Informance Performance

Offer mobile workers anytime, anywhere access to key information, and they'll beat a path to your door. That's what iDEN carriers Nextel and Southern LINC are hoping by adding wireless data to their suites of services aimed at business users.

This past October, Southern LINC, which serves four Southeastern states, rolled out Informance Solutions, a suite of data and Internet services. Nextel followed in January with the Motorola i700plus Internet-ready phone, but the phone's Web browser is for "future access to Nextel Web-based services," Nextel said in a release.

As early as 1997, Southern LINC, which recently hit the 150,000-customer mark, had considered offering text-only data services.

Southern LINC decided to focus on a wireless Internet portal, a wireless Internet dispatching service, a vehicle-location service (VLS) and public safety/law enforcement services because of their appeal to business users. One trait that all Southern LINC customers have in common is that they're mobile businesses: Some or all of their employees are on the road. When they're out of the office, they need to reach co-workers on the phone and access information that they use every day: work orders, e-mail, calendars, news and stock quotes.

LINKING TO MY LINC Southern LINC partnered with Phone.com to offer the main facet of Informance Solutions: a mobile portal platform. Julie Pigott, Southern LINC director of marketing said Southern LINC chose Phone.com because the vendor had developed its MyPhone portal specifically for wireless instead of modifying an existing portal to meet wireless-phone specifications. Southern LINC branded the wireless Internet portal as My LINC.

With their handsets, customers can send and receive e-mail, update calendars and address books, and access weather, stock quotes, news and other information from the Internet. They also can personalize and limit the information they receive by going to the My LINC Web site via their handsets or PCs and entering a user name and password. The site (www.mylinc.phone.com) is public, but when subscribers sign in, they see a private set of Web pages that they can customize. Personal Web pages can include bookmarks, e-mail, stocks, news, an address book and directories. All the data sits on a server, so customers can view it through a PC or phone.

"The goal is to have both views be the same," said Rob Butts, Southern LINC project manager. "As you change things on your phone, they change on the Web site. As you change things on the Web site, they show up on your phone."

The ability to read and compose e-mail from handsets is what Southern LINC hopes will differentiate it, said Amanda Cancel, Southern LINC communications specialist. To make that experience more user-friendly, handsets come with Tegic's T9 software, which reduces the number of keystrokes by offering choices to complete a word as the first few letters are entered.

My LINC also offers e-mail forwarding. If a user has a personal e-mail account with, say, AOL and a corporate e-mail account, he can forward all e-mail to his My LINC account, which Phone.com manages. My LINC also filters e-mail and sends only the most important ones to the handset based on user-chosen parameters. Pigott said this service is ideal for travelers and people constantly in meetings.

If the user is on the Web when a call comes in, at the call's end, the handset takes him back to where he was on the Web before the call arrived. Southern LINC also offers reminders, a precursor to a fully functional calendar that will be available this quarter. Customers can schedule reminders for future events and have the phone ring or receive an e-mail as a reminder.

NEW WAYS TO OFFICE Southern LINC didn't stop with e-mail, content and calendars. Another part of Informance Solutions, eDispatch, allows a business' dispatchers to go to a Web page and send orders directly to employees' handsets. Through an agreement with eDispatch.com Wireless Data, workers can download their orders each morning to their phones. As they finish orders, they update the status, and the information goes back to their dispatcher's Web site. If one worker is running behind, the dispatcher can redistribute his orders to a less-busy employee.

"Data allows for more accuracy," Cancel said. "All the information that you need to do a job appears on the handset."

Southern LINC partnered with Data on Air for VLS, another Web-based service. However, VLS doesn't work with the handset's microbrowser. Instead, it uses a device called Diplomat to record GPS data and transmit it via an Internet-ready handset or the Motorola iO1000 or iM1000 modems. Priced at $40 per user, per month, it allows businesses to view any vehicle's location and direction. The service also works as a reporting mechanism: If two workers constantly cross routes, the company can modify their routes to save gas, time and money.

Southern LINC also signed a joint marketing agreement with Cerulean Technology to offer PacketCluster Patrol. With a laptop connected to an iM1000 modem or Internet handset, police officers can access information stored in national, state and local databases.

"A police officer can pull up that license plate, log into a database and see if there is anything he needs to know about the person that the license plate is registered to," Pigott said. If something questionable comes up, he can send a message to other PacketCluster Patrol users to let them know where he is.

Southern LINC currently covers Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, Georgia, and eastern Mississippi but might expand into other states. Any expansions, however, will be based on the needs of commercial customers.

"I don't ever see us becoming a national carrier," Pigott said. "If we were to expand, it would probably be in contiguous areas."

The next expansion might be in data.

"We will continue to work with our customers and potential customers to identify applications that we should be developing," Pigott said.