One of the challenges facing the wireless world is the constant change in formats and the fact that most wireless devices have to include specialized hardware in order to support those format. As a result, uptake on new wireless format can often be slow in the mobile phone industry as it represents a typical chicken or egg problem: the telcos will not build new infrastructures until devices are available to consumers, and device manufacturers will not build until the infrastructure is in place. In comes Vanu, a new company that is proposing a radical new concept: the software based radio. The idea is that most of the functions related to managing communication would be relegated to software instead of being hard coded into hardware. It could represent a real revolution in the way telecommunication systems are built and could eventually reduce the cost of production for those devices. The reason is that manufacturer could include such software into their phones and not have to worry about upcoming standards relegated their devices to the trash bin. Right now, when a mobile device manufacturer sells a new product, that product includes several chips to manage each of the different format (GSM, TDMA,…