Doug Moeller - Autonet Mobile CTO

The beginnings of Autonet

Sometimes folks ask about how Sterling and I started Autonet Mobile, so I thought I’d share a bit of that history.

Back in 1998, while I was working at Bay Networks we acquired a wireless LAN company called NetWave. NetWave was one of the first companies to build a full product suite that implemented the new IEEE 802.11 standards and I was really interested in getting my hands on it. I had “played” with some pre-standards stuff before like the Karlbridge, but the NetWave solutions had the potential to be much more main stream. (At the time, the PCMCIA cards were $500 each, and the Access Point was $1500, but that was still a big improvement over the proprietary solutions that were out there before). So, though my job was really focused around IP routing protocols I managed to get a bunch of the NetWave stuff in the name of verifying their interoperability with our other products.

Having recently gotten a new car, my first task was putting in a killer new sound system. And being a diligent and constant ripper of my CD’s to mp3’s I really wanted to figure out how to get all that music in my car and keep it updated. So, it didn’t me long to figure out that I needed a computer in my car that had wireless capabilities in it so that it could to my home music collection. At this point, cellular data networks weren’t around, so I was just focused around doing the wireless sync while the car was in the garage.

I took a Standard ATX 486 motherboard, found a 12VDC power supply from a marine computer supplier, bought an IDE to PCMCIA adapter for the Netwave card, added a couple of HUGE 80GB drives; I found a really cool 8” VGA touchscreen that was surplus from some medical equipment, built a Plexiglas enclosure and a shutdown controller and installed it in my car. The part that was hardest to find, was a decent head unit that Aux-In capabilities for the audio, but I finally found a Blaupunkt unit that worked great.

Software wise I had to make some major compromises. I wanted it to be Unix, but there were just not any decent graphical music players for Unix so I ended up going with Windows 98, using Winamp as the music player and rsync to copy the music over. I eventually got around to adding a GPS, an OBD2 interface and video support. It was a great system and great learning process. I still have it somewhere in my garage.

So, fast forward a few years and a few startups and I’m working at a new startup that is looking at providing Satellite based connectivity to command center type vehicles. I’m really focused on developing the network and the CPE device and other folks are developing the antennas technology. I get way ahead of them in the development cycle and I look towards using these new cellular data cards in my system for testing purposes. And they were horrible! They worked OK in the test lab, but in actual vehicles they were worthless. So, I dropped that and that company soon imploded for other reasons anyway.

Sterling was working at that same company and he was always really interested in taking Internet connectivity to the mass automotive market. The Satellite stuff we were doing was cool, but it would never be economical enough and the antenna size would always be an issue. After we had both left that company he contacted me to see what it would take to make a cellular based solution work for real. I dove hard into for about 6 months and really came to understand the challenges of using TCP in a mobile wireless environment. It would have been so easy and elegant to solve these problems with a new protocol, but we knew that wasn’t feasible. There was just no way we’d ever be able to get every Operating System vendor, every router vendor and every cellular carrier to implement it so we had to come up with a solution that was completely transparent to the existing network infrastructure. And that’s where our TRU technology comes into play. I’ll explain our TRU Technology in detail in an upcoming post, but that’s what really makes us different then every one else.

So, after we came up with the TRU Technology, we implemented the first generation of it, built up 10 units and we started field-testing. That’s where we learned that we really had solved a problem that most people didn’t even realize existed. People we’re used to “dropped call” syndrome on their cell phones and they expected the data network to perform just as poorly. Next, we had to start a real company so that we could build lots of these and really establish this market. I’ll spare you the details of the joys of fund raising and venture capital, but we did it and now we’ve really established a new market.

One funny note is that we’re getting ready to release a home sync product, which is eerily close in function to that original Car PC I built in 1998. I still just want my mp3’s in my car more then anything :-)

Posted at 09:44PM Jun 28, 2009 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  |