More: A portal in your pocket?
The Red Herring - December 3, 1998: 9:18 p.m. ET
New Palm VII organizer puts 3Com unit in new position with its partners
SAN FRANCISCO (The Red Herring) - 3Com's latest
organizer debuted Wednesday at a Santa Clara conference held
for Palm developers. But at an announcement of the new "Palm
Computing Platform," a.k.a. the Palm VII, the spotlight was
on Palm's partners, not the upgraded machine.
"It's significant that we're rolling out this product at our
developers' conference," says Janice Roberts, a 3Com
(COMS) senior vice president who oversees the Palm
Computing Division.
The Palm VII is not the radical new PalmPilot some people
were expecting. What it is, essentially, is a Palm III with one
new feature: an antenna that supports a wireless connection,
with Palm-branded cellular data service provided by BellSouth
Wireless.
For less than $10 a month (on the basic plan), Palm VII
users will be able to get stock quotes, news stories, driving
directions, and other features provided by a variety of partners.
Most partners would not discuss specifics of their deals with
3Com, but Yahoo, US Dex, the Wall Street Journal
Interactive and TheStreet.com confirm that no money changed
hands.
The Palm VII uses a technology called "Web clipping" to
deliver just the relevant portions of Web pages. (It's not unlike
Apple's Sherlock search technology, which delivers
abbreviated versions of Web search results to Macintosh
desktops.) Joe Sipher, Palm's director of wireless products,
says pricing wasn't fixed but was likely to be under $800.
That's significantly more expensive than current models, which
may limit sales -- and lessen the appeal to media companies
aiming for a mass market.
"For us, it's distribution overall," says David Conway, a
Yahoo product manager. "We're always looking at various
ways of distributing our product."
For TheStreet.com, it's a perfect match, says Cory
Johnson, the financial publication's West Coast bureau chief.
"If they brought the price down to $50, it would suck for us,"
he says. A high price point, Johnson suggested, would bring
TheStreet.com a desirable demographic of affluent
professionals on the go.
Palm's portal play
3Com, too, may be eyeing the Palm's demographics. Its
current strategy not to charge for placement may make sense
for now, as it tries to attract more content providers.
But the apparent aim is to create a hub of
instant-gratification content for information junkies. If the Palm
VII takes off, 3Com will act as a gatekeeper for content
providers, and will handle the conversion and compression of
data that will travel over the Palm network. That may be bad
news for AvantGo, a prominent Palm developer. AvantGo's
Web to Go, which uploads Web pages to the Palm organizer
when the user synchronizes it with a Net-connected PC, has
attracted over 500 content providers.
Stuart Read, VP of marketing at AvantGo, is clearly feeling
the heat from Palm's foray into the portal market. "A
standards-compliant approach would be much more appealing
to content providers," he says. "Shouldn't Palm be one of
those platforms (that can read standard HTML)? ... If you're
going to have any kind of interactivity, you have to use
(Palm's) compiled HTML."
Palm content manager Tammy Medanich said that the
content provided over a wireless connection will be
substantially different than the offline AvantGo content. But
publications like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today
provide content for both programs. The real battle may be for
users' attention.
Palm's portal ambitions may accelerate AvantGo's focus on
the enterprise market and other operating systems, like
Windows CE; executives have long said that the Web to Go
strategy has been more about getting attention than developing
a revenue stream.
AvantGo company announced a partnership Wednesday
with Puma Technology to develop a generic way to connect
mobile computing devices running on a variety of platforms.
"AvantGo is designed to deliver any application to any
handheld via any network," AvantGo CEO Felix Lin said in a
statement.
One startup sure to emerge a winner is Certicom, whose
technology will encrypt the credit card information used to bill
users for Palm's wireless service, as well as a banking
application developed by Bank of America. Encryption experts
have long hailed Certicom's elliptic-curve technology as a
better solution for computers with limited processing power
and battery life. The rollout of the Palm VII will be Certicom's
first encounter with the mass market, and will likely help it win
accounts for other consumer devices.
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