Demomobile notebook

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - At first, you think maybe it's the California sunshine that incubates these wireless industry entrepreneurs who have 6 minutes apiece at the annual Demomobile show to persuade a group of jaded investors and reporters that their product is the next big thing.

Then you learn that:

• Radixs is from Singapore and wants to challenge Microsoft and Palm with a new mobile operating system.

• Microwave Photonics originated in Britain - not known for its sunshine - as the result of 10 years and $20 million worth of research by British Telecom.

• FireTide is a wireless LAN equipment vendor in Honolulu, where one imagines "mobility" to be walking to your canvas deck chair on the beach.

• Xybernaut develops its custom-built, rugged, Windows XP-embedded handhelds - which look like they could almost bounce off a concrete floor - in Virginia.

Plenty of the 38 companies invited to Demomobile (a show organized by IDG Executive Forums, a part of Network World) this year actually do come from California. But the point is that creating ideas and translating of them into workable software and hardware is something like a universal human instinct.

After watching the Demomobile presentations, which range from deft to almost embarrassingly amateurish, it's apparent that the creative instinct is different from the survival one.

Besides the companies highlighted last week, several others showed products worth noting.

Aeroprise, Mountain View, Calif.

Mobile Gateway

This software, billed as a mobile workflow program, is designed to let companies reorganize a back-end application, such as help desk software, and tailor it for mobile devices.

The software includes a gateway program to handle requests from mobile end users, a "personalization console" that lets them pick what they want to see on the device and an "application adapter" that feeds the console with specific features from a given application.

An adapter for the Remedy Help Desk application lets end users work with the personalization console to change the sequence of items appearing on a trouble ticket just by selecting options shown by the Aeroprise software. A smartphone user will choose one sequence, a PDA user another.

Version 3.0, just released, includes a feature that lets the software notice a new device, or version of a device, when logging on. The software then can read information from the device and automatically create a configuration file for it.

The Mobile Gateway is available as separate components or a single package. A package of its five main components starts at $25,000. Price varies with the number of users.

Aventail, Seattle

EX-1500 SSL VPN Appliance

The Aventail box sits in a data center rack to create a Secure Sockets Layer connection that lets remote workers access corporate data from any device with a Web browser, over any network. It eliminates the need in traditional IP Security-based VPNs to download and maintain a VPN client on remote notebooks and handhelds. The software in the EX-1500 lets network managers set up very specific policies for what end users can access. The appliance makes use of whatever existing authentication system, such as RADIUS, that a company already has.