Dashboarding
on Bourbon Street
by
Mark Sedenquist
A
week ago I was in New Orleans attending the Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) Wireless
2000 show. The four-day conference was, by turns, exhilarating,
exhausting, frustrating and illuminating. New Orleans itself
was gearing up for Mardi Gras, and inside the convention center,
it was humanly impossible for one person to attend the swirl
of press conferences, product briefings, panel discussions,
and keynote addresses. By keeping myself focused on dashboarder
equipment (and attending only one little Mardi Gras parade),
I came to a couple of observations.
First,
the line between work-time and personal-time continues to
blur. In one session, one presenter asked the room of 500
telco executives how many worked 9:00 to 5:00 I saw about
three hands raised. In my own entrepreneurial dashboarding
life, there is virtually no hour during the day when I am
not "available" for a work-related telephone or
Internet messaging communique. In fact, since many of my dashboarding
colleagues work and reside in time zones distant from my own,
much of my daily work correspondence "arrives" in
my e-mail box when I am asleep, and vice-versa.
Being
accessible, whether in wireless or wireline mode, doesn't
necessarily lead to more productivity. In Road
Wirer 16, I introduced the concept of Dynamic Space, and
it is my contention that the current rush of products and
services should be viewed in relation to how much personal
control the devices provide (or fail to provide) in enabling
personal productivity in work and leisure time. There was
so much activity at the CTIA show that I am still at a loss
in my attempt to provide some measure of clarity to what seemed
to be happening. While my mind continues to sort out true
utility from glitzy hype, I will plunge in and report on several
Web sites, companies and products that show promise.
- Nokia's
new "How-to" Web site
A
frequent problem posed by correspondents on the Road
Wirer Wireless Forum has to do with interface questions
by owners of Nokia phones who have purchased wireless handset
with the expectation that they will then be able to use
the phones to connect their laptops to the Internet. Nokia
makes one of the most popular .6 watt phones (6160 series)
among professional road warriors and the general lack of
documentation about how to perform this task has led more
than one analyst to suggest that Nokia's preference for
WAP-enabled phones may be the culprit. It seems possible
that Nokia's marketing push may tend to favor non PC-based
applications using Nokia handsets. (See commentary about
WAP below).
There
is good news on this particular Nokia horizon. I spoke with
a senior marketing manager who assured me that Nokia will
be updating their on-line customer service Website with
accurate, practical information for this application on
most of their North American products. The Website currently
provides excellent tutorial information about many of the
features of the listed handsets. Current "How To"
information is now online at www.nokiahowto.com.
The updates are expected to completed by early summer.
- WAP
WAP
stands for "Wireless Application Protocol" which
includes a programming language, (WML) that allows Internet
content to be delivered in a stripped down version so that
it could be viewed by low-bandwidth capacity devices, like
handsets and PDA's (e. g. Palm Pilots). There are hundreds
of WAP-enabled devices that are being rushed to the marketplace.
Such devices will make it easy to capture and deliver the
latest stock market, news and business facts to personal
devices. There is also the entire SMS (Short Messaging System)
network that can deliver information and data to personal
paging devices. However, I am of the opinion that anyone
should be able to access information from any Web site,
regardless of whether or not that information has been re-written
in the WAP-formatted language. To that end, there are a
number of companies that are working on ways to translate
the HTML codes of most Web pages into this other language.
- MarbleTop
Wireless LAN
There
were lots of companies exhibiting new products and technologies
at the show that sound exciting but are largely unproven.
I'll be keeping abreast of news about a "MarbleTop"
wireless LAN that can deliver Internet content at 9.6K speeds.
- AirDesk,
Inc.
AirDesk,
Inc., working with Paradigm, is marketing the AirStar100
for $199 that provides a digital interface for use with
a Motorola StarTAC handset in much the same way that the
S1936D provides an analog interface for connecting with
a laptop on the road. This AirStar100 can be attached to
an external antenna. AirDesk, Inc. also produces an excellent
catalogue, and they sell many of the products that the Road
Wirer has recommended. The current version of the Website,
www.airdesk.biz,
is a little difficult to navigate, but ordering one of their
printed catalogues may be helpful. Since they are a Motorola
retailer, it is unlikely that they will expand their product
lines to include other telephones. However, they also carry
the Standard Communication's CDL900 AMPS data modem. Top
speed on this unit is still only 9.6K but it was developed
for heavy applications and may offer a good alternative
to analog-based cellular phones. One of the worrisome aspects
of the current spectrum crunch is that many carriers are
dropping analog service through conventional service plans.
- "Customized
Internet Vehicle"
Cellport
Systems in Boulder, Colorado, certainly grabbed my attention.
They are building or preparing to build something they refer
to as a "Customized Internet Vehicle" (CIV). By
the use of a on-board mobile server this vehicle supports
TCP/IP and CDPD, iDEN, PCS and CDMA platforms.
- New
Hands-free Cellular Products
For
something interesting you may see at your neighborhood Circuit
City in about a month, check out www.cellport.com.The
current offering is called the Cellport 3000 which is a
phone-specific pocket adapter that enables a single hands-free
platform in which you can place different digital handsets
using Lucent's audio enhanced sound, battery charging, and
antenna connection. In subsequent versions, data jacks,
voice-recognition and text- to-speech protocols are planned.
More
news in a few days, when I can find some perspective of where
we are and where we are headed. Our grail of finding the ways
and means to log on anywhere at a reasonable cost is still
just slightly beyond our grasp, but conferences like Wireless
2000 certainly reveal a strong commitment on the part of many
companies and developers to stay the course.
