Heads-Up! Here’s what’s new – Wireless technology show introduces insiders to three dozen products

In this super-busy, high-tech world, why do Americans still waste countless hours waiting at home for the repairman, the delivery van or the cable company?

By Frank Bajak, Associated Press The Oakland Tribune

One company says it has the answer — notify the customer by phone, e-mail or text message to tell them exactly when the delivery will occur.

That service, from Dynamic Mobile Data Systems, was among three dozen products introduced last week at DEMOmobile, a wireless technology show.

Heads-Up! led a field of products for roving repair and delivery people. Such workers increasingly carry cheap mobile devices imbued with ever more intelligence.

Another standout category at the fifth DEMOmobile — an elite gathering for industry insiders and journalists — was about getting access to home or work computers from mobile phones or any other Internet-connected device.

"No longer are we tied to our desks, and for that matter, no longer are we tied to the traditional workday," is how Chris Shipley, the IDG show’s executive producer, described what she sees as a coming era where mobile work will redefine social and business relations.

Software called ezPCAccess by TERA Technologies Inc. impressed many with its remote management of Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail/contact/calendar application.

Promised for later this year, ezPCaccess’ features include direct access from any Web browser and simultaneous multi-user viewing that should challenge similar products such as Laplink, PCAnywhere and GoToMyPC.

PocketWatch Systems’ PocketHub software also offered remote access to Windows computers from handsets, though the Scotland-based company’s demonstration was flummoxed by a datastorm of competing wireless signals.

The plethora of wireless frequencies — aggravated by spotty cellular coverage — played havoc with several demos. Bad luck also shadowed those relying on the GSM cellular standard that blankets Europe, but not North America.

A few items grabbed even this jaded crowd. One was a joystick-equipped handheld computer called the Zodiac. The clever machine, engineered by Palm Inc. alumni, tilts the Palm operating system on its side for portable gaming. It’s due out next month, starting at $299.

Another was the Mirra, a compact "personal server" from a company called Ispiri Inc.

Mirra backs up computers and securely shares your files — pictures, music, whatever — over broadband Internet connections with people you select. The cheapest model, with an 80-gigabyte hard drive, is priced at $399.

This year’s DEMOmobile offered hope that the long-suffering, low-power Bluetooth wireless standard will get some traction.

Brother International uses Bluetooth in the new, $399 MPrint Micro Printer, which fits in a coat pocket. Logitech introduced a $180 Bluetooth-centric desktop suite that untethers keyboards and mice and lets you send text messages through any Bluetooth-enabled cell phone.

Anyone who has ever entered text with a cell phone keypad or the Graffiti handwriting-recognition feature on Palm handhelds knows there must be a better way.

MessageEase from ExIdeas may not be the ultimate answer, but it’s a fine idea, especially with tablet PCs looming. MessageEase is a nine-key, on-screen touchpad where letters not used as often are entered with a sideways slide instead of a tap.

A few inventions at this year’s DEMOmobile were positively Orwellian. A British-developed anti-truancy tool called Alerts, from Langtree SkillsCenter Ltd., tells Mum and Dad when the kids are on the lam — in real time via text messaging.

And Get Closer from Closer Communications is sort of a trade show riff on the popular "Are You Hot or Are You Not?" genre of Web sites. Get Closer rates showgoers by their value to you, the presenter.

Several products sought to entice people to buy camera-equipped cell phones.

Two of them, Phone2Fun Digitizer and Postcard from the French startup Realeyes3D, allow you to write or sketch a personal message on a piece of paper, photograph it with your handset then send it as an e-mail attachment. Or overlay a message on a photo to create a digital postcard that can be sent anywhere from a handset.

Photo-phones are wildly popular in Japan and South Korea, but American cell phone users are largely oblivious to them.

Vladimir Edelman, director of ESPN Wireless, which is already pushing sports scores and highlights to U.S. cell phone users, wants domestic wireless carriers to give a bigger push to the video clips, games and other multimedia services now available on more handsets.

