These days it is rare to find someone who doesn’t rely on a smartphone or some kind of handheld device and a slew of mobile apps to stay productive at work, on the road or even in their home. There are so many mobile electronic gadgets on the market, including the popular iPhone, Palm Pre, BlackBerry Bold, iPad and Android tablet. READ MORE
Want a glimpse into the future of smartphones? Check out eYeka, a crowd-sourcing company that lets community members co-create products. The community developed prototypes based on a set of requirements that included minimalistic design, an extension of the human body, transparency, and the ability to “life guide,” notes ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus. READ MORE
In the era of growing concerns about the erosion of personal time, a recent study found that more than 70 percent of mobile business people expect mobile e-mail to “liberate” them. The study, by RONIN Corp., a Princeton, N.J. market research firm, found that mobile e-mail could actually provide workers with more control over their schedule while improving productivity for their employers. The call for more mobility in e-mail is being answered by U.S. telecom companies. The latest versions of the Blackberry, Treo, and Moto are fighting to combine that mobile e-mail with cell phone service. Here are some of the most handy models and sportiest designs for your mobile e-mail: Audiovox SMT5600 Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 OS; Bluetooth; speakerphone; not great e-mail. What’s cool: VGA camera with video; buttons for a person with small hands. $199 BlackBerry 7130c Bluetooth, EDGE support, and a speakerphone. Good speakers, and delivers e-mail in real time. Keyboard follows the QWERTY standard typewriter format, takes a little getting used to something so logical. The “SureType technology” where it guesses what word you want can be daunting for the uninitiated. What’s cool: Excellent phone and mobile e-mailer, works where traditional cell phones don’t. $199 Motorola Q Or Moto Q as its known. Can’t use its Bluetooth as a wireless modem. What’s cool: Sports a QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and solid call quality. $199.99 Nokia 6820 QWERTY keyboard; integrated camera; video recording and playback; screen is on the dark side. What’s cool: Bluetooth; EDGE support; $225.00 Nokia 6230 (Cingular Wireless) Bluetooth and Infrared support; VGA camera; video recorder and player; expandable memory; speakerphone. What’s cool: MP3 player; FM tuner; $245.00 Palm Treo 650 (Cingular, GSM/GPRS) The Palm Treo 650 improved display and keyboard, integrated Bluetooth, and a speakerphone. No built-in Wi-Fi, low-res camera. What’s cool: The world phone also has a 312MHz processor, Palm OS 5.4, multimedia, and e-mail support. $299 Samsung SCH-i730 Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, speakerphone; slide-out QWERTY thumb keyboard; No support for modem use with a laptop; Wi-Fi and phone won’t work at the same time. What’s cool: Nice to have a slide out keyboard for those extended e-mails. $299.99 Cingular 8125 $149 – $457 QWERTY keyboard slides, Bluetooth-enabled, with Windows Mobile 5, EDGE, Wi-Fi and infrared. What’s cool: The quad-band world phone also offers a speakerphone and extra-long talk-time battery life. $349.99 Sony Ericsson W810i New keypad; Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera, an MP3 player, a memory card slot, and speakerphone. What’s cool: The Ericsson is a fun phone for taking and sending pix as well. $374. Nokia N90 EDGE capable; MP3 player; Bluetooth; USB connectivity; e-mail. Top drawer in every category and fun to use, albeit a stiff price. What’s cool: 2-megapixel digital camera with flash and 8X digital zoom; MPEG-4 video-capture capabilities; separate lens and display swivels; $599.99
Convergence New technologies stand to make Internet video as useful and ubiquitous as the telephone. How will it work for your company? You’ve heard it all before, and not that long ago. Teleconferencing was supposed to drive airlines into the ground. Telecommuting was going to make office complexes obsolete, and we were all going to work in our bathrobes. Television was going to converge with the Internet and the computer to form one big box. It’s easy to mistake the progress of the present day for the revolution of the near future. In 1993, Time magazine wrote, “Suddenly the brave new world of video phones and smart TVs that futurists have been predicting for decades is not years away, but months.” And that was not the first time such a promise had been made. Gad Liwerant, president and CEO of VideoShare, a provider of Internet video services in Watertown, Mass., says, “More than 35 years ago the big telecom carriers were always saying the phone was going to come with a screen, but it never really took off.” Well, this time it’s different. Really. This time there’s not just one silver-bullet technology that will supposedly revolutionize the ways in which we do business but rather a convergence of technologies that are all advancing at once. And they will all help deliver cheap, convenient high-quality video over the Internet. “Video’s going to be integrated into everything from your PC and your TV to your cell phone or PDA,” says Neal Manowitz, vice-president of marketing and business development for Vingage, a Reston, Va., company that creates server software for online video delivery. “If you launched a Web page today, you’d be shocked if there wasn’t a picture on that page. Five years from now, you’ll be surprised if you don’t see video. It would be like turning on the TV today and seeing a still image.” Sounds like the grandiose pronouncements of the past, no? But here’s what’s different now: advances in the software used to compress and deliver video, combined with increased computing power and the spread of high-bandwidth delivery services, are fostering the creation of new Internet video technologies. Providers are already creating wild new consumer services. Sony’s ImageStation.com, for instance, allows users to archive and share home movies online. And on the way are new tools that will offer even small businesses the capability of using live and recorded video for everything from Web brochures to training to customer service. Of course, we heard the same kind of promises about the picture phone. And a video clip, or even a two-way live videoconference, will never replace a face-to-face schmooze with your best customer or lead investor. “People have been dreaming about video as a travel substitute since the oil crisis,” says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park, Calif. “It’s a myth. The more we communicate electronically, the more we go to face-to-face meetings.” So the new promise of video is not the replacement of air travel or television or telephones as we know them. It’s about technologies that are satisfying, cheap, and easy to use, and that don’t require special equipment. You can see the difference already with devices like Web cameras. “Even a few years ago, you had to open your machine, install software, and then set up the camera,” says VideoShare’s Liwerant. “Now all you have to do is plug the camera into a USB port.” In the same way, Internet video is finally getting good. “Video technologies are going to provide a revenue-generating opportunity that never existed before. It’s an entirely new channel,” says James Canton, president of the Institute for Global Futures, a high-tech think tank based in San Francisco. Canton’s research predicts that E-commerce sites with live video will generate more sales than competitors without such features will be able to do. Right now, says Canton, 75% to 80% of people who are looking to make a purchase online fail to do so, largely because they get confused. “There’s no one there to help them,” Canton says, adding that video — either a product demo or a live, two-way help center — could conceivably provide that assistance. “Small businesses should be adopting this stuff faster. It will give them a chance to establish brand awareness, whereas big companies aren’t going to change so fast.” Taking that step shouldn’t be too scary, says Dominic Milano, editor-in-chief of DV (digital video) magazine, in San Francisco. “There’s no real barrier to entry anymore. The tools are more powerful, and they’re really cheap. It really all came to a head at some point in the middle of last year. It’s like somebody threw all the pieces in a big stew pot, and it started to congeal.” The new promise of video is not the replacement of air travel or television or telephones as we know them. It’s about technologies that are satisfying, cheap, and easy to use. One of the advancing technologies bringing better video to the Net is compression software. Here’s how it works: A piece of software reviews a video file, effectively “deciding” which parts of the picture don’t have to be duplicated for every frame. Think of the passionate beach scene in From Here to Eternity, in which Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster are all over each other on the sand as the surf encroaches. A compression algorithm would review that scene and see that the sand and the sky are pretty much static. Only the wriggling actors and wild waves would need to be updated in every frame. That cuts down the size of the file. Once the file is compressed, it’s translated into file formats (such as those developed by RealNetworks, Microsoft, and Apple) and delivered to viewers through streaming-video service providers (such as Yahoo Broadcast, I-Beam Broadcasting, Activate, or Digital Island). Competition among such developers and providers has kept up pressure to make delivery more efficient. RealNetworks now uses an Intel compression system called SureStream, which functions like the advance team for a presidential candidate. When a user clicks on a video file, SureStream shoots out ahead to detect the speed at which he or she is connecting to the Internet. Then it matches the downloading speed to the user’s connection. That way, even users with slow-modem Internet connections will be able to watch the clip, although not with the same quality enjoyed by someone with a broadband connection. Improvements in compression and delivery of video files have boosted traffic on the Internet to the point where it often threatens to overwhelm the Net’s capacity. So there is a third technology in play that will help expand access to high-quality Web video: improvements in the capacity of the Internet itself. “The Internet became its own worst enemy,” says Sanjay Srivastava, vice-president of enterprise services for Akamai Technologies, a kind of Internet traffic cop headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. Akamai helps manage traffic on the Internet through hundreds of networks it has installed in countries all over the world, which it operates from a room that looks like the NORAD command center, with giant screens displaying maps of the continents. You can store multiple, or redundant, copies of Web pages — including video — on Akamai’s servers. So if your company is in Indiana and you want to stream your financial presentation to investors in New York City, you can hook it up to a server in Manhattan, rather than one in Muncie, to send it more efficiently. “We’re a visual species. You can go back and find cave drawings from thousands of years ago” to prove it, says James Canton, president of high-tech think tank Institute for Global Futures. A fourth frontier that technology has now crossed enables users to receive fat video files, thanks to the increased power of personal computing and the