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5o9’s strategy emerges

October 16, 2006

I covered a new Boulder startup called 5o9 back in March and at that time the founder (Liz Coker) was extremely vague as to what they were really up to.

Today, Liz told me that the company has exited “total stealth mode” as they progress towards their first full scale pilot tests. Indeed, the 5o9 web site provides much more information now. The company appears to be building a platform for content providers to use in order to facilitate mobile connections that securely access opt-in personal information such as identity and location.


5o9 calls their approach Pushing With Permission. The end user uses a mobile application to define what information they’re comfortable with sharing and to which content providers. This includes data such as current location (for GPS enabled mobile devices), name, address, phone number, type of device, etc.


Content providers install the 5o9 platform and in turn have access to this information and can optimize the mobile experience. A great example of this is to serve a location-based coupon, as shown here. The nice thing here is that I can use a single tool on my mobile device to configure what I want to share, when and with whom. This is a critical and missing element in the mobile strategy of most organizations. 5o9 proposes to provide the standard toolset to enable these features for content providers.

5o9 wants to “connect the physical and virtual worlds“, which is certainly quite the challenge. At least one blogger covering the “Personal World Connection (PWC)” space finds the 5o9 solution to have a chance of doing just that. In order to make a dent in this market, it seems to me that 5o9 will need some big time strategic partners such as cellular operators and/or device manufacturers to pre-install the mobile component. Distribution is often the challenge in the mobile space. 5o9’s solution has to be viewed as a well supported standard by the consumer. If not, it will be very hard to get people to make the effort to install the application just to gain benefits on a single site. Liz hinted to me that they are in the process of signing on a “very large strategic partner” which may address this very issue.

5o9 hopes to close a Series A investment round by the end of this year and have an initial product release by Q2 of 2007. Thanks to Liz Coker for the update.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 3 Comments 

5o9 Inc (Boulder) - Discussion with the founder

March 16, 2006

I spoke with one of 5o9’s founders, Liz Coker (President and COO) today. Liz has a strong and varied background in working with large companies and startups, and is also the founder of Aspenwood Consulting. She confirmed that the company is indeed in stealth mode, is “very early stage” and was started in January. Liz confirmed that that the company is working in the mobile space which she says users view as “slow, difficult, and not intuitive” to use. She also told me that the company aims to create “consistency” and to make things “faster, easier, and ultimately cheaper” on the phone. She continued to say that the company will work domestically, but also aims to do well internationally where customers still pay based on the amount of data transmitted and received unlike the typical “all you can eat” plans here in the U.S.

Peter Cranstone (another founder of 5o9) was previously a founder of Secure64 which continues to thrive, as well as Remote Communications (RCI) and other startups. RCI was acquired by Hyperspace Communications, AMEX: HCO in 2001, and I came across some interesting details about that deal if you are interested.

The third founder is Kevin Kiley whose notable contributions in the past include the widely-used mod_gzip compression module for the Apache web server and other data communications tools. Kevin was also involved with RCI previously.

Currently, the company is not seeking any outside investment, but that may or may not change “in the next 90 days” Liz said.

Might be an interesting one to keep an eye on.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Boulder’s 5o9 Inc

March 15, 2006

Boulder’s 5o9 Inc. appears to be in stealth mode, but we get a hint form one of the founders on Peter Cranstone’s blog, Peter’s Thoughts. Peter boldly declares that he’s working on Web 3.0 and says “It’s all about improving the mobile experience and blending “content” (king on the desktop) with “contact” (king on the mobile device).” An interesting point, but what’s this all about?

5o9 is a sponsor of the Boulder Software Club and touts itself as “Internet communicatons software designed to improve the mobile experience.” The company’s half-working web site also gives us no clue.

Can somebody fill us in on what this is all about?

Update: I spoke with one of the founders.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |