Mobile Mecca

The confluence of software and wireless technology in the Pacific Northwest has put the region in a favorable position as it moves toward an anytime-anywhere mobile computing society.

By Stuart Glascock |   January 2010   |  FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Ontela. Perlego. Opanga. Gist. Zumobi. Swype. Impinj. Geopage. Motricity. Medio.

Sounds like the dessert menu at an upscale, tropical bistro or an indie rock weekend lineup. Actually, these names are mobile and wireless businesses that reflect a vibrant and uniquely symbiotic slice of the Northwest economy.

Like the constellation of software enterprises that coalesced around Microsoft, the still-rising Northwest mobile and wireless ecosystem creates a regional specialty. At the same time, it spices up the area's economy.

All the ingredients blend like a masterful soufflé: large anchor companies spinning out skilled entrepreneurs, venture capital, an environment conducive to innovation and incubation. The result: new wealth and local jobs in the midst of tough times.

Consider:

• Clearwire Inc., founded in Kirkland in 2003 by cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw, provides approximately 1,700 jobs, and posted $68.8 million in revenue for the third quarter of 2009 and offers high-speed wireless internet services to about 475,000 consumers and businesses in the United States and Europe.
• Bellevue-based Snapin Software, which provides instructional software for smartphones to customers such as Bellevue-based T-Mobile, sold itself last year to Nuance Communications for $180 million.
• Seattle-based QPass, which handled billing for small web purchases before seeing revenues plunge during the dot-com bust, reinvented itself as a mobile billing and digital content distributor. In 2006, it was sold for $275 million to Amdocs, where its technology processes mobile transactions.

The Puget Sound region's success in the wireless sector has been driven by the unusual concentration of wireless and software talent that migrated here over the years as well as the large number of local companies in the full spectrum of technologies that play strategic roles in this rapidly expanding industry.

If you were to look for "the confluence of carrier DNA, software expertise and internet business experience," you would have to go to London to find a more dense contribution than Seattle, says Thomas Huseby, managing partner of SeaPoint Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested heavily in the wireless sector. "You can't find it in any other city in the U.S."

Huseby has co-founded or managed several wireless companies and now serves on the boards of half a dozen startups. He is currently chairman of three wireless startups, including Ontela, which makes photo software for camera phones, and Zumobi, which creates social networking applications for smartphones.

The Puget Sound region is a particularly strong beneficiary of a relatively new trend: growing use of the cell phone as an all-purpose

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