spread of broadband delivery. According to senior analyst Jeremy Schwartz of Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., about 5 million homes will have broadband Internet access at the end of this year, with a critical mass of 19 million households wired up by 2002. So where are the great new business tools? They’re coming, and very soon. Already, developers are providing new products that make video more flexible. For example, there’s Krishna Pendyala, who six years ago was assistant director of a National Science Foundation project at Carnegie Mellon University that focused on making video a more meaningful communication tool. “Text can communicate only 7% of a message,” Pendyala says. “The rest is body language, the audio, the visual content.” Or as futurist James Canton says, “We’re a visual species. You can go back and find cave drawings from thousands of years ago” to prove it. Pendyala and his fellow researchers tried using technology to map out important messages on video, including software that could “recognize” speech and language patterns as well as images. Essentially, they were indexing video electronically, a task traditionally carried out manually by a lot of employees fortified with cases of Pepsi. By 1997, Pendyala and his team had founded MediaSite in Pittsburgh, and last year they launched an Internet-video search engine. That Carnegie Mellon project has spawned a technology that will surely be a boon for companies with archived video, and it’s ready now. Businesses that are already using it include a health-information Web site and a conference producer. Companies are also already using Internet video to communicate with customers and investors. CUseeMe Networks, headquartered in Nashua, N.H., has launched two-way videoconferencing on the Web at www.cuseemeworld.com. The service is free, except for the $99 Web cam you need to beam your gorgeous mug out over the Internet. “Teleconferencing was a niche market with a few hundred thousand units worldwide running on ISDN lines,” recalls CEO Killko Caballero. “The proprietary equipment cost $100,000. Early-stage PCs couldn’t handle video.” Today, Caballero says, the company makes money by hosting the back end of other companies’ face-to-face Web call centers. Novell and Ericsson recently launched a video instant-messaging service with CUseeMe’s technology. Liwerant’s VideoShare offers video E-mail as well. Most of the business tools being forecasted for the new age of Web video, however, have yet to be invented. Not until Internet video is truly ubiquitous will all the possibilities become apparent. “Streaming is one of the first truly converged voice, video, and data applications on the Web,” says Alex Benik, an analyst at the Yankee Group in Boston. “It’s the forerunner of truly futuristic next-generation applications that will run on IP-based networks.” Applications now in development include “hotspotting,” a kind of video version of Amazon’s “1-Click.” Hotspotting would allow you to, say, watch a clip of an Olympic snowboarder and click on his board. That would process an E-commerce transaction. Two days later a snowboard would appear at your door and a charge would show up on your Visa bill. Some new tools may be built from current technologies. For example, there’s Princeton Video Image’s virtual advertising technology, which is used at sporting events to superimpose digital images on stadium walls. The company says the same effect could be created using Internet video. And MediaSite introduced a video-skimming product at the end of last year. Video skimming uses speech- and language-comprehension software to find key themes of a video presentation and take out all the “Thank you very much for coming” stuff. The resulting thumbnail videos are as much as 90% shorter than the originals, so they save time and bandwidth. Progress on another tech frontier — wireless — will help make video easier to use. Japan is leading the way on this one, but industry watchers predict it will be only a year to 18 months before the United States sees streaming video on a handheld personal digital assistant or a Web-enabled phone with an improved display screen, no cables necessary. “Right now you can access the Internet and get some content delivered to your cell phone,” says Vingage’s Manowitz. “Imagine how much more powerful it will be when that content is video.” In video, content is the killer app. And the first companies to explore the new uses of Web video are, so far, content producers and providers like E Screening Room. Founder Ward Bouwman spent a year in E-mail conversation with RealNetworks engineers before deciding that the time was right to launch his documentary-film E-commerce site. Bouwman, a former Discovery Channel documentary associate producer, says technology has caught up to his business concept: using the Internet to eliminate the middlemen who take big cuts from a film’s profits. “It’s hard for documentaries to find the right target audience because the audience is not geographically oriented. They’re communities of interest. That’s why the Internet is an ideal medium,” Bouwman says. “So I’ve been watching the technology, building the Web site, and testing it. For us, the video is of good-enough quality right now.” But for most business users, the issue isn’t so much quality as it is utility. “The next step is, How do you take all this streaming capability and tie it in to your back end — your employee-learning management and your customer- relationship-management database?” says Akamai’s Srivastava. “When you do a live video presentation online and Joe Blow customer asks a question, you want to know that Joe buys $40,000 worth of stuff a month or that he hasn’t bought anything in three months. You can respond to his question a lot more intelligently.” Video can be tied in