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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kanetsu who wrote (8803)	6/29/1999 1:59:00 PM
From: Rande Is	Respond to of 57584

Kanetsu, No bother. . .On TUTS. . .some thoughts. . . The key to their success lies in allowing hotels to use existing telephone lines. . . AND existing commercial phone systems. I see where Teledex is supporting TUTS. . .but the question is this. . . how many other commercial phone systems are there in use in hotels and what percentage of them are compatible with TUTS. Yes, I understand that the system will run on copper wire. . or as TUTS puts it. . "to exploit the underutilized bandwidth of copper telephone wires". . . .like that installed at all hotels. . . but that does not mean that a salesman and a tech can get a hotel up and running right away. My guess is that a hotel would need to have a Tuts compatible system. . . .Teledex is the market leader . . .but what is Teledex's market share? . . .which others are in use?. . .what compatibility issues are there? What would a typical hotel expect to pay to be Tuts Home Run compatible. . . . now remember that most older hotels have older phone systems. . . some could be 20 or more years old. I know. I have seen it. Some here probably won't believe this. . .but guess who perhaps the very first person to push hotels into providing online services to their guests was? Moi. Yup. . .in 1984, I was given the green light by Knight-Ridder to pursue my idea of putting Viewtron terminals [with remote control keypads] into high rent hotel rooms and luxury condominiums. . . this would allow guests to check real-time stocks by touching in any one of hundreds of thousands of keywords. . .up to the second news, sports, weather. . .chat, banking, shopping. . . check the menu to every restaurant in the Miami area [by just typing in the restaurant name]. . .check movie showtimes [by theatre location, time or movie name]. . .or reviews for both. . .book airline reservations online [through travel agents or go right to the Official Airline Guide] or reserve a rental car [from major agencies]. . .or buy tickets to any major event, without leaving the hotel room. . . or making a call. Guess what the number one obstacle was? Some PBX systems would not allow the modems to call out. . .under any circumstance. . . . so a new phone system would have to be purchased, before the systems could be installed. Then we could not get the service providers to agree on volume pricing. . . finally, we rolled out Viewtron nationwide and it was never again pursued. I was the only representative of Viewtron that ever marketed to hotel executives. . .in fact, I doubt if any other person in America marketed online services to hotels in any part of the 1980's. Another consideration is ease of use, by guests. Considering that only what 20 or 25 percent of us have PCs?? . . . what additional personnel would need hired by the hotel to talk the guests through the use of their system? If they used a terminal with a video display, the number one question would be. . . "what do I do with this mousey thingy?" . . . . if they limited access to the telephone [like press release says] then the usefulness of the system is greatly limited. . . and still guests will want to know how to retrieve their mail. . . it may take 15 minutes of an operator's time to explain to them that nobody is reading their mail. . . and assure the guests that when they get home from vacation, all of their mail will still be in the box in front of their house. And yes, I HAVE worked the phones. . . can't you tell? <g> Rande Is