May 2000

BY EVAN KOBLENTZ

Luckily, we TMC Labs engineers are like the Boy Scouts when it comes to toting technology -- we're always prepared. I never leave home without taking my mobile telephone, at the very least. (In my case, it's a Sprint Touchpoint, which is OEM equipment from Denso International America, www.denso-int.com -- see our product review.)

Since I had my phone, you're probably thinking that I should have simply called my destination for directions. I could have done that, but what fun would that be? After all, my common nicknames around the halls of TMC are "Inspector" (as in "Gadget") and Rube Goldberg, among others. So I catered to my misanthropic side that night and I connected to the Web with my telephone's built-in minibrowser. It turned out that both Go2Online.com and Mapquest.com are Sprint PCS Wireless Web partners. Such sites use the HDML method, which stands for handheld device markup language. It's very similar to HTML and XML, except that it's optimized for mobile, text-only browsers. Oh, precious information!

Using Go2Online.com, I was able to search for hotels by their ZIP codes. Once I found the hotel, the site provided the street address. I then used Mapquest.com, entering as my starting point the street address of the building in front of which I happened to be lost. Minutes later, I had directions. My destination was only two miles away!

Nevertheless, had I remembered to take the directions with me, I could have walked to the hotel in less time than it took me to futz with my phone browser's keypad data-entry system, with time left over to mock the companion who said I'd never be able to get the address and directions on the phone's little one-square-inch LCD (okay, so I did that anyway). And since I arrogantly assumed that I didn't need to learn the layout of the city, I also never learned that the area I proposed to walk through was the kind of place that I wouldn't venture into without an energy shield and an Abrams M-1 Tank. Finally, even though my telephone Web access was useful for getting the address of and directions to a local hotel, I wouldn't use it to plan, say, a 15-city, cross-country caravan.

A taxicab happened to drive by just as we embarked on our trek, which nicely saved the day. We made it to the business meeting with time to spare -- actually, it was a vendor's cocktail party, but we tell the boss that these things are business meetings.

A few days later, en route home, I was thinking about my navigation experience. My initial thoughts were simple ones, mostly about how cool it was that I actually used the Web browser of a mobile telephone to do something useful besides checking a weather report, sports score or stock quote. But once my brain was warmed up, I started doing some real thinking -- about CRM.

What if police dispatchers, airline reps, help desk agents, maitres d' and even telemarketers could use this technology?

The ability of an agent to push, pull or otherwise manipulate the content of callers' PCs through a browser is nothing new, but the ability to work with the contents of their Web-enabled mobile telephones or PDAs is a blank canvas for which developers are just beginning to dream up applications. Combined with technologies like Bluetooth, audio ISPs, wireless broadband and VoIP, mobile and handheld devices can easily become our personal interactive help desks. Today, the coolest wireless applications are "virtual assistants" that speak to you and recognize your voice commands for managing messages, contacts, appointments and other relatively simple tasks -- they are basically ASP-model PDAs. Someday (very) soon, those applets will grow up and become real applications, and the lines between a mobile telephone, a PDA and an online service will be further blurred. Now we just need a clever URL -- mobilecrm.com is already taken.

The author can be contacted at ekoblentz@tmcnet.com.