to just about any business function. Training is an obvious application. But there are industry-specific applications as well. In manufacturing, for example, you’ll be able to diagnose and repair machinery from a remote location. “We should stop looking at video as something discrete or separate from the rest of the world. It’s like telephony,” says Christine Perey, a video-technology consultant based in Placerville, Calif. “It’s part of HR, part of supply-chain management, part of financial planning with your retirement consultant. It’s embedded. It doesn’t have to be considered the primary application. The primary application is, What do you want to do today?” “Right now you can access the Internet and get some content delivered to your cell phone,” says Neal Manowitz, vice president of marketing for Vingage, which creates server software for online video delivery. “Imagine how much more powerful it will be when that content is video.” Skeptics will — and should — wonder whether any of this will happen, and if it does, what it all will mean. According to Perey, even if you removed all the technological barriers, there would still be the human factor. “Do you remember how uncomfortable we used to feel leaving voice mail and how awkward it was to receive it? Today getting a live person is the exception to the rule,” she says. “It’s the same with video. We need to get to a level of user familiarity, user comfort. Then not only will people not be afraid of it, but it will be one more step in lowering the perceived difference between small and large businesses, just as the Internet has lowered the access barrier of small businesses to global audiences.” Another detail that will have to be worked out before video reaches the no-brainer status of the telephone: billing. How will all the new streaming-media providers charge customers for their services? “Pricing is an extremely deep black hole,” says Perey. “Think about how a cell phone works,” says MediaSite’s Pendyala. “When you’re on a call, the signal jumps from one tower to another, each one owned by somebody else. Imagine if you got 150 bills a month from all those tower owners. I guarantee I would not use a cell phone. There needs to be a whole industry cooperating for video. It has to be easy to buy, easy to install, and easy to use.” Perey predicts, “The most successful model in the future is going to be a blend of a subscription model and a premium fee for services as you go.” It’s likely that the greatest benefits of video are things we haven’t even thought of yet. “The next-generation Internet will become more secure and faster, but ultimately it will become more intelligent as well. Video enablement is just a part of that,” says futurist James Canton. Jill Hecht Maxwell is a reporter at Inc. Technology. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
Inc.ubator If Bluetooth flies, we’ll all be wired without wires A short-range wireless technology with an oddball name could free you from tangles of cables for good. More than 2,000 high-tech companies — from Intel and Motorola to a crop of start-ups — have joined forces to support “Bluetooth.” The low-power technology will let laptops, cell phones, printers, handheld computers, and other devices “talk” over a distance of about 30 feet. Named for the 10th-century Nordic king who unified Denmark and Norway, Bluetooth could save small businesses time and hassle when they, say, settle into new digs or need to do E-mail on the run. Bluetooth amounts to a postage-stamp-sized radio chip that’s installed in a product, and it’s expected to be widely deployed in devices such as cell phones and headsets by 2002. “None of these devices really have the ability to talk with one another. They need a common language,” says Simon Ellis, an Intel marketing manager and Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) marketing director. Bluetooth is designed to provide just such a dialect. What does that mean for you? A start-up could use Bluetooth chips to create a short-range wireless computer network without pulling up flooring to wire the new offices. Colleagues could meet informally around a table and zap one another data files without schlepping cables to the meeting. And on-the-go executives could finally be able to match up phone numbers, dates, and other data stored on their laptops, cell phones, and handheld organizers. With a Bluetooth chip in them, cell phones could serve as modems for wireless Internet access. No more having to find the right cable to link the laptop to the phone. Instead, the cell phone could sit in your briefcase while you send and retrieve E-mail. One more option: office workers could get wireless entry to the Internet — at DSL-like speed — by using a special Bluetooth “access point” that acts like a server and provides a gateway to the public phone network. Bluetooth technology was born in 1994 at Ericsson, the Swedish cell-phone maker. In 1998, Ericsson partnered with Nokia, IBM, Toshiba, and Intel to form Bluetooth SIG, which helped foster a global Bluetooth standard. More than 2,000 companies have since agreed to develop Bluetooth products and software. The wireless technology differs from that of traditional cell phones, for example, in that it transmits over much shorter distances and emits far less radiation. The introduction of products that use Bluetooth technology may be slow, because currently there is no standard to ensure that those devices can talk to one another. But Bluetooth isn’t perfect. Like other complex technologies, it’s hitting the market later than was expected — more than a year and a half behind schedule. And security is less than fail-safe: a device using Bluetooth isn’t immune to interlopers. Researchers at Lucent Technologies recently uncovered flaws that could allow eavesdroppers to read E-mail