How can they write an article like this an not mention General Magic, or Wildfire for that matter. GM's PR department needs to get out there and remind these reporters they are here and now with a leading edge product. In fact, any new product announcement should be held in light against existing products to be fair, but then that's the power of the press.
Regards, Mark
GTE Unveils Combined E-Mail, Voice Mail, Fax System (Update3)
Bloomberg News
Jun 7 1999 4:38PM ET
GTE Unveils Combined E-Mail, Voice Mail, Fax System (Update3)
(Adds information about competing free services.)
Irving, Texas, June 7 (Bloomberg) -- GTE Corp., which is set to be acquired for $80 billion by No. 1 local-phone company Bell Atlantic Corp., unveiled a service that combines e-mail, voice mail and faxes, letting customers nationwide retrieve all of their messages in one place.
The service, the first of its kind available nationwide, will cost about $15 to $20 a month and be offered later this month to GTE's local customers and to other phone companies that will resell the service. The service lets users receive e-mail and faxes over the phone and voice mail through computers, getting all of their messages either way.
GTE, the No. 3 U.S. local phone company, is pushing to sell more high-profit enhanced services as it faces unprecedented competition in its local markets. GTE expects the new service to eventually replace separate voice mail and e-mail accounts, boosting the market to $2.2 billion to $3 billion by 2002.
''Demand is on the rise for enhanced services that bridge the gap between traditional telephone and Internet networks,'' said Paul O'Brien, vice president of GTE's Internetworking unit.
Other companies, including closely held OneBox.com Inc., uReach.com Inc. and Telebot Corp., are racing to offer similar services for free.
GTE rose 7/8 to 64 1/4. Bell Atlantic rose 5/16 to 55 7/16.
Closely held Telcordia Technologies Inc., of Morristown, New Jersey, developed the service for GTE, combining products from eight suppliers, including Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., closely held Amteva, Software.com Inc. and Real Audio.
The service won't require customers to change their phone numbers. That means a user can get e-mail and voice mail for office, home and cellular phones all in one stop.
GTE plans to target the service to salespeople and other traveling professionals who are frequently out of the office and need to retrieve messages from the road.
Universal
''People have to go to a bunch of different places to get their messages,'' said Roger Smith, GTE's product manager for the new service. ''This directs everything into a universal mailbox.''
The service will read e-mail to users over the phone and identify faxes, letting users redirect the faxes to a local number if they want to read them.
The unified messaging service also will be available to Internet service providers and other phone companies for $8 to $11 a month to offer to their customers.
GTE is the first of several phone providers and equipment makers that plan to announce new products and services that merge features from voice and data at this week's annual Supercomm conference in Atlanta.
snap.com
This one is even worse. Mark
Unified messaging in works
GTE plans to combine fax, voice and e-mail
06/08/99
By Jennifer Files / The Dallas Morning News
New high-tech ways to stay in touch are creating a problem for the people who most want to be connected: too many places to check messages.
Irving-based GTE Corp. said Monday that it plans to become the first phone company to sell a solution.
For $15 to $20 a month, subscribers could check voice mail, e-mail and faxes from all their phone lines and e-mail accounts, using any phone or computer. The system, called unified messaging, is expected to be available to Dallas customers before the end of the year.
While other phone companies, including Southwestern Bell and AT&T, are testing similar technology, they're not as close to bringing it to market. Is this Portico?
An entrepreneurial Silicon Valley company called TeleBot Corp. offers a unified messaging service for free, but subscribers must wade through paid advertisements every time they check in. Other companies are jumping into the market, including San Mateo, Calif.-based Onebox.com, which said Monday that it will sell a unified messaging service in Austin and other cities.
"GTE has made a commitment to really make a difference in this space," said Roger Smith, a spokesman for GTE Internetworking, its Boston-based Internet and data subsidiary.
The service will help GTE capitalize on its $500 million investment in a nationwide telecommunications network that will carry the calls.
The company plans to sell unified messaging to its own phone and Internet customers. But at first, most revenue will come from selling the service to wholesale customers - Internet service providers or other phone companies - which would resell it to residential or business customers.
Unified messaging will be available this month to resellers in the Dallas and Boston markets, and later in 50 other U.S. cities.
The target market? Folks who probably already have, say, two phone lines, a fax machine, an Internet account or two - plus maybe a pager and a cell phone. "Very mobile customers - on the go," GTE spokesman Bill Kula said.
Those busy business types currently receive an average of 71 messages a day, according to polling firm Gallup Inc. Expecting people to pay for convenience, telecom gurus Ovum Ltd. forecast that unified messaging will be a $2.3 billion industry by 2002.
Subscribers would set up the system by forwarding phone calls to the messaging service after a few rings. They could check messages in two ways.
On a computer, an inbox would show a list of messages, with voice mail, e-mail and fax messages identified by different icons. Voice-mail messages would be converted to sound files, and faxed messages could be sent to a convenient fax machine.
For users who check in by telephone, the system would convert e-mail messages to speech and electronically read them aloud.
Pricing is key, Mr. Smith said. When GTE tested the service in Dallas and Tampa, Mr. Smith said, 74 percent of users said they liked it but wouldn't subscribe if they had to pay every time they checked messages.
Phone companies are developing other stay-in-touch services.
Later this year, for instance, Southwestern Bell plans to sell Dallas customers a service for its voice mail subscribers that will automatically send messages to a group of people whether they subscribe to voice mail or not. Bell is marketing the service as a "soccer mom" convenience: Make just one call when rainy weather cancels a weekend game, not 12.
Customers have at least one thing in common, said Carol Beeman, director of messaging. "Their driving needs are to simplify their lives, to control their lives and to have products that are easy to use."
dallasnews.com |
