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Technology Stocks : i3 Mobile (IIIM) -- Wireless Internet Portal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LORD ERNIE who wrote (51)	6/26/2000 10:37:00 AM
From: Walter Morton	Respond to of 96

Portal Wars II: Mobile Operators Take on Yahoo By Richard Baum LONDON (Reuters) - If you thought the likes of America Online (NYSE:AOL - news) and Yahoo! (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news) had the Internet portal industry pretty much sewn up, then Europe's mobile phone companies would urge you to think again. Armed with deep pockets and a direct line to millions of customers, operators such as Britain's Vodafone AirTouch (VOD.L) and Sonera (SRA1V.HE) of Finland are building portals in the belief that the battle for the gateways to the Internet has barely begun. With wireless devices expected to overtake computers by 2003 as the most popular way of accessing the Internet, the mobile operators are convinced they can beat Yahoo! at its own game. The networks will profit from call charges regardless of which portal their customers use, but owning the web sites that guide people to other services would add to their bounty significantly. The money lies not so much in the traditional portal cash cow of advertising -- the industry is still thinking about how to make that work on a handset's small screen -- but through controlling e-commerce in a way that lets the operators share the revenue. The idea that most excites the industry is that of people charging online shopping to their phone bill instead of a credit card. In return for providing a link to the retailer on its portal and collecting money from its customers, the operator would skim off a commission charge. Reverse Cash-Machine Pre-pay phones, where users buy vouchers for calltime, are ideal for such transactions, said Brian Greasley, who runs the Genie portal for Britain's number two operator BT Cellnet (BT.L). "I think of pre-pay as a reverse cash machine," said Greasley. "It gives people the ability to load money into their phone -- you can buy minutes but you can also buy a CD." As well as addressing people's worries about credit card security, it would open e-retailers' doors to people without plastic. "Most teenagers don't have credit cards but they do have pre-pay mobile phones," Greasley said. Japan's NTT DoCoMo (9437.T) is already doing something similar. Its i-mode mobile Internet service, which has close to seven million subscribers, takes a nine percent commission on subscriptions to content providers like newspapers and the Hello Kitty cartoon Web site. At present commissions earn DoCoMo an additional 2,000 yen ($18.95) a month per subscriber, little more than loose change for the world's second largest mobile company. But the potential is enough to have its European peers scrambling to set up portals. Vizzavi's Big Ambitions Sonera has had its Zed portal running at home for almost two years and plans to roll it out in six other countries this year. Cellnet's Genie has signed up close to one million subscribers in Britain and is expanding into Asia. But it is DoCoMo's larger rival Vodafone that has perhaps the greatest ambitions in the field. Its Vizzavi joint venture with French media group Vivendi (EAUG.PA) is spending 200 million euros ($187.3 million) creating a portal for the partners' 70 million mobile phone and pay TV subscribers. Yahoo! is not worried by the new competition, confident that its global audience of 145 million people means it knows what Internet surfers demand from a portal. "The challenge I see for the network operators is do they understand what the user wants?" said Fabiola Arredondo, Yahoo! Europe's managing director. Yes emphatically, responded Chris Smith, the managing director in charge of Vodafone's Internet applications division. "We understand our customers much better than they do." Vodafone knows, for example, who has subscribed to its text message services for cricket results and would be able to direct those people to cricket content on its portal, he said. More importantly, it understands the potential of the wireless Internet and realizes that the kind of content people will want in the future could be very different from the news feeds and weather forecasts of the traditional portal. Smith's vision of a customizable portal on a high-speed, permanently connected handset would allow him to include a window for a live game of draughts with his young son or a link to his wife's online agenda when she is away on business. We Know Where You Are The mobile operators will also have the advantage of localization technology that tells them where their customers are, Smith said, allowing their portals to direct people to nearby restaurants and businesses. Despite all this, Vodafone will have its work cut out wooing people from the traditional portals, said John Jensen, wireless services analyst at Chase H&Q. In countries like Britain where Internet penetration is high, people have already personalized a Yahoo! or Excite (NasdaqNM:ATHM - news) front page and will want to use the same portal on their mobiles, he said. Some analysts think the operators would be better off co-operating with the existing portals than trying to compete. "AOL is a great content aggregator but it knows zilch about mobile. The mobile operators know a lot about their customers but nothing about portals,'' said Eden Zoller, a senior new media consultant at independent research company Ovum. Four European operators including the giant Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM.MI) have reached the same conclusion, striking deals under which Yahoo! will provide their portal. Zoller reckons the ability to personalize and localize content will determine which portals survive. "The established Internet portals like Yahoo and AOL will certainly give the operators a run for their money," she said. Greasley believes Genie is already outrunning them, its early launch giving it a first-mover advantage over both the traditional portals and Vizzavi. And he thinks whatever lead the established players have on the fixed Internet will count for little in the wireless world. "The land-grab for the mobile Internet is yet to be made." dailynews.yahoo.com