transmissions, for example, or possibly even determine a Bluetooth user’s identity. But Paul Kan, the Bluetooth strategic marketing manager for the microelectrics group at Lucent, says those flaws can be solved “quickly” and doubts they will have much of an effect on when Bluetooth products will be deployed. Airwave traffic jams are an issue, too. Bluetooth operates in the 2.4GHz frequency band — the same portion of the radio spectrum used by cordless phones, remote-control garage openers, and the wireless local networks that already exist in some offices and homes. Airwave congestion could disrupt some data and voice traffic, but the average Bluetooth user wouldn’t experience those hiccups, says analyst Sarah Kim of the Yankee Group. Kim also says the introduction of Bluetooth products could be slow because there isn’t a simple system to ensure that all of the devices will talk to one another. “If Bluetooth can get over those and other hurdles, it could be a big success,” says Kim. Among the first products will be special cards that slide into PCs to make them “Bluetooth enabled.” IBM plans to sell its PC cards for $189. Wireless cell-phone headsets are another niche for the technology. Ericsson expects its headsets to cost about $500. Bluetooth cell phones are also expected to hit the market. Gadget freaks will likely be the early adopters. Cahners In-Stat Group expects that the number of Bluetooth devices eventually will explode, hitting 1.4 billion units shipped by 2005. The research company predicts consumers will use Bluetooth to wirelessly access the Internet, to print documents from different rooms without needing a full-blown home network, and to synchronize personal data stored in separate electronic devices. Analysts predict that the number of Bluetooth devices will hit 1.4 billion by 2005. That could mean profitable opportunities. “Bluetooth is going to enable a plethora of small businesses to start,” predicts Tony Kobrinetz, a Motorola vice-president. Already, Jeff and Mary Beth Griffin have started a Charlotte, N.C., company, BlueLinx Inc., that’s using Bluetooth technology to create “quiet zones” where beeping cell phones and pagers won’t shatter the peace. The couple — who were inspired to start their business by a ringing cell phone in church — are targeting restaurants, theaters, and other establishments. Their Q-Zone technology cuts the volume on wireless devices or switches them to vibration mode when the devices enter specific areas. Industry executives can even see a day when a customer armed with a handheld computer will be able go to the mall and notify nearby shops that he or she needs, say, oversize shoes. A store’s computer could receive that electronic alert and beep the customer’s device to indicate that the shoes are available. By then, maybe cables will be history, as outdated as rabbit ears on a black-and-white TV. Roger Fillion is a freelance writer based in Evergreen, Colo. Pocket Wizard If Larry Bodony and Paul St. Pierre achieve their dream, your wallet will become a wireless device for surfing the Internet, as well as a personal ATM. How? Bluetooth. The duo cofounded a Boston-area start-up called WearLogic. Their SmartWear wallet, which is due out by year-end, boasts a keyboard and a display screen and stores phone numbers, dates, and other personal data, much like a handheld organizer. “Smart card” users can whip out the wallet to check electronic cash balances and view recent transactions. Looking ahead, Bodony, 42, and St. Pierre, 48, plan to use Bluetooth to make their smart wallet, well, even smarter. They see their wallet as a perfect companion for a cell phone. With it users could download money into their smart card, pay bills, or shop. So Bluetooth seemed like a natural fit. “Your wallet doesn’t have a wire on it, does it?” asks St. Pierre, who admits that the challenges of the technology are complex. “How do I tell my wallet to speak only to my cell phone and not to every other one in range?” Bodony and St. Pierre met in the early 1990s at a Massachusetts company that makes digital editing systems. They quit in 1996 and went their separate ways: Bodony headed to a U.S. affiliate of a Japanese electronics company, where he built technology for reading smart cards; and St. Pierre accepted an engineering post at a software company. The Asian financial crisis reunited them in 1998. After his Japanese employer shut its research division, Bodony was unemployed. But he walked away with valuable knowledge about smart wallets, a product that his former employer had looked into but hadn’t developed. Bodony called St. Pierre to pitch his idea for an electronic wallet. They discussed it over beer and buffalo wings, and St. Pierre decided to quit his job and join Bodony. He felt that he was getting old, “and the high-tech business doesn’t look kindly on old folks. I figured if I was going to take the plunge, I’d better do it now.” Soon WearLogic was born. After raising cash, Bodony and St. Pierre set off to develop a prototype wallet. They rented a tiny office near a Chinese restaurant and, steeped in the aroma of greasy pupu platters, debugged hardware and software. Today Wakefield-based WearLogic has about a dozen employees. Bodony is CEO, and St. Pierre is vice-president of engineering. The partners secured their first round of venture funding in January after having run so low on money that they temporarily stopped taking salaries and their employees began looking for other work. WearLogic has patents and trademarks for other clothing articles, like jackets, that could become wearable computers. The price for the initial smart wallet is targeted at about $300. The Bluetooth wallets are scheduled to be available by mid-2001 but don’t yet have a price. “It’s definitely something to keep your eye on,” says Yankee Group analyst Sarah