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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seconds Out who wrote (5140)	2/12/1999 5:33:00 PM
From: jbay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

I'm long GMGC and finally got around to signing up for the service myself about a month ago. I got it to synch with Sidekick on the first try, which in itself is a miracle. The system has an extremely high Wow! Factor with people who call it or get an email reply from me via the service. Many of those people either signed up immediately or are wavering and probably will eventually (then again, my peer group is comprised almost entirely of early-adopters and technology savants). I -have- had some problems with the voice recognition when calling from a digital cellular phone, which is disturbing -- sometimes the failure rate on commands is so high that I just give up. I think they need to spend some major time & money getting that tuned up before the service will really be useful for me -- right now it's more of a novelty. Some other sore points: 1) it seems to be easy to get stuck if you can't remember a command -- I'd like to see many more command choices for the same action (i.e., I'd like to be able to say "kill it" "delete it" "get rid of it" "erase it" etc to delete a message) 2) you can't originate outgoing email, you can only respond to an incoming email, unless I'm missing something basic. This is a major flaw, obviously. 3) you can't "reply to all", only "reply to sender" 4) I don't think there's a way to do a direct reply to another portico voicemail box -- you'd have to originate an outgoing call to the other user's portico number. Nice for the revenue stream, but in an enterprise setting, "direct connect" would be preferred (sorry, nextel). hmm, I don't want to sound totally negative. Let me balance out: I think VUI in general is the wave of the future, not just for telco applications. Removing the screen and keyboard from various data appliances will allow them to become compact enough for integration into many, many other applications. GMGC is obviously well ahead of anyone else in that sort of race. RE: using NT vs Unix; well, I'd prefer they use unix, but if it's built on NT, it leads me to believe that magictalk's capabilities may be integrated into NT5 (or whatever they call it when they finally get around to releasing it). That might make our Portico Girl (does she have a name?) as ubiquitous as the You've Got Mail guy.

To: Seconds Out who wrote (5140)	2/13/1999 2:21:00 AM
From: Kurt Goebel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

Works great for me. I'm happily checking stock prices (wish they were real time, but it's better then nothing when I'm driving), hearing email, responding, asking Portico to look up someone and then giving them a call, checking the news, faxing it to myself for later, checking my next appointment and adding one for later in the week, getting paged when a stock goes up, it's time for a meeting, or I received a hot email. Would like real time quotes, more varied news sources, ecommerce, etrading, the ability to call Portico into a call to give me info, conference calling, faster web page calendar, integration through fire walls, some kind of save a thought facility, the ability to have Portico go get any info I want, e.g., local entertainment listings, airline flight times, weather for the weekend, directory assistance, traffic report, ... Works well with the i1000 too.