In the Beginning...

In 1989, the president of our company, Konny Zsigo, had formed a new company to provide training to cellular phone companies. There was only one subject, "wireless data," an elusive and much joked-about emerging market where cell phones could be used to send computer data for things like faxing and email. Boring, perhaps, but nonetheless a promising use for cell phones beyond just carrying on a conversation.

Konny's company grew, not in size so much, but in market share. By 1995, Zsigo Wireless Training had an 85% market share in wireless data training. Nobody knew what he was talking about, but everyone was taking his classes. By the time Konny sold the company in 2001, Konny had personally trained 38,000 people in the cellular industry. Everyone knew Konny.

In early 2000, Konny's courses gave him an idea. If cellphones were going to be used for data transmission, somebody would need to write software for the phones. Just like in the PC industry -- there is hardware, and there is software.  So he figured that if wireless data was ever going to take off, the cellular phone carriers had to become very receptive to the computer industry.

So he coined a new term, a "wireless developer", and began running conferences under that name. He also convinced several carriers that they needed "wireless developer programs" that would help them attract software developers. One thing led to another, and before we knew it, the training company was sold off to a bigger training company in England, the conference business was sold to a major print publisher, and WirelessDeveloper (the new name for the new company) was running 22 developer programs around the world.

The Problem...

Things were rolling along nicely through the "dot com" era. However, after 9/11 and other events, it became clear to Konny that being a member of a developer program was nice for the 22,000 developers the company was managing, but it wasn't putting food on anyone's table. In fact, there were really a whole lot of companies in those databases that were not all that serious about developing wireless applications, and the carriers were now faced with a new problem of how to sift out the really good ones.

Ironically, WirelessDeveloper  had created the very problem it was trying to solve. The company brought in so many prospects that almost all of them sat idle with no deal flow. It was, as one observer put it, a "giant parking lot for all of the people the carriers didn't want to do business with."

The Eureka Moment...

One day, one of those 22,000 developers called the offices of WirelessDeveloper, got Konny on the line and said "hey, I've joined lots of your developer programs and you guys are really great. But, could I just pay you guys some money have you DO this for me? In other words, instead of teaching me how to do it myself -- can you just do it for me?"

And to make a long story short, that's the day that WirelessDeveloper became the WirelessDeveloper Agency.

Copyright 2005, WirelessDeveloper Agency.  All Rights Reserved