Speaking of mobile e-mail solutions....
This may not be directly on topic, but it's surely related to every Wit IPO player who must occasionally pry free from the main computer and venture out into the cold, cruel, vicious, unwired world. Until a couple of months ago, I assumed that it was fairly easy to just buy a cellular-capable modem and an adapter to hook it up to any of the popular cell phones on the market, for internet access via notebook computer. Ha! I drove myself nuts trying to put together a solution in time for vacation. In the end, I dug out an old cellular bag-phone, along with a dial tone adapter that I bought for it years ago when I had a kiosk business in a mall. It's nothing more than a gizmo that hooks up to the bag phone and then provides a standard phone jack with a standard hot dial tone. I dusted off the bag-phone, got it temporarily activated for the vacation at very low cost, and tested her out with my notebook. Worked like a charm. Retrieved e-mail, sent e-mail, and surfed the net at a speed of around 14K bps. Packed her up and headed out, confident that my rather bizarre looking contraption would indeed allow me to check for my BNBN Affirmation Request from the Disneyland parking lot. Wrong. Apparently the cells in Anaheim aren't up to the standards that I enjoy in my own small hometown. I couldn't get connected. Of course, BNBN turned out to be plentiful at Wit, I got back to the hotel in plenty of time to respond to the e-mail, and got 200 shares. But that's beside the point. It could've just as easily been a really hot issue that required a really quick confirmation.
Last week, on ZDTV's Fresh Gear, I saw a new service called PocketMail that would've been perfect. The devices, made by Sharp and JVC, sell for $100-150. They fit in your pocket and have a QWERTY keyboard on them. The back of the gadget is an acoustic coupler that you hold to virtually any phone (excluding some digital cellular bands), including plain old pay phones, and connect to a toll-free service. The service lets you retrieve and send e-mail from an address that is included with the service, or your own standard ISP e-mail, in around 20 seconds. The service costs $9.95 per month for unlimited usage, and according to the ZDTV folks who tried it out, it works great. It sounds like what the doctor ordered if I have any other travel pop up on a big IPO day. You can see more details at this link.
pocketmail.com
And, I'd love to hear about any successful mobile data solutions that others are using for e-mail and internet access. I know this is a rapidly evolving field, but so far I haven't been able to find much out there that's ready to go at the moment. |