Kim. Face to Face It’s Going to Be Huge Chunka Mui is a partner with Chicago consulting firm Diamond Technology Partners and is coauthor of the book Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Inc. asked him about the impact Bluetooth is expected to have. Inc.: What’s significant about Bluetooth? Mui: The most fascinating thing for me is the idea of having devices talk to each other in a fairly simple way. It’s unbridled connectivity. And what that does is lay an infrastructure for a tremendous amount of innovation in terms of devices and communication. Inc.: Can you think of a similar global technology standard? Mui: The Internet Protocol, on which the Internet is based. Just look at the innovation that was permitted to spread around the Internet. So what the Internet did for PCs, Bluetooth can do for all devices. Inc.: Can you envision that Bluetooth will cause disruptions for businesses? Mui: Huge disruptions all over the place. You can imagine that the number of ways you connect with your customers will grow maybe a thousandfold. Instead of communicating with you face-to-face or over a phone or using their PC, they can do it from almost any device they’re carrying. You won’t know where your customers are talking to you from anymore. They could be at home. They could be at the office. They could be at your store. They could be in your competitor’s store. They could choose to interact with you using their handheld computer because they can’t get to the front of the line. Inc.: What’s the importance of that? Mui: You have to be able to respond to all that. You have to have the information instantly available to answer the query or the request. Then you have to be able to differentiate among the ways they’re interacting with you, because their expectations will be different. Inc.: How quickly do you see this happening because of Bluetooth? Will it make inroads as quickly as the Internet did? Mui: It’s going to be faster, because it has the Internet to build on. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.
Options: Technologies on the Horizon The Internet now reaches your digital phone — without wires. But it’s not the Internet you know By now, you’re probably already aware that E-mail and Web surfing are available on digital phones and other handheld devices. Well, if the prospect of watching people in restaurants and ticket lines tap away at their mobile phones to exchange E-mail, shop, or trade stocks bugs you, look at the bright side: Would you rather they were talking? The top two tool-toys of the new millennium — the mobile phone and the Internet — have finally melded. Through Sprint’s PCS Wireless Web service, the itty-bitty displays of properly equipped digital phones now present live Internet E-mail, news, shopping, and trading. Sprint’s service tips an iceberg of wireless Internet services now coming online not only for phones but for pagers and handheld computers as well. By 2003, according to GartnerGroup’s Dataquest, 33 million people will add themselves to the ranks of those in the United States already sending and receiving E-mail and other nonvoice data — like that airline reservation to Omaha and your sister’s E-auction bid on that great Farber Bros. decanter — wirelessly. If you need anywhere, anytime access to E-mail and the services of the most popular Web sites (and only the most popular Web sites), Internet-connected digital phones, handheld computers, and other wireless gizmos soon to come promise powerful convenience. But don’t take promises of “the power of the wireless Internet in your hand” or “Web w/o Wires” too literally. None of these devices enable you to hop onto the Web and browse around wherever you will, as you can do on a bona fide computer. The “Mini” in the Browser Phones equipped for Sprint’s Wireless Web feature a “MiniBrowser” program. Pay close attention to the first four letters of that name. The “browsing” available from Sprint allows you to choose from among a list of popular Web sites — Yahoo, Amazon.com, CNN.com, and AmeriTrade, to mention a few — that have repackaged their content in a special text-only, simplified version for display on a phone. At this writing, the list features a few hundred sites, but that number is growing steadily. You do just about everything on the Wireless Web simply by pressing the phone’s dialing buttons to make choices from text menus on the phone’s display. Graphics are gone — including the banner ads that clog many sites. Going graphics-free not only permits practical use of a phone’s tiny display but also keeps performance snappy — which is important, since you pay for Wireless Web by the minute. (See “Early Adopter,” below.) In addition to using the featured sites, Sprint users can sign up for “Web updates” — data such as sports scores, stock prices, and auction status delivered to your phone automatically. You choose which updates you want to receive from the Sprint PCS site or from the site where the news originates (such as Yahoo Mobile). Unlike Wireless Web, Web updates require no special phone; all Sprint PCS users can sign up for them. But How Do I Type? On the wireless Web you occasionally have to do something other than choose from menus. Composing messages, telling Amazon.com which book to find, or selecting a stock all require typing text. And that’s when an Internet phone’s biggest drawback becomes most obvious. For activities requiring text entry (such as composing E-mail messages or adding a speed-dial name), each dialing button has four characters assigned to it; for example, press the 2 button once to type a, twice for b, thrice for c, and four times for 2 . Obviously, this is not the means by which you would want to ask Amazon.com to find Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). But it’s tolerable for short search terms, stock