
Before maps lived in every pocket, Jim DiSanto helped put location on the web. His next act has been a long bet on the physical world - trucks, sensors, robots, energy systems and the stubborn infrastructure beneath the software.
KonaWare was a Menlo Park mobility-software company founded in 1999 that built a platform and development tools for putting mission-critical enterprise applications into the hands of mobile field workers. Its suites covered transportation, logistics and field service - dispatch, proof-of-delivery, electronic driver logs, vehicle inspections and asset tracking - and were engineered to keep data intact whether devices were connected or not, running across laptops, PDAs and early smartphones. Backed by Draper Richards and Western Technology Investment, the company was an early bet on enterprise mobility years before the smartphone made it mainstream; its field-service assets were acquired by ServicePower in 2008.