On Saturday, the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum hosted a panel discussion on wireless business opportunites. Jeff Black of Partner Vision Ventures, Valerie Buckingham of Nokia Innovent, Jaideep Singh of Clearstone Venture Partners, and Moderator Joe Platnick from the Pasadena Angels each presented their perspectives on the business potential behind wireless innovations and new wireless applications. The presenters shared massive intel (i.e "drinking from a firehose") with the audience on topics ranging from Wi-Fi to cellular to location-based services, gaming and Bluetooth.

Key take-aways for mobile startups are… have a great team, create something new, develop cellular applications for more than one runtime environment (Java and BREW), and you can make millions on a few cents per downloaded application in a market of 900 million phones.

This 3 minute video (WMV) shows insights specifically on Bluetooth technology and how a startup can embrace the technology. Here's highlights:

If it's a critical component of your business plan, Valerie tells us that Bluetooth has a lot of potential in the consumer application space, Interesting stuff around gaming, BT tracking to consoles (Xbox, etc.) Kiosk connections, etc. It's a forgone conclusion Bluetooth will be there, but there's a lot of problems with Bluetooth. If you've ever tried to pair a BT phone you know it's still problematic.

Jeff speaks about attending the VON conference and meeting a hacker that seems to have exploited Bluetooth phones to make them dial a 900 number to "generate revenue".

Jaideep takes the view that Bluetooth is not an area for innovation. There's room for improvement, but everyones already has a BT stack.  He says that if he was starting a company he wouldn't spend time on BT innovation. Instead, he would build an interesting application around Bluetooth. It's like Wi-Fi. You're not going to go out and start a Wi-Fi chip company.  You're going to take advantage of existing infrastructure."

Also, this video segment touches on the panelists reponse to using Bluetooth at record breaking distances (like the 1 mile link I was involved in). Their response is that CDMA or GSM is better for long distance.

Watch (WMV file)