To: LORD ERNIE who wrote (51)	6/26/2000 10:58:00 PM
From: Walter Morton	Respond to of 96

i3 Mobile Brings MSNBC.com News to Wireless Users PR Newswire STAMFORD, Conn., June 8 /PRNewswire/ -- i3 Mobile (Nasdaq: IIIM), a leading provider of innovative wireless media solutions since 1991, from personalized, localized information to e-commerce services, today announced an agreement with MSNBC Interactive News LLC, a joint venture of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and NBC News (NYSE: GE), to deliver MSNBC.com's content to users of mobile phones, pagers, and other wireless devices. NBC Interactive Media, Inc. and GE Capital Equity Investments, Inc. both made investments in i3 Mobile late last year. This agreement links one of the nation's top news sources with the leader in providing personalized wireless content and e-commerce services to consumers. MSNBC.com news, sports, and entertainment headlines are now available to i3 Mobile's network of more than 20 wireless network operators, which comprise more than 50% of the North American digital wireless marketplace. MSNBC.com joins i3 Mobile's growing list of more than 50 content providers representing thousands of sources. "One of the reasons we have been successful in signing agreements with leading wireless services providers is the quality of the content we provide," said Stephen G. Maloney, president and CEO of i3 Mobile. "MSNBC.com is a recognized leader in delivering accurate, timely news to millions of people across the nation, and we're looking forward to helping them extend their brand into the wireless space through our numerous distribution channels." "i3 Mobile has established a reputation as a leading provider of innovative wireless media solutions in an industry that's changing daily," said John Nichol, general manager of MSNBC.com. "Their history of innovation and unparalleled distribution network make them a natural choice to help us further extend our reach in the red-hot, emerging wireless media space." About MSNBC.com MSNBC.com is the number one news site, according to Media Metrix(TM), the industry standard in Internet measurement services. As the leader in breaking news and original journalism on the Internet, MSNBC.com additionally delivers the best of NBC News, MSNBC Cable, CNBC and NBC Sports. MSNBC.com provides expanded content via partnerships with The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Ziff Davis, MSN Money Central(TM), The Sporting News, Expedia(TM), E! Online, Pencil News, FEED magazine and APBnews.com. MSNBC.com takes a leadership position in the delivery of broadband content for Road Runner, Excite@Home and on Broadband.MSNBC.com, in addition to programming interactive television with MSNBC Cable and NBC News. MSNBC is a 24-hour cable and Internet joint venture of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and NBC News (NYSE: GE.) About i3 Mobile i3 Mobile is a leading provider of wireless media solutions that enable wireless network operators, Web sites and enterprises to extend personalized, location-based information, mobile commerce and wireless advertising services to their customers. As of the end of first quarter 2000, i3 Mobile was delivering up to two million wireless messages daily and had more than 700,000 users receiving personalized information on mobile phones, pagers, PDAs and other wireless devices. i3 Mobile was selected by Deloitte and Touche in 1999 as one of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in America and is included in Upside magazine's "e-business 150" for 2000. For more information, please visit i3mobile.com. This news release may be deemed to include forward-looking statements as defined by applicable U.S. law and, as a result, may involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The words "believe," "expect," "intend," "anticipate," variations of such words, and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that the statement is not forward-looking. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those related to the overall market acceptance of i3 Mobile's products and services; uncertainties related to i3 Mobile's reliance on a small number of wireless network operators for a significant portion of its revenues, i3 Mobile's dependence on the distribution of its products by third parties, and competition from companies with substantially greater financial, technical, marketing and distribution resources. Further information regarding these and other risks are included in i3 Mobile's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2000 and in its prospectus dated April 6, 2000. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. i3 Mobile undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events or circumstances after the date of this release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Source: i3 Mobile Contact: Mike Miller of smartpr, 908-879-2942, mike@smartpr.net, for i3 Mobile; Benjamin Billingsley of Trylon Communications, Inc., 212-725-2295; Peter Dorogoff of MSNBC, 425-703-8456, Peter.Dorogoff@msnbc.com zdii.com