Eric Mack On-Line

My friend, Tony Fascenda, was named as one of the top 10 demonstrators at this year's DEMO@15 conference, where he successfully demonstrated four products in six minutes! Tony's an exciting person to be around, a true visionary. The walls of his office are covered with patents for various technologies that he's invented.  Most recently, Tony invented a technology, now embedded in his SecurEdge TrustChips, that can provide an end-to-end secure connection between IP devices and applications. The beauty and simplicity of this technology is that it is device and application independent -  meaning that you can secure just about any internet technology (Laptops, VPN, VOIP, PDA, etc.) without touching the existing applications or devices!

The folks at DEMO think it is an innovative approach to network security. I think so, too!  Check it out.

Congratulations, Tony, I wish you and your team the best!

I first met Tony back in 1992 at Newspager Corporation of America (NCA). I had approached Tony, and his colleague, Dan, with the idea of using their wireless database receiver as a platform for mobile messaging and wireless databases. (Their current products were primarily focused on financial news and stock information.) Tony and Dan were particularly interested in my activities in the messaging field, particularly the ICA Information gateway -- a tool which I had developed to extend corporate messaging to the mobile workforce. At he time, I was the guy, walking around with not one, but three large pagers on his belt. I know, I looked like a geek. That's OK, it led to some interesting meetings; the most memorable of which was with Hubert Lipinski, founder and architect of cc:Mail. That meeting launched my formal entry into the wireless messaging space and my involvement with Peloria Technology Corp.

A few years later, Tony hired me as a consultant to NCA, to serve as their Director of Advanced Messaging Applications; my mission was to develop and promote wireless messaging technology. We were a little early for the marketplace. The biggest challenge at the time was convincing the carriers that wireless messaging really was a good thing - something people would pay for - and that these huge messages (in those days, 80 characters was a long message) would not kill their networks. I designed and promoted the Flash! wireless database publishing tool for cc:Mail and Lotus Notes, which allowed data to be published to the wireless device. That was 10 years ago. The closest thing I've seen since is the Pylon iAnywhere application. One product, which I helped promote for Tony was a small handheld database receiver, called Compass. It was much like a Tungsten C of today but developed long before color PDAs and 802.11 anything. The Compass was huge compared to the Palm but it did have an 8 color screen and really was the ultimate geek accessory. Here's a photo of [a much younger] me with the Compass unit. (You can read more of the story here.)

I had a blast working with Tony and his team, and it was an honor to help his company and to see Tony in action.

I have no doubt that Koolspan has a bright future ahead.