Reqwireless

» see reqwireless.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The browser was 51 kilobytes. That is the fact worth keeping about Reqwireless: in the years when a web page on a phone meant WAP, a stripped text format served from the carrier's own walled deck, a small company in Waterloo shipped a Java midlet smaller than a photograph that fetched ordinary HTML off the ordinary web and drew it on a handset display. WebViewer handled forms and image maps, kept cookies and ran JavaScript. It also spoke FTP and gopher, in 2003, on a telephone.

The company registered reqwireless.com in August 2001 and had products on sale within months, run out of Kitchener-Waterloo with a 519 number under the contact link. The pitch on the site was for developers rather than consumers: programming interfaces for J2ME MIDP, so that Java code written for a desktop would run on a handset without being rewritten. There was a JDBC driver for talking to a real database from a phone, plus libraries for HTML and for email.

Turkey had the handsets for this. Java midlets on Nokia keypads were completely normal here by 2003, and anyone who swapped games around at university knew what a JAR file was. What Turkey did not have was any reason to pay for mobile data by the kilobyte to browse the open web on a 128 by 128 screen, so the audience for a product like this stayed thin everywhere, not only in Ankara.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually sold ~

Two businesses ran in parallel. One was the library license, aimed at device makers and carriers, which is the sort of deal that keeps a small company alive without ever producing a headline. The other was retail: WebViewer at twenty dollars, EmailViewer for Palm and BlackBerry, both downloaded straight off the site. There were viewers aimed at Hotmail accounts too.

Twenty dollars bought unlimited upgrades and unlimited lifetime use of the service behind it, because WebViewer leaned on a server that reshaped desktop pages for small screens. Opera Mini worked on the same principle and arrived around the same time with a company behind it. WebViewer ran on more handsets, and Opera had the distribution.

~ the summer nothing was said ~

Around the middle of 2005, Reqwireless quietly stopped selling anything. Existing customers kept their support and were still allowed free transfers of a license from one handset to another, which is the behavior of a company winding down carefully rather than collapsing. At least one person in the mobile press noticed and read it as a company in trouble.

It was not trouble. Google had bought the company in July 2005 and simply did not mention it. The acquisition stayed unannounced until a reporter at Canada's National Post got Google to confirm it on 6 January 2006, six months after the fact. Terms were never disclosed. The only public number is from Google's own filings for that year, which account for 22.5 million dollars spread across several acquisitions, Reqwireless among them, alongside a Brazilian search company and a small mobile operating system startup called Android.

~ what Google kept ~

Google took the team and the address. The products came off sale, reqwireless.com decayed into a hosting provider's default page, and the name survives mostly in the footnotes of other people's acquisition lists. The Waterloo engineers became Google's foothold in the city, and the client-server trick of rendering a heavy page somewhere else and shipping the small result to a handset is exactly what Google shipped soon after in its mobile mail and maps clients.

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