symbols, and boilerplate replies such as “Thx 4 msg. Will call u.” There’s a stopgap to the text trouble: you can buy a cable ($100 to $200) to connect Wireless Web-enabled phones to a Palm or Windows CE handheld computer or to the standard serial port in a notebook (or desktop) PC. The phone then functions as a wireless modem, enabling the computer to dial up any Internet provider. That’s not as perfect a solution as it sounds: current wireless technology limits the connection speed to 14Kb, one-quarter the speed of a regular dial-up 56Kb connection and pretty poky for Web surfing — though adequate for E-mail. But the pitch is that users can do much of their work from the phone alone and need to resort to the cable scenario only rarely. Limitations notwithstanding, it’s surprising how much one can actually do on these downsized sites through the phone alone. Yahoo, for example, offers access to all its services (other than Web searches), including E-mail, a personal scheduling service called Calendar, and Web updates of scores, auctions, and stock prices. When your E-mail and calendar are on the Yahoo portal, you can access them from any computer (notebook, desktop, Palm, or Windows CE) that has Web access and from your mobile phone. Shopping sites generally offer catalog searches and full ordering capability — though without graphics, of course, you buy sight unseen. More Handheld Net Coming At this writing, Sprint Wireless Web is the only nationwide carrier offering anything approaching true Internet content over a telephone, although a few regional digital-phone companies (like Bell Atlantic Mobile) are rolling out similar Internet phone services. Some other telecom carriers provide limited sorts of wireless Internet-based services. GTE Wireless and BellSouth Mobility, for example, both let you compose a short text message on a Web site or in an Internet E-mail program and then send that message to appear on the display of a GTE or a BellSouth Mobility subscriber who pays for the optional text-messaging service. BellSouth customers can also get automatic news updates from CNN, similar to Sprint’s Web updates. But is all this the same thing as getting the Internet on your phone? Hardly. Other devices also provide their own versions of Web access to a limited number of sites. Some new digital pager models from Motorola and other manufacturers also access Web-portal content and retrieve E-mail from portals. And the Palm VII Organizer can connect to Palm’s own Palm.Net wireless Internet service to retrieve live Web content and send and receive text messages. But just like Sprint’s Wireless Web, Palm.Net doesn’t let Palm VII users wander the entire Web. Instead, Palm users can access only a certain number of sites (about 130, at press time) that employ a “Web-clipping” application. The program delivers selected data to the user in a format that the Palm VII can display. Of course, it’s appealing that you can access Internet services wirelessly at all. But today the lack of flexibility afforded to wireless aficionados is the biggest drawback to these services. At this moment, your choices are pretty limited. If you choose a Sprint phone, you get Wireless Web. If you choose Palm, you get Palm.Net. Do I Need It? When it comes to portable communications and the Internet, the “Do I need it?” question is moot. These things really come down to “Do I want it?” And you already know the answer to that, don’t you? But seriously, how useful are wireless portal services? Well, as they’re now configured, these services deliver the greatest value to subscribers who already use a portal as their E-mail hub and restrict their Web surfing mainly to such Ôbersites as Amazon.com or CNN — at least when they’re on the road. If you’re dependent on your ISP E-mail account (not a portal) and you really need to surf esoteric sites, wireless portals don’t offer you much. Consider coverage, too, when you’re deciding whether to plunge into wireless Internet. Although Sprint’s national PCS network covers all U.S. metro areas, many rural areas are not included. If you already subscribe to a digital-voice plan, like Sprint PCS or Bell Atlantic Mobile’s SingleRate, you’re probably aware that if you travel outside the digital service area, you can continue to chat, thanks to “roaming” agreements that send your call through the networks of other carriers. But Sprint’s Wireless Web functions only within the smaller confines of Sprint’s all-digital network, cutting out when you stray into roaming regions. Similarly, the Palm.Net network covers more than 260 metro areas but leaves many locations between the cities unserved. (You can examine coverage maps on the www.SprintPCS.com and www.PalmNet.com sites.) More important, watch for an industry association called the WAP Forum made up of more than 200 companies. The group, which includes every heavy hitter in communications and digital hardware, has developed Wireless Application Protocol, a new global specification that will standardize the way wireless devices exchange and display voice and data. Already in use in Europe and Japan and set to explode in the U.S. market this year, WAP defines a new language — WML (wireless markup language) — for creating Web pages intended for use by wireless devices. What does this mean to you? A variety of digital-phone makers, including Nokia and Ericsson, are building so-called “WAP-enabled” devices that are part phone, part personal digital assistant. When they hit the United States this year (priced at around $500), these hybrid handhelds should be able to display any Web page that’s been translated into the new language. To get the goodies from WAP, you must be holding a WAP device — meaning that virtually every U.S. user of an Internet phone at this writing will need a new phone (pardon, new device). The full