June 2013
| Business World Magazine | 187
forcement agency can function without it
today. Poellmitz ultimately sold his interest
in Cerulean and went on to join forces with
Fresonke at Data on Air just in time to help
shepherd the sale of the company to a San
Francisco-based dotcom during the Internet
boom in the year 2000.
The dotcom crash that followed shortly
thereafter saw investors running for the hills
as their companies crashed in the ditch.
With the newparent in deep trouble, Freson-
ke and Poellmitz acquired many of the cloud
computing assets of the original Data on Air
and retooled them into the foundation on
which ClearSky Technologies was created.
The new company was making significant
advances when the New York terror attacks
of September 11, 2001, prompted not only
the crash of the World Trade Center towers,
but also turmoil for many unrelated indus-
tries. As Fresonke recalls, during the first two
years that followed the tragedy, investment
in telecomm and wireless came to a grinding
halt. During this ensuing period of declin-
ing business in the U.S., ClearSky was able
to capitalize on inroads that Poellmitz had
made in Latin America, and the company
went on to become a leading provider of
hosted data services, running mobile brows-
ing and messaging applications for carriers in
locations as widespread as Mexico, Colom-
bia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay.
After five-plus years of success in the
South American market, the piper that led
the company back to the U.S. didn’t play a
flute; it instead was a cell phone playing a
ringtone. Fresonke says it wasn’t until 2006
that U.S. consumers really began to wake up
to the power that was in their hands. Though
business operations had been relying on
ClearSky’s array of services, consumers were
still using their cell phones for voice calls.
