Thursday, July 30, 2009

Visiting Wireless Generation

At the beginning of the month I got an email from Andrea Reibel, Wireless Generation VP for Corporate Communications, inviting me to visit next time I was in NYC, so I arranged to stop by on the way to my parents' last week. I had a nice lunch with Andrea, a wide-ranging two hour conversation with some of their geeks covering SchoolTool, SIF, a nationwide educational data "utility," the Semantic Web, and other fun topics, and then talked with Andrea and WG president and COO Josh Ribel for about an hour.

It was a little confusing because of the many hats I wear and a rather vague initial invitation that I didn't bother to clarify. With Josh I seemed to be primarily wearing my quasi-journalist hat. The main thing I learned is how deeply Wireless Generation is entwined with the big NYC tech initiatives, ARIS and now School of One. This is good news, more or less, because I can't think of another company I'd trust to not completely screw these up. And I had been wondering if any of the ARIS work was going to become available as a commercial product/service elsewhere (probably), and again, WG is less likely to turn that into a rolling disaster.

2 comments:

Carlo Cabanilla said...

Hey Tom, didn't realize you visited WGen, sorry I missed you. Looks like you got a better meeting out of it than I could have gotten you. Did you notice any "synergies" with our tech and yours in your visit?

Tom Hoffman said...

No particularly low-hanging fruit. The problem is that the WG customers with the funkiest, most annoying SIS's would also be the funkiest, most annoying systems to migrate onto SchoolTool.