Intava wants to boost wireless web

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By Alexei Oreskovic

(IDG) -- The wireless Web may be the next frontier to companies, but to consumers it's still a pipe dream. A recent survey from Cahners In-Stat found that a mere 3 percent of respondents had used wireless Internet services.

Aside from technical limitations, a common complaint among consumers and industry analysts alike is that there's not a whole lot to access.

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Intava, a startup company whose software allows the "little guys" to build wireless Web sites, hopes to change that. While there are at least a dozen so-called wireless development platforms already, they cost thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands) of dollars. Intava's product, dubbed Gravity, will sell for less than $600. "It's been very hard and expensive to build for mobile, so there's not a lot of content out there," says CEO Troy Carroll.

Generating lots of content has worked before. NTT DoCoMo's I-mode service in Japan has over 25 million subscribers accessing the Net from their phones, in part by allowing anyone who knows basic HTML to build an I-mode-compatible wireless Web site. According to NTT DoCoMo, there are 1,480 officially sanctioned sites and over 40,000 independent ones.

So far, thousands of developers have taken Intava's bait, downloading free beta versions of Gravity. The ultimate goal is to achieve the same scale as Macromedia's popular Dreamweaver Web-authoring tool, which sold 1.5 million copies. Now that could lead to some serious surfing.