Weather in Your Hand; The Weather Channel Teams With 3Com to Provide
Palm VII Users Instant Weather Access - BW, 01:35 p.m Dec 02, 1998 EST
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2,
1998--The Weather Channel(R) announced today it will put
weather information in the palm of consumers' hands.
The Weather Channel will be the premier weather information
provider for the new Palm VII(TM) connected organizer,
unveiled today by Palm Computing, Inc., a 3Com company.
The Palm VII device offers users instant access to
up-to-the-minute weather information from the all-weather
network's web site, www.weather.com. The Palm VII
organizer, a wireless product from Palm Computing, will enable
users to quickly and easily access information from The Weather
Channel database of more than 1,300 domestic cities --
including the latest local conditions, five-day forecasts and
severe weather updates -- via a wireless connection to the
Internet. The Palm VII connected organizer will enter national
field trial in January, 1999, and be available next year.
"The Weather Channel is continually seeking better ways to
deliver information to its users, and we are proud to work with
Palm Computing," said Mike Carey, Senior Vice President, The
Weather Channel New Media. "The extension of our web
content to this platform allows us to move one step closer to our
ultimate goal, providing weather to users wherever they need it,
and allows us to extend our highly successful Web site,
weather.com. With the Palm VII organizer, weather information
is always up-to-date and available, even when a television or PC
is not accessible."
"The Weather Channel's trusted and reliable contribution of
weather data adds yet another convenient and customer-friendly
resource to the Palm VII organizer," said Andrea Butter, acting
vice president of marketing for Palm Computing, a 3Com
company. "Whether customers are traveling on business or
pleasure, or simply in their own hometown, they will now have
access to up-to-date weather conditions via the world's favorite
organizer."
The Weather Channel will give Palm VII device users hourly
updates on current conditions and forecasts and will be updated
three to four times a day to ensure Palm VII organizer users
always receive the most accurate and timely weather
information. Weather headlines will be updated as often as six
times per day during periods of extreme weather.
The Weather Channel, based in Atlanta, is the nation's premier
provider of weather information. As the only 24-hour national
weather network, The Weather Channel can be seen in over 72
million homes nationwide.
The Weather Channel Web site, located at www.weather.com,
is the leading weather provider on the Web and offers current
conditions and forecasts for over 1,700 cities worldwide as well
as local radar, satellite, and special lifestyle features.
Weather.com attracts over 100 million page views every month,
and is consistently ranked as the top single content news site by
Relevant Knowledge. The Weather Channel provides
weather-related products and services to several leading edge
online organizations, including: BellSouth, CompuServe,
iVillage, MindSpring, among others.
In addition to its cable network, The Weather Channel produces
home video products; offers 1-900-WEATHER, its interactive
telephone service; supplies weather forecasts for radio and
newspapers; and provides free resources to educators. The
Weather Channel is owned by Landmark Communications, a
Norfolk, Va.-based privately held media company with global
interests.
The Palm VII connected organizer is the first handheld solution
for out-of-the-box wireless communications and Internet access.
In addition to providing fast and simple access to personal and
business information, the Palm VII organizer enables users to
quickly, easily and securely obtain information from Web sites
via a wireless connection to the Internet and provides a means of
instant two-way personal communications. The Palm VII
organizer enters a national field trial in January, 1999, and is
expected to be widely available in the U.S. next year.
With the Palm VII organizer, 3Com also introduces a
revolutionary new model for accessing Internet information,
called web clipping. Web clipping is a means of extracting a
specific set of needed information from a given Web site, by
requesting certain types of information via special query forms
that reside on the Palm VII device. Information received from
the Internet by a Palm VII user is automatically optimized for
viewing on the Palm VII screen. 3Com and Palm Computing are
registered trademarks, and Palm VII is a trademark of 3Com
Corporation or its subsidiaries.
Copyright 1998, Business Wire
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