Rod McQueen, an award-winning Canadian author, is writing a book about Research in Motion and has established a weblog to, in part, chronicle his research for the book.
McQueen writes in his weblog, “At the moment, one of the happening times I’m focusing on is the pre-BlackBerry days of the mid-1990s, when Research in Motion (RIM) founder Mike Lazaridis was developing a two-way pager and looking for a market.
“RIM struck up a relationship with BellSouth Wireless, which had spent $300 million on building a network. The two needed each other: BellSouth wanted products to sell to consumers; RIM required a network on which its pagers would operate.”
The Frezza, Reiter connection
Among the wireless data experts McQueen already has communicated with is Bill Frezza, now a general partner at the venture capital firm of Adams Capital Management, but previously the director of marketing and business development for Ericsson’s wireless data division.
I’ve known Bill for years — even before he joined Ericsson, and worked for Agilis (you have to be an old time wireless data person to remember that company). Agilis wanted to create a drop-dead great wireless computer that included different wireless radio “slices.”
At Ericsson, Bill came up with the idea for the a wireless data “package” that included in a leather zip-up case: The Ericsson one-pound wireless data “Mobidem” modem connected via a cable to a Hewlett-Packard LX95 palmtop computer that ran RadioMail’s wireless data application over Ram Mobile Data’s Mobitex network.
(More about RadioMail in another posting soon.)
Wireless geeks
If you were a wireless geek you carried the package and could be seen at conventions and elsewhere typing on the tiny — but usable — HP keyboard. Everyone (or just about everyone) who used the package loved it.
It was a great packaging idea. There was nothing like it for wireless e-mail. Research in Motion originally created wireless data middleware but realized that hardware + service was where the money was, not middleware (a critical component of wireless data, but no one wanted to pay for it).
I started the world’s first wireless data newsletter, Mobile Data Report,” in 1988 (and the first wireless data conference in 1989). Bill sent several years of the newsletter to McQueen.
In fact, McQueen writes in his weblog that, “For me, reading the newsletter by Executive Editor Alan A. Reiter, has been like traveling in a time machine complete with gossipy bits about the wireless world that was just a-borning.”
BlackBerry today
I’m going to speak with McQueen on Tuesday as part of the research for his book.
I’ve been using RIM’s products since before they created the BlackBerry, including the “pre-BlackBerry” — a very large flip-top pager that was the first product before the slimmer BlackBerry pager that ran over Ram’s network.
I typically carry two cellular phones: One is always a BlackBerry because of the superior keyboard and excellent push e-mail capabilities and another is a feature-rich multimedia handset that I’m testing.
It’s not unusual for me to carry three and sometimes four handsets since I test them. But when it comes to plain ol’ e-mail, the BlackBerry remains terrific.
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