Wireless start-ups show their wares.

PHOENIX - Forget about reinventing the wheel. The hottest new wireless companies, which took center stage at last week's Demo 2002 conference, said their plan is to simply repurpose it.

Many of the more than 65 presenters at the IDG Executive Forums event showed how they are shying away from products and services that require costly buildouts or forklift upgrades in favor of those that take advantage of existing infrastructure and technologies.

"Only 1% of the wireless capacity is being used today," said Roland Van der Meer, a partner at investment firm ComVentures. "That is highly inefficient." The key, he said, is getting more users onto the nets that exist.

Among the companies addressing this inefficiency was talk-of-the-show Boingo Wireless, which introduced a trio of wireless Internet services designed to help mobile users who have 802.11b cards locate nearby wireless LANs (see story, page 33).

With software that can be downloaded from the Web, users can "sniff out" wireless LANs in cafes, airports, hotels or buildings. Boingo, which keeps a directory of wireless LANs across the country, charges users a monthly fee to connect to these wireless LANs via its broadband service.

While Boingo's service is aimed at populated areas, Space Data's new offering for wireless service providers has a more rural focus.

The company plans to take advantage of the twice-daily launching of several thousand weather balloons throughout the U.S. to increase the reach of existing wireless networks. Space Data will attach wireless repeaters to weather balloons throughout the country that will hover at about 100,000 feet. It then will charge wireless carriers for the use of these repeaters to extend their services. CEO Gerald Knoblach said making use of the weather balloons would keep operating costs down and provide for more widespread coverage than cell towers or satellite systems.

Another company, ClickServices, showed software that companies could use to add mobile access to applications. The vendor's Movera Server and Studio products, which work hand in hand with popular application servers, let developers create content once and provide access to it via different markup languages and protocols.

Yet another vendor, Mitigo, is exploiting digital camera technology found in the latest mobile devices to enable new applications. "Users were not having much luck using that equipment for videoconferencing," according to Sanford Squires, a consultant at Mitigo. The company says its CodePoint software lets cell phones and PDAs recognize bar codes that can be used to conduct e-commerce transactions.

Squires said one use for the service would be if someone needed to hail a cab. The user could point his or her cell phone at a bar code on a taxi stand sign and within seconds, receive confirmation of a pickup and an estimated waiting time. The service would even let the customer pay using the mobile device.

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and Demo presenter Linden Lab, said the wealth of new wireless offerings is evidence that companies are not being stymied by worries about security.

"Wireless companies are going to do well," he said. "There is internal demand from the line of business folks that will compel IT to figure out how to best integrate wireless technologies." n