.com, a pre-IPO start-up, has incubated a product scheme that promises to unleash unlimited potential for enterprising user organizations seeking to converge their voice, data, video, multimedia, storage, ERP and CRM applications onto a single solution comprising wireless, optical and IP technologies.

Proactive, bleeding-edge IT executives working at Fortune 500 on down to SOHO environments will be able to implement this dynamic solution frictionlessly into their mission-critical infrastructures. The open source, cross-platform system is fully standards-compliant, working with every standard from the IEEE, the IETF, the ITU, the WAP Forum and the W3C.

Using the Web-ready system, enterprise IT executives will be able to create scalable, robust platforms that will empower their companies to gain critical mindshare among e-businesses, leveraging B2C, B2B, click-and-mortar, dot-com, e-marketplace and portal opportunities. User organizations will be able to mesh their infrastructures over broadband connections that capitalize on DWDM, optical networking, IP or WAP. IT executives will be able to optimize the platform for their environments, while running 24-7 front-end, back-end and customer-touching operations.

This revolutionary new optical-IP-wireless system will interoperate out of the box with major platforms widely deployed from vendors such as Cisco, IBM, Nortel Networks, Novell, Microsoft and Sun. Partnerships, alliances and relationships with additional vendors are in the works.

MindlessNetworking.com expects to grab major funding from leading Silicon Valley VC firms in the next quarter, and will entertain offers for second-tier and mezzanine funding. Once it gets monetized, the pre-IPO start-up will begin development work immediately, with an eye toward productization within six months.

"We're a prerevenue company right now, but with our powerful, all-encompassing wireless optical IP network platform, we're sure to ramp up quickly and capture significant market share rapidly," says Beth Schultz, company founder, CEO and altogether big thinker. Schultz calculates the potential market at $150 billion and expects the company to be on a path-to-profitability by first quarter of 2002.

MindlessNetworking.com is a leading start-up in the emerging new optical-IP-wireless network field. It is headquartered in Chicago, with virtual offices planned globally.

So there you have it. I just know this wireless-IP-optical networking solution will be a hit. Those of you who are skeptical can relax. I did the research - my Y does have Web-o-cycles, you know.

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