Local technology buzz attracts

Swedish firm headquarters

Tampa Bay Business Journal
by Michael Hinman
Staff Writer

CLEARWATER -- It's bringing just under a dozen jobs to the Tampa Bay area, but it seems a lot of attention is being paid to a Swedish wireless technology company that has made Clearwater its home in the United States.

Appear Networks, which provides multimedia channel platforms for mobile employees, has set up shop on McMullen Booth Road. The operation may appear small, but the impact its move will have on the Bay area's perception of being a technology corridor could be substantial.

"As we build a reputation in technology here in Pinellas County and also in the greater Tampa Bay area, companies outside our region -- and outside our nation -- are taking notice," said Stacey Swank, business development manager with Pinellas County Economic Development.

A Swedish (wireless) chief

California-native Ann-Louise Palm, who founded the company with six other people in Stockholm, Sweden, has moved over to manage the American operations after spending eight years in Europe. For more than a decade, Sweden has been known for its high-skilled technical engineers, attracting many wireless companies from all over the world, including major U.S. companies.

Palm first founded a wireless company called Bluetail that sold to Alteon WebSystems in San Jose, Calif., for $152 million in 2000 and is now part of Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT). Soon after, Palm got together with Swedish entrepreneurs Xavier Aubry, Pontus Axelsson, Alex Cabrera, Martin Dahlstrand, Lars Nordgren and Johan Magnusson to create Appear Networks.

"Bluetail was founded by (L.M. Ericsson Telephone) engineers who wanted to build a platform to basically do smart management," Palm said. "Once we sold it, it proved to me that there's a unique kind of wireless skills that we could tap into in Sweden, and I had the startup bug."

Opening its doors in 2001, the company now employs more than 40 people in Europe focusing on transportation security issues with clients such as Dutch Rail, the Stockholm Subway and the Paris Local Transport Authority. Appear Networks builds platforms that allow security personnel and other users to be more mobile. One platform allows a guard to patrol a building while receiving video images from cameras on a handheld device.

"There's also other areas of deployment that we do, serving relevant information in sort of a reverse search," Palm said. "One of those areas could be in maintenance, where we can ship a company a relevant handbook for a particular escalator, for instance. You can get everything, including a detailed maintenance history for that specific escalator."

Choosing Tampa Bay

When looking to open an American headquarters for the company, Palm said being on the east coast was already a given because of its closer proximity to Europe. But it wasn't Boston or New York City that had attracted her, it was the tech community found in the Tampa Bay area.

"There is this growing technology base here, especially in medical innovation, which we want to get in to, and there's also a lot of startup companies," Palm said. "That's a good environment for me to network, to build, with people who have similar challenges."

There seems to be plenty of opportunities to network, Swank said, with everything from formal groups like the Tampa Bay Technology Forum and Creative Tampa Bay to more informal settings like the quarterly networking gatherings organized by Fritz Eichelberger that draw around 400 people per event.

But however small the numbers in the technology sector seem to be, it's the quality that matters, contends Andy Hafer, TBTF's executive director.

"I firmly believe that the fiber of this technology hotbed is going to be built around these companies employing 10, 20 and 25 people," Hafer said. "You don't need massive amounts of people to deploy these amazing technologies. Having Appear come here, it's a home run."

mhinman@bizjournals.com | 813.342.2477

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