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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Straight Up who wrote (6333)	6/14/1999 10:54:00 AM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

New Markman Memo. Well, not so new, it was issued on June 8th, but I don't believe anyone has posted it yet. Regards, Mark Memo from Markman: June 8, 1999 Today at the SUPERCOMM '99 trade show, we announced our plans to deliver new features for the Portico service. (To see the press release, click here.) These features address a number of important enhancements requested by our users, resellers and telecommunications partners. They will be integrated into Portico at no additional charge, and we believe they will make the service even more attractive to current and future subscribers. Two of the enhancements address what we call the Welcome Domain. This refers to what a caller hears and experiences when he or she first connects to a subscriber's Portico number. For the caller, it's the equivalent of reaching a receptionist. A significant number of our users have asked for a more flexible welcome experience so that they can tailor their "virtual receptionist" to reflect their needs. Specifically, customizing the greeting and the length of time a caller spends in the Welcome Domain were identified as key priorities. With our new customized greeting feature, Portico can now answer with "You have reached the office of Steve Markman" instead of "Good afternoon, welcome to Portico, you have reached the number for Steve Markman." In this example, the italicized words are recorded in your own voice. This enhancement allows a greeting to be shorter, and the caller hears your voice first when he or she is trying to reach you. The other new feature for the Welcome Domain allows the user to select the questions that Portico asks the calling party. Portico users will now have the option to request certain questions by selecting them from a list. Again, this allows you to significantly shorten and further shape a caller's initial experience with your Portico assistant. Both new Welcome Domain features are scheduled to be available in mid-July. Also at this time, we will be adding inbound fax receipt capability to Portico. This feature allows faxes to be sent to the Portico user's toll-free number. The received fax is stored as an image in your Portico Web mailbox. From there, it can be forwarded using e-mail, or faxed on to another fax machine. This feature rounds out the messaging features of Portico and makes it a fully featured Unified Messaging Service. In the upcoming months, we will be introducing a number of other features that expand the functionality of the service. We expext to commercially deploy our voice agent technology, code-named Kenya, for the first time. This technology will be used to implement a much requested feature --having Portico call you over the phone or send you an e-mail when there's something about which you've asked to be notified. Currently, Portico notifications are sent as alphanumeric pages only. Thus, you could find out about a key voicemail message, or the fact that a stock has surpassed some value, by a page. With the new feature, Portico will literally pick up a virtual phone and call you wherever your schedule says you will be. Or if you have a device that supports e-mail, Portico can send the same notification to that device as well. Two other future enhancements will give users more messaging function when they're using Portico over the phone. We'll be including file folders as part of the voice user interface (VUI), similar to what users experience in e-mail today when they file items in "sent" or "deleted" for example. We are also adding the ability to create and forward messages directly on the phone through the VUI. In summary, we are committed to delivering the best service and features to our customers. Customer feedback is critical in achieving this goal, and we have several feedback methods to help us track what's most important to our users. Recently, we added the Portico Information Exchange to the Portico Web site, www.portico.net. This online forum not only enhances our users' ability to communicate with us, but also allows them to learn and share ideas about Portico among themselves. We are very pleased to bring these latest capabilities to our subscribers and business partners, and we intend to keep it up. genmagic.com