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Technology Stocks : Access Anywhere, Anytime. Cell Phones/PDA's join the Net -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (104)	7/30/1999 10:44:00 AM
From: John Biddle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 332

From the link: There are already quite a few devices in the form of pagers, PDAs, and cell phones, so there's no reason why payment systems shouldn't look to expand to existing devices," he said. Well, one reason is that the telcos may not want to get into the electronic payment business. Nothing in the article talked about buy-in from any of them. It does seem like something they could do reasonably, though, and not only will they boost interest in cell phones, but they should be able to charge a small fee for the service (maybe paid by the vendor ala Visa) which though small would be high margin. It will have to be fast, though, to compete with putting in coins. And how about the privacy implications. More and more of your life activities will be available to someone who wants it. Where you were, when and what you did there. Spooky. . . . Add in all the things that are totally not serious work related like getting a phone listing from a on line yellow pages and you'll see reason to have a good phone no matter what other devices you keep. There's no doubt in my mind that PCS phones will number over a billion in a few short years. That's one of the reasons I'm long QCOM. Add in things like Bluetooth and Jini where the devices automatically link up as soon as they come near each other and having a cell phone with you at all times will indeed become a necessity. Beepers will disappear as just a feature in the phones, at least for all but the poorest.

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (104)	7/31/1999 12:25:00 AM
From: chirodoc	Respond to of 332

standard is finally set--winners will be emerging Palm Plans to Adopt Rivals' Technology 11.32 a.m. ET (1532 GMT) July 29, 1999 By Joseph Gallivan NEW YORK — The market leader in the hand-held device business is giving up on its personal technology and adopting the standards used by most of its lesser rivals in the business. 3Com's Palm Computing, maker of the 4-million-unit-selling Palm Pilot, has announced it will join the Wireless Appliance Protocol (WAP). Sun Microsystems Inc., Hitachi Corp. and WirelessKnowledge - a joint venture between Microsoft Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., quickly switched to WAP, as well. A spokesperson for Palm said that the company will remain committed to the Palm.net service, but plans to support the WAP protocol in its operating system (Palm OS). Ultimately, the aim is to be able to serve full-color web pages on screens on cell phones and digitally-enabled PDAs. WAP has become popular because it enables web pages to be converted on the fly to smaller versions of themselves, so they can fit on the limited bandwidth of cellphones. WAP is a software standard designed to let portable devices like PDAs and cellphones with small screens view and download content from the Internet. The market is set to explode as cellphone users upgrade their hardware and begin receiving bursts of data such as sports scores, weather information and stock prices. Palm is a latecomer to WAP, which now has 125 member companies. In May it announced the Palm.net "web clipping" service which works with the Palm VII, the new Pilot with built-in cellular modem. For a monthly fee users can receive limited amounts of web-like content from certain providers. Far more content providers prefer the WAP system. "All providers care about is installed user base, that's why WAP is popular," says Seamus McAteer, Analyst at Jupiter Communications. "Consumers aren't signing up for cellular data services, they're signing up for voice. Data is just an add-on. So Palm's proprietary protocol is slower and more expensive." Content providers are lining up to do WAP-compliant deals with digital cellular providers, for example Yahoo! with Sprint and Microsoft with Nextel. It is considered a low-cost way to extend a media brand to a new platform. "Microsoft has no leverage in this space," said McAteer. "AT&T Wireless calls the shots - it basically told Ericsson and Nokia to get in line. But the big new brands will be companies such as Etak, the map and traffic people, and Airflash, the mobile portal. Bank of America plans to offer mobile banking, so you can check your balance before you write a check." Owen Davies, CEO of New York's Thinking media, which creates programs for wireless devices, welcomed Palm's move to WAP. "They bring a lot of devices with them, and that helps push the standard and the infrastructure. But WAP is only the first generation. There are other technologies, such as radio packet data, to be considered further down the line."