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Technology Stocks : Phone.com [PHCM] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sammie-m who wrote (325)	8/23/1999 10:56:00 PM
From: Ellen	Respond to of 1080

zdnet.com Commerce Talks, But Will Anyone Listen? By Kathleen Cholewka, Inter@ctive Week August 16, 1999 9:27 AM ET Silence may now be golden in the world of Internet commerce, but a handful of developers are betting that money ultimately will talk on the Net. Several companies now are trying to mix the mobility of cell phones with the ubiquity of the Internet to drastically change and expand Internet commerce. The ultimate goal is to create a new strain of business, dubbed voice commerce or v-commerce, that will let users initiate and execute Internet-driven transactions via voice calls. V-commerce platforms combine e-commerce applications with speech recognition software that makes "voice prints" for each subscriber. These audio end-user profiles can be used to look up account information, past transaction records, profiles and other information too. Here's how a v-commerce application could work: A service provider monitors predefined data - such as stock prices or auction movements - for a given subscriber, based on the subscriber's profile and preferences. As the specified data changes, the provider sends a text message or a sound alert to the subscriber's wireless phone. The subscriber then gets a brief menu of choices or instructions to be executed via push-button or voice call. Once a choice is made, the customer receives immediate confirmation of the transaction via voice or data. V-commerce activity now is being driven by two initiatives. Application vendor Edify, which uses speech recognition software from Nuance Communications, is working with Home Shopping Network to put Edify's v-commerce platform into use. Meanwhile, Wireless Services and Xypoint, two private companies led by ex-McCaw Cellular and Microsoft execs, have teamed up to develop a v-commerce platform called WebWireless. They say their services will be available by year's end. Words apart The push for v-commerce points up a debate among wireless developers regarding how to graft wireless communications onto the Internet. On the v-commerce side, the argument is that end users won't want to use their phones to fully browse the Net, but would rather receive specific snippets of information on their phones that they can then react to in the fastest way possible - whether that's by hitting a few keys or giving voice commands. But v-commerce naysayers such as Phone.com push the idea that it's easier and more intuitive to equip phones with Web browsers than to retrofit Internet e-commerce engines to deal with voice. "They're solving the same problem, and text is so much easier to deal with," says Ben Linder, vice president of marketing at Phone.com. Linder adds that there are "biological reasons" that voice-driven transactions won't work on the Internet. "It's not natural to listen to something being read to you - you need to see it," he says. "Hearing is stored in short-term memory." The Wireless Application Protocol Forum, which is spearheading efforts to develop browser-enabled digital phones, met last month to finalize some technology initiatives. Linder says that about 40 content providers have signed on to develop Web pages that interact with browser-enabled phones. Sites that let digital phones communicate with these providers will be up and running by year's end, according to Linder.