If there’s been good news recently about the wireless sector in Southern California, it generally has emanated from San Diego. Except when it comes to Jamdat, the Los Angeles wireless entertainment company.
In late July, Jamdat inked an agreement to provide applications and distribution technology to LivePlanet Inc., the Santa Monica start-up founded by movie producers Chris Moore and Sean Bailey and actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
LivePlanet will need some compelling technology to fulfill its stated promise to “break down barriers between traditional media, new media and the physical world.” Jamdat will play a role in providing the wireless component to LivePlanet’s reality-based show “The Runner,” which is scheduled to air on network television later this year.
Earlier this month, Verizon Wireless said it was throwing Jamdat’s multi-player “Gladiator” game on its games deck. That licensing deal is significant for Jamdat, given that Verizon Wireless is the largest wireless service provider on the playing field.
Founded in March by a few former Activision Inc. executives, Jamdat already has a hit with Gladiator, easily one of the most popular wireless games. Chief Executive Mitch Lasky says more than 800,000 unique users have tried the game, and they’ve racked up more than 10 million minutes of airtime since the game went online last October.
That’s enough airtime to attract some solid partners. Besides Verizon, Jamdat has existing alliances with Sprint PCS, AT & T; Wireless and Quest Communications. Other backers include Qualcomm, Intel and Sun Microsystems.
If They Get It, They Will Come
Most of the companies doing deals and making news in the technology sector lack gladiators, Afflecks and Damons. In fact, most of them possess downright mundane technology.
They do, however, retain the techie proclivity to blaze new language trails.
Consider some of the players that got funded in the past two weeks. One develops photonic energy for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Another said it “discovers new medicines by using proprietary knowledge of proteins and chemistry to provide fundamental information on protein structure and function on a genome-wide scale.” Huh?
Another develops components for optical amplifier systems. One, more simply, said it is “a resource planning infrastructure provider.”
One of the most recent examples locally is Rockwell Scientific, the spin-off from Rockwell International focused on research and development and commercialization of mostly aerospace-related technologies. It announced a few weeks ago that it had received a $6.4 million contract from the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The objective of the program, according to Rockwell, “is the development of transistors based on new types of compound semiconductors that employ antimony as a primary constituent.”
It gets worse. “These new antimonide-based compound semi-conductors have superior electronic properties and lower turn-on voltages compared to present-day semiconductor materials from silicon, gallium arsenide and indium phosphide.”
In plain English, what Rockwell will be developing will amplify digital signals without adding extra noise and without consuming more power, according to Bobby Barar, whose official title is Manager of Advanced III-V Devices. (The Roman numerals refer to families on the periodic table of elements.)
Standing Up to Pushing Up
One scrappy content management company took a stand against Wonderbras last week. SurfControl, a Scotts Valley-based firm, rallied on behalf of employers in California, who SurfControl said lost workers’ attention and bandwidth when Wonderbra, a division of the Sarah Lee Corp., unveiled its new line of figure-enhancing undergarments in a live online fashion show last Wednesday afternoon.
SurfControl decried the Webcast and others like it as a major distraction to employees that would end up hurting the bottom line.
SurfControl President Kevin Blakeman said Victoria’s Secret’s May 2000 fashion show was viewed by 1.5 million users and consumed a massive amount of bandwidth the equivalent of 200 million T1 lines being shut down for 20 minutes.
An outrage to be sure. But Blakeman has nothing against undergarments. He said he just wants companies to know how much money is lost to surfing and to show them how to “keep employees productive.”
Staff reporter Hans Ibold can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225 ext. 230.
