Wireless/Mobile /

Cool Tools /

A few "aha" moments

By Keith Shaw
Network World Fusion, 09/19/03

The best part of when I’m meeting with technology vendors is when I get that “aha” moment. It’s the moment when I figure out how their product or service will solve some problem for either the IT organization, the end user or companies in general.

There’s a lot of “aha moments” at the DEMOmobile show this year. You’ll be reading more about the specific technology behind some of these products in the pages of Network World, but for the purposes of this report I want to reveal just a bit about what problems some of these vendors are solving:

Pen&Internet riteForm – Doctors generally are known for their “notorious” handwriting. Since doctors also like using mobile devices like PDAs and tablets, Pen&Internet has taken their advanced handwriting recognition technology to create riteForm software. With the form software, doctors can write specific words in each box of the form, and the technology converts the handwriting into digital text. Context-sensitive boxes help the conversion along – for example, a “/” written in a date box is recognized as a slash; if it was in the name field it might be converted to a 1 or an l. The software isn't just for doctors, though, as any company with paper-based forms can benefit from the software.

Bitfone – You know those times when you buy a new cell phone, only to have something go wrong with it? You either have to return the phone to the store where you bought it, or you pack it up in a box, mail it back and wait for a new phone to arrive. Bitfone aims to solve this with its mProve PRISM application, which gives carriers the ability to conduct over-the-air firmware upgrades for its cell phones.

Closer Communications – Everyone who goes to a trade show gets a name badge. And exhibitors at the show often will ask attendees to “swipe the badge” in order to get the attendees’ demographic information, also known as sales leads. But a lot of trade show attendees are in it for the T-shirts, so lots of “leads” don’t really go anywhere. Plus, at the end of the show most exhibitors end up with a long, long register tape printout of all the attendees whose badges were swiped. This doesn’t really help the sales force. So Closer Communications have come up with a new badge, based on Bluetooth, which helps identify visitors to a booth and rates their potential as a sales leads. The badge also includes software that can determine how long visitors were at the booth, etc., and other statistical information. Instead of wading through a long register tape, the sales force gets a ranked list of possible sales leads quicker.

Bytemobile -- Have you ever tried to open Microsoft Outlook and download your Exchange e-mail over a dial-up connection? Didn't think so. Bytemobile's acceleration and optimization technology, which it already sells to carriers to help optimize their wide-area networking technology, is aiming at the enterprise. The technology vastly improves the delivery of Internet data over remote connections, making the connectivity option (dial-up, wireless or wide-area) less of a concern for remote workers. Pretty cool.