transition to WAP will take several years. During that time companies like Spyglass and Digital Paths are delivering software that automatically converts everyday HTML Web sites into WML. The software promises to enable WAP users to see any Web site online, including the millions of pages that may not have been retooled in wireless-friendly WML. If you’re ready to run out this instant to visit Mel, the take-no-prisoners electronics salesman (“Want the extended warranty on that, pal?”), you’re probably also the type who’ll be drooling over sexy new WAP devices by year’s end. By then, your sexy pre-WAP communicator may seem as obsolete as a CB radio. You may want to hold on to your money until the new toys arrive. Ned Snell is a freelance writer living in Florida. He is the author of 16 books, including Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 Hours , Third Edition (Sams, 1999). Who Are the Players, and What’s the Cost? Wireless Internet service is sold in the same sorts of mind-twisting packages in which voice services are sold, although minute for minute it’s more expensive. For example, with Sprint, $50 will get you 500 voice-only minutes, and $60 will purchase 300 minutes that you can use for both voice and Wireless Web. The information below was accurate at press time, but prices in this market change rapidly. Check with providers for current details, and watch for discounts and special offers, which are common. DEVICES Internet-Ready Phones Digital phones compatible with Sprint Wireless Web start at around $130 and are available from several manufacturers. You can get them in all-digital or dual-band models. Major makers include: NeoPoint : 858-458-2800 Ericsson : 800-374-2776 Motorola (phones and pagers) : 800-453-0920 Nokia : 888-665-4228 Qualcomm : 800-349-4188 Palm Computers Palm Inc. : 800-881-7256 Palm VII Organizer: $500 (street) SERVICES Sprint PCS Wireless Web : Monthly plans range from $60 for 300 minutes (combo of voice and Internet) to $180 for 1,200 minutes. All such plans also include 200 Web updates. Additional minutes cost 25¢ to 30¢ each, depending on the plan, and additional Web updates are 10¢ each. You can add 50 minutes of data and 50 Web updates for another $10 to your existing voice plan of $30. (No matter how you work it out, adding data to the mix increases the per-minute cost. Sprint’s twist of plan options can make that hard to notice.) Finally, you may also sign up for a voice-only plan, purchase no Wireless Web plan, and still use the Wireless Web as needed for 39¢ a minute. (You must purchase a compatible phone for any Wireless Web; Web updates may be received on any phone used on Sprint PCS.) Palm.Net : Three plans are available, all tying cost to the number of “transactions” performed per month. A transaction is one message, one stock quote, one score, and so on. The basic $10 plan includes 80 transactions. For $25, you get 240 transactions. Up it to $40, and you can tick away 480 transactions. EARLY ADOPTER What’s the business benefit of tapping the Internet through a telephone? Well, have you heard about the guy who started a company while riding an airport courtesy bus? Howard Gerson, president and co-owner of Certified Safety Inc., a 200-employee Kansas CityÂbased maker of first-aid supplies, was itching for E-mail from a business partner in Israel. Gerson saw getting that message and posting a reply pronto as a vital relationship volley in founding a new “M-commerce” (that’s “M” for mobile) venture to be co-owned by Gerson, his family, and TeleVend, a one-year-old, Jerusalem-based company that supplies network services and applications to the vending-machine industry. But by the morning on which Gerson was packing up his family for a trip, the missive from the Land of Milk and Honey hadn’t arrived. After dropping his family at the airport terminal, parking the car, and boarding the courtesy bus to ride back to the terminal, Gerson connected to Sprint’s Wireless Web service through his NeoPoint 1000 digital phone. He opened the Yahoo portal from the phone’s MiniBrowser menu, retrieved his Yahoo E-mail — and breathed a sigh of relief. The message he’d been waiting for had finally arrived. Using the phone’s keypad, he quickly replied. Gerson says that the exchange — with “no cables connected, on a bus in the middle of Kansas” — was a critical step in the formation of Wirca Inc., which will develop and market wireless cash-transaction technologies. Gerson says Wirca’s products will make it possible, for example, to pick up a hamburger and fries at the local fast-food palace without handing over cash or a credit card — the transaction will take place automatically, wirelessly, as you drive through. Admitting that text entry is cumbersome, Gerson says it’s manageable enough for brief responses. For more full-featured E-mailing, he hooks his phone to his notebook PC through the optional cable and wirelessly dials his regular Internet provider. That comes in handy not only on the road, says Gerson, but also at home, where having four kids can make the availability of an open phone line “a challenge.” Tapping into the Web solely from his phone, Gerson has dipped into the MiniBrowser’s other offerings. He has made wireless transactions on AmeriTrade’s site and recently ordered a book from Amazon.com during a lull at a breakfast meeting. Though he has been a Yahoo portal customer for two years and an avid user of Yahoo mail, Gerson doesn’t manage his schedule on the portal, preferring to keep his calendar in his phone’s built-in, off-line scheduling application. Such phone features, along with the NeoPoint’s large (for a phone) display, blur the boundaries between mobile phones and personal digital assistants. The blur has come far enough for Gerson; a longtime Palm user, he has abandoned his PDA in favor of his phone.
