Excite-ment in the air: Web portal readies content for mobile phones

In a bid for the eyeballs of the world's 220 million digital wireless phone users, Excite@Home will work with wireless portal AirFlash to adapt its Web content for access over mobile phones.

The deal will let wireless users get some of the personalized content that they now can receive over the Internet on their personal Excite Web page - stock quotes, news headlines, sports scores and an interactive calendar. They also will be able to access their Excite address book to send and receive e-mail and eventually perform e-commerce transactions.

"Our broad strategy, under the banner 'All bandwidth, all devices, all the time,' is the notion that consumers want to set up a personal Web page and have that available to them everywhere," said Joe Kraus, Excite@Home's senior vice president for content one of the company's founders. "We have successful PC efforts, both broadband and narrowband - and efforts on the broadband television side as well, but we haven't had anything in the wireless phone area until now." Excite@Home provides an application for the Palm VII hand-held computer.

The task of sending Excite@Home's content via wireless involves two parts, Kraus said - making sure the appropriate content is correctly formatted for the devices and then doing deals with wireless carriers.

AirFlash will assist Excite@Home with the first part of that equation. AirFlash is a mobile portal that offers end users information and services over their phones with access to local data, for instance, listings of the three nearest florists.

This "location-based information," Kraus said, should be an important edge for Excite@Home over wireless efforts from competing portals, among them Yahoo! and Lycos. "We think it's an important differentiator," he said.

"Excite shares our vision that content on the mobile phone has to be created specifically for this medium," said Rama Aysola, CEO of AirFlash. "The Web was made for a color screen and hyperlinks, and you don't have those on a mobile phone. AirFlash doesn't do pagers or Palm Pilots; we focus on tailoring content for the fastest-growing device out there."

AirFlash's proprietary technology pulls up information customized by location, including lists of automated teller machines, hotels and restaurants for a user's current or eventual location.

Aysola, who co-founded AirFlash last year, helped turn out the first Web-based business directory service for Excite's rival portal Yahoo!. The company is in the process of running trials of its wireless portal service with Sprint and the mobile phone division of Pacific Bell but does not have any signed deals under its belt yet, he said.

The Excite@Home wireless service will be ready for beta testing on Wireless Application Protocol-enabled handsets and short message service-enabled mobile phones by first quarter 2000, Kraus said. Future enhancements include the development of e-commerce capabilities so that users can use their phones to make restaurant reservations or order flowers from that nearby florist.