To: Rarebird who wrote (33 ) 7/12/2001 7:22:05 AM From: TheSlowLane Read Replies (1) | Respond to Rarebird - By your own description, you are a classic early adopter and not representative of the Average Joe. It is hard to see how any of the consumer-oriented wireless Internet businesses are going to become viable anytime soon because there are not enough people like you (only from that perspective, mind you). From what I can tell, Omnisky and GoAmerica are not getting the subscriber growth they expected and from what I can tell YadaYada is no longer a going concern. You asked, what else do I need as a businessman and what other business models are required other than accessing your PC from a Palm. Well, I am working with a company right now to enable them to use a PDA to do real-time credit authorization. They could care less about surfing the web. All they want to do is swipe cards and the only reason they care about being able to do that is because it saves them a significant amount of money. These guys deliver high-end hot tubs and many people use credit to pay the balance on delivery. The guys driving the delivery truck are probably not interested in doing the same thing with their PDA as you are. In fact, most of them won't care that it's a PDA. On the other hand, there are other merchants who will see the benefits of having a device that can do credit auth as well as maintain all of their contacts, calendar, to-do lists, and so on. Restaurants will be able to use PDA-based devices to run food-ordering, inventory management and do credit auth all with the same platform. You cannot do this with any of the existing, proprietary, non-PDA based wireless credit authorization terminals. Those are the sorts of things that I am talking about that will drive the numbers of users. Early adopters are easy to get, they will run to the store themselves. Crossing the chasm to reach the masses is another story. Part of your argument is based on the premise that NVTL had the option of building a 56Kb CDPD modem and chose not to do so. I am still not convinced that it is technically feasible to pull that off, but I will make some inquiries. You are obviously passionate about the subject and I have to admire that, but I still think you're being a little harsh on my friends in San Diego. I would be interested in following what happens with your transition to PCS. Our solution runs over any network that will support a TCP/IP connection. Would you be willing to continue this conversation offline? Regards,