His lament at DEMOmobile: "Most people here (in the United States) have absolutely no concept of what can be done on their phone."

http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~10834~1653032,00.html

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10 mobile technologies to watch

PRODUCTS AIM TO MAKE WIRELESS LIFE EASIER

By Jon Fortt
Mercury News

Under the sun in La Jolla last week, participants in the annual DemoMobile conference showed off technologies poised to make a splash in the next three to five years. Here is an early peek at what’s in the oven, including phone software and pocketable wireless printers.

FlashCast

Macromedia

Who likes surfing the Internet on a cell phone? Probably nobody. Loading any kind of Internet content is agonizingly slow, even on today’s next-generation networks — and once you get it loaded, it’s still ugly by Web standards. Macromedia’s FlashCast has a pretty snazzy way of changing that. FlashCast has three components: a phone-screen-size Flash template that’s a 200 kilobyte download, a FlashCast server that updates content for different channels, and a tool that channel operators can use to update the template occasionally with new information.

The result is an animated, interesting look that doesn’t take forever to load because the template’s already in the phone; you just have to download a little data in extensible markup language (XML) to get updated stock quotes, celebrity news, weather or whatever suits your fancy. The downside is that Flash probably won’t be the final standard for cell phone content the way HTML was for PC browsers; from what I’ve seen so far it’s not simple enough to create, and it’s too hard to link around to different content on the wireless Web. For the wireless world we live in now though, FlashCast looks like a nice compromise.

Freestyle

Aura Communications

Finally, a wireless headset for people who don’t have whiz-bang phones. Wireless headsets look a lot cooler than the wired kind, and you don’t have to worry about snagging them on something as you walk through the office. Problem is, the main technology in wireless headsets is Bluetooth, and there are just a couple of Bluetooth-compatible phones broadly available in the United States, including the Sony Ericsson T616 and the Nokia 3650.

Aura’s Freestyle headset works on magnetic technology, not Bluetooth, and for $70 to $80 you can buy a headset that will fit most any phone. The Freestyle headset works off of a little dock slightly bigger than a pack of gum; the dock takes a single AA battery that the company says will last 20 hours of use. The main downsides I could find are that you have to carry the little dock with you, attached to the phone — and the headsets come only with those over-the-ear clips that always fall off small ears, or fold them over making wearers look like shy puppy dogs. Headbands, Aura. We need headbands.

HotPoint

Firetide

It’s come to this: Any hotel, convention center or coffeehouse that doesn’t offer WiFi wireless access is a technology backwater. It’s becoming one of the “rights” that tech travelers expect from a business-class location along with AC power and a business center. But WiFi can be expensive and vexing to install, since every typical wireless base station that covers a 150-foot radius must have a high-speed wired connection feeding it, the way a water hose feeds into a sprinkler.

Pulling all those data hoses through corporate campuses can get expensive, counting labor and equipment. That’s where Firetide comes in. Several of its HotPoint routers can share a single data line, handing off the wireless connection from one base station to another, and saving thousands of dollars in back-haul costs. After a glitch or two during its on-stage demonstration, Firetide managed to set up a free wireless network that blanketed much of the convention area in wireless access.

Alerts

Langtree SkillsCenter

Kids, enjoy playing hooky while it’s still easy. Langtree’s Alerts software not only computerizes class attendance, which several school districts in the San Jose area have done anyway — if you don’t show up to third period, this tattling piece of server software will check whether you went to first and second period. If so, after 15 minutes it can send a text message to Mom and Dad’s phone or e-mail account to let them know you skipped. When the software is fully implemented, it will even check records to make sure students didn’t leave early without a doctor’s excuse.

MPrint Micro Printer

Brother International

Handheld technology and printing don’t go together. We print from desktops and laptops, sure — but PDAs? There haven’t been many good portable printers on the market, so printing has become something you do before you leave or after you get back, not something you do on the run. Brother International is looking to change that with its MPrint Micro Printer.

A $400 Bluetooth version will connect to Bluetooth-enabled handhelds within 30 feet; a $300 infrared-only version needs to be positioned next to the handheld to work. The MPrint uses thermal printing, the same technique many supermarkets use to print receipts, to produce 300 dot-per-inch black-and-white results. Some obvious limitations: The print-outs come on receipt-size paper, so this won’t be any good for distributing official memos; also, thermal printing isn’t known for its longevity, so expect prints to fade in a matter of days or weeks, especially when exposed to direct sunlight. At the same time, though, it should be good for people like doctors, real estate agents and salespeople who want to give people a quick, legible and somewhat official record of business.

