Arlene Harris
Professional Experience
Arlene Harris has decades of experience as an innovator, entrepreneur, board member, and investor in a number of successful companies in wireless related businesses. Most recently, through her incubator Dyna, Harris has fired up Wrethink, a new broadband solution for families launching later this year, and Wrethinking, the Foundation, to support privacy through the Me2B Alliance and help fund female technology founders.
In her previous work, she founded GreatCall and launched its Jitterbug offering in 2006 in partnership with Samsung to create a simple and personalized cell phone experience. With almost a million customers, GreatCall was sold to a private equity company in 2017 and is now the foundation of retailer Best Buy’s consumer health offering. In 1994, Harris founded SOS Wireless Communication that became GreatCall in 2006. In 1986, she started Subscriber Computing (now Verisign) and invented the first management systems to support prepaid cellular service and the first niche cellular offering founding Cellular Pay Phone, Inc. In 1983, Harris helped found billing and CRM market leader Cellular Business Systems, Inc. (now Netcracker). Before CBSI, Harris helped lead her family’s Los Angeles-based wireless business, ICS (now USA Mobility). In addition to providing early mobile telephone service and becoming the world’s largest paging system, ICS was developer of LifePage, the world’s first health related application of wireless technology for consumers.
Harris holds several issued patents. She received the PCIA Foundation’s distinguished Chairman’s award, is a Fellow in the Radio Club of America, has served on several committees of the FCC, EIA/TIA, and PCIA and became the first female inductee into the Wireless Hall of Fame. She is one of few women in the Consumer Technology Hall of Fame and has been honored with Stevie, Athena, and Girl Scouts awards. She is on the advisory boards of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design and Stuart Business School and the University of California San Diego’s Engineering School. In 2019, she earned a UCSD Gordon Engineering Leadership Award.
Harris lives with her husband and business partner, renowned wireless pioneer Marty Cooper, in Del Mar, Ca.