Wireless devices have become so widespread that some folks may need professional help to use them.
At least that’s the premise of a business launched this month by Dan Croft, a wireless industry veteran who started Mission Critical Wireless LLC based in Deerfield.
Croft said he knows that accessing electronic mail wirelessly has become so important that some large firms have added information technology workers solely to support the BlackBerry and similar devices.
“Wireless e-mail has moved from being a science fair project to becoming a mission critical application,” said Croft. “But for most companies, the level of technical support just isn’t there.”
MCW will provide wireless service maintenance and customer support agreements to small and medium-size firms that cannot afford to keep in-house expertise, Croft said.
“A lot of people might say their wireless carrier can handle support,” said Croft. “But if you need someone to tell you how to use your BlackBerry to open and modify an e-mail attachment, do you really want to call a cell phone company that mostly gets questions about phone services?”
In his earlier career as an executive for Motient Corp., the Lincolnshire-based wireless data carrier, Croft said the service sometimes got calls from harried executives wondering how to turn on a BlackBerry.
“They’d have been given the things weeks before and just carried them around,” he said, “but then they had an e-mail they had to see and couldn’t figure out how to operate the equipment.”
Croft said there are functions available for the BlackBerry that most people don’t know about, such as using the device to access a printer to get a hard copy of a long e-mail attachment.
“We believe this is a gap in the market that we can fill,” Croft said. “We can show people how to be more productive.”
The firm operates with six people in the Chicago area, but Croft hopes to expand into other markets and add more employees as his client base grows.
Phone works: Joe Ziemba has a surefire means of getting attention: He drops his cell phone into a vat of clear liquid and invites someone to call it.
The phone rings like a champ, and Ziemba pulls it from the liquid to take the call. Pretty impressive. If he wants to, he can get a bigger vat and stick a laptop computer or a TV into the liquid.
It’s not the waterproof nature of electronic gadgets that Ziemba is demonstrating, but the liquid, which looks like water but isn’t. It’s a chemical, fluorinated ketone, created by the 3M Co. for the purpose of extinguishing fires.
Ziemba’s firm, Ansul Inc., of Marinette, Wis., makes sprinkler systems and has devised one using the 3M liquid, which goes by the brand name of Novec 1230. Of course when it’s in the system, no one ever sees Novec 1230 as a liquid because it’s under pressure and when it comes out of sprinkler nozzles, it is a gas that extinguishes fires.
But the fact that Novec 1230 looks like water is helpful to Ziemba as marketing manager for Ansul, which is a unit of Tyco Fire & Security.
That’s because Novec 1230 evaporates about 25 times faster than water and won’t harm electronics. Even though systems using Novec 1230 cost three times more than water-based systems, many find it worth the price for protecting libraries and computer rooms where water damage can be as big a problem as fire damage.
Besides cell phones and TV sets, Ziemba also dips books into the Novec 1230 liquid to show that it is harmless to paper.
“It’s a carbon-based liquid,” he said. “It looks like water, but its properties are completely different.”
Taking a sip of the stuff, he said, “would be a big mistake.”