Twingo

Twingo Systems

Twingo’s job is to keep you from leaving a crumb trail of corporate data, Hansel-and-Gretel-like, for thieves to find. The PCs that dwell in hotel business centers and convention lobbies are treasure troves of misplaced information — PowerPoint presentations, memos, corporate e-mails not intended for public consumption.

Twingo sets up a protective software environment that looks like a second Windows desktop — kind of like a security tablecloth — so that the Web sites you visit, the information you download and the documents you save are all stored within the protective environment. When you log off or leave the computer, the software environment gets locked up so that others can’t see. Information technology workers would set up Twingo as part of their remote access framework, so that when workers log in, Twingo is automatically launched. Twingo Systems plans to charge a $49 per user license for the product.

mProve Prism

Bitfone

Bitfone’s mProve Prism system is designed to make your phone software as current as possible. Most cell phones are really, really stupid; they don’t learn much after you buy them. Sure, many of the newer models can download ring tones, games and other useful software, but it’s a lot harder to download upgrades that help the phones work better. Little-known fact: There are little software patches, known as firmware upgrades, that can sometimes help phones drop fewer calls, or even unlock capabilities like ring-tone downloads. Why have you never heard of these upgrades?

Each upgrade tends to fit a specific phone model, and the wireless network operators have a hard time keeping track of who has a phone in need of a software upgrade. So it’s easier for the wireless folks to keep quiet about firmware upgrades until you complain. With mProve Prism, the wireless operators would be able to use a Web-based system to push the upgrades out to the people who need them — which might have the fringe benefit of making our phones work better.

Mobile Veepers

Pulse Entertainment

So yes, it’s sort of creepy. Software from Pulse lets you take a cell-phone photo of a friend or pet; outline the head, eyes and mouth; and make it appear to say pretty much anything you want in English or Japanese. Think of it as a low-cost, low-bandwidth way of doing a talking head in streaming video, without actually doing streaming video. Some of the more skeptical attendees at the DemoMobile conference said there’s no obvious practical use for it — but come on. Did that stop Tamagotchi or cell phone cameras?

Mobile Veepers is launching first in Europe and Japan, where Pulse says early surveys suggest kids will use it to make their friends say crazy things, or to create life-like images for ring tones. (Picture your dog yelling for you to answer the phone.)

riteForm Remote

Pen & Internet

How many times have we heard promises about handwriting recognition that really works? This time it does. Sunnyvale-based Pen & Internet solves the problem by narrowing it: The riteForm system is tailored specifically to work with forms, so it looks for certain words in certain fields. For example, riteForm is smart enough to expect “Larry” in the name field but not in the phone number — a bit of intelligence that boosts its accuracy. The company’s latest product is made to work with mobile devices that in many cases will lack the storage and processing power to handle the heavy-duty job of handwriting recognition. Instead, the riteForm software sends the information to a server, which performs the recognition and fills in the form. In conjunction with products like Logitech’s Digital I/O Pen, this is a technology smart enough to be used by patients in doctor’s offices, to immediately digitize the information they fill out on standard forms.

Let’s hope Adobe Systems is paying attention — a product like riteForm remote is the sort of thing that could help paper-heavy businesses make the switch to Acrobat PDF for digital documents.

Heads Up

Dynamic Mobile Data

Imagine, if you will, technology that would help the cable guy get to your house on time. Stop dreaming, because that probably will never happen — but Dynamic Mobile Data’s Heads Up notification system promises the next-best thing. Using global positioning satellites and wireless messaging, the Heads Up system tracks the location of the service truck, and sends you a message when it’s, say, 90 minutes away.

Theoretically, this system could save a lot of people a lot of time — no more taking off an entire morning so you can be home “sometime between 8 a.m. and noon.” Of course, the system isn’t perfect, because it requires that you stay flexible. Still, we’ll take a flexible schedule over a paralyzed schedule any day.
Contact Jon Fortt at [email protected] or (408) 278-3489.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/personal_technology/6856849.htm