The Palo Alto, Calif. company has also announced a second round of financing to the tune of $12.5 million.

IXI's personal mobile gateway (PMG) is especially attractive to the mobile market, said co-founder, president and chief executive officer Amit Haller. The PMG puts all the intelligence needed for a personal-area network into one small box that fits in someone's wallet or pocket. The personal gateway then forms the connection that bridges the personal-area network to a wide-area, cellular network over one cellular account. Since the IXI solution is software-based, it is air-interface-agnostic, though the company will first target Bluetooth-enabled devices that will connect over a General Packet Radio Service network.

"The big difference here is the point of view," said Haller. "We've taken a thin-client approach, where all the Bluetooth devices around the gateway are very slim with minimum hardware — all they have to do is act as the user interface to the PMG, which is running the application." The Bluetooth-enabled clients could be anything from a slim calendar watch to an ultrathin cell phone to a short-message keyboard that will act like a RIM Blackberry but be a fraction of the size.

"All are actually serving as multiple clients of one mobile gateway," said Haller. "This disassociation of the intelligence from the client devices greatly reduces their size and cost, while also solving the application interoperability issues."

In IXI's scheme, an operator will supply or subsidize the PMG. IXI will supply the operator with remote management tools for fully automatic configuration and IP-address setup.

"We're supplying an end-to-end solution for operators and eliminating the need for users to become their own IT managers," said Haller. The scheme will bring the cost of mobile devices down from more than $150 to under $30 each, he said, though pricing for the PMG is not yet available. "We believe it must be under $200, instead of the $500 or more for smart phones [with multiple applications]," said Haller. The cost per mobile client device might drop even more, since disconnecting the intelligence from the client allows even more device vendors to come to market faster, said Haller.

The gateway itself comprises a Bluetooth radio and a cellular-network radio, with an ARM7 and memory on board to perform interfacing between the two networks as well as applications processing. IXI will license its software and do a hardware reference design but will not be the gateway manufacturer. It plans to demonstrate its technology at the GSM World Congress in February.

Founded in August 2000 by former Texas Instruments Inc. executives and the founders of Butterfly VLSI Ltd. and DSP Communications Inc., IXI got its seed funding from Gemini Funds. Its recent $12.5 million second-round funding came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures and Gemini Funds.