industrial strength mobile imaging
In late 1999, William Mitchell acquired Image Viewer III,
then the #1 imaging software for the Palm handheld, as the first step in a plan he developed at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business to roll up leading third-party PalmOS software.
He was joined by Harvard Business School alum Ken Marshall, who coined the name FireViewer. The two raised $2.6m, led by VLG Investments, in two closings ending January 2000.
Mitchell assembled a team of experienced and highly motivated mobile software programmers from the US, Germany, New Zealand and Northern Ireland, who quickly extended FireViewer into a full-fledged client/server platform supporting high-definition zoomable images, live video, hyperlinks and push & pull updates.
During 2000 and 2001, FireViewer achieved many firsts in the world of consumer mobile computing, including the first handheld video, first live streaming video, first zooming images, first vector-based images, and first combined video monitor and configurable remote control system over HTTP. Some of these achievements were not matched by any other consumer product until years later.
During 2001, when over 99% of all seed-stage startups in Silicon Valley failed, FireViewer survived and remained one of the top 5 PalmOS apps, by downloads and sales, for years thereafter. It also was popular in the early 2000s as a mobile multimedia reference system, and sold large numbers of units to multinationals such as Novartis and General Motors. FireViewer remained commercially available until 2009, when Palm Inc. dropped PalmOS.Questions about FireViewer should be directed to customer support.