Live From Telecom 99: Traveling Lighter Than Ever

Mobile applications are expanding rapidly and several of them were presented at a Telecom 99 press conferences on Wednesday. Nokia Mobile Phones Inc. and 3Com Corp.'s Palm Computing division -- leaders, respectively, in mobile phones and handheld computing devices, announced a development agreement to create a new series of products that will run on both Palm and Symbian applications.

These products will join mobile phones and keyboard devices like Nokia's 9110 Organizer to create a new, pen-based product category for which the potential market is ''huge,'' said Anssi Vanjoki, senior vice president of Nokia. He deemed the agreement a ''groundbreaking cooperation'' that will result in new products that are ''small, beautiful and usable.'' Alan Kessler, president of Palm Computing, said there are already 22,000 developers working on this new product, with 500 more signing up to do so every week. The consumer will benefit, he says, from the greater array of rich applications available by the time the first devices come to market in 2001.

U.S. rollout

Rollout will begin in the United States, given its larger Palm Pilot customer base and greater degree of Internet penetration, but will quickly extend to Europe and elsewhere. Mr. Vanjoki does not expect the new category to cannibalize existing Nokia products, because Nokia sees different applications in the marketplace for different consumer needs. Inmarsat announced its capability to support Internet Protocol across its global satellite system, which covers 98 percent of the world's landmass, starting in early 2000. Customers will be able to use new, briefcase-size mobile units that can handle 64 kilobits per second. Such data-transmission capability is more and more requested by customers such as construction companies, mining operations, military and humanitarian organizations. Manufacturers of the mobile units -- Nera, Thrane & Thrane, and STN ATLAS -- conservatively estimate the size of the market at 40,000 customers. Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) presented its TIM Universal Number, which will make its debut in Italy Nov. 1. This marks the first time a single number can be used for a cellular phone, e-mail, fax and answering machine; the technology is in the process of being patented. Mauro Sentinelli, director-general of TIM, noted that both TIM's GSM customers (14 million) and its TACS customers (3 million) will be able to take advantage of the new service.

The Italian government worked with TIM during the development of this service in the hope that it will boost PC penetration in Italy. Although Italian Internet connectivity is not high by northern European standards, Italy has by far the highest number of mobile phone subscribers on the Continent. Mr. Sentinelli explained: ''We expect that access to e-mail through mobile phones will foster demand for PCs. To encourage this, in the first months of 2000, the government will be offering fiscal incentives to buy computers and generate use of ISDN and ADSL. In this way, it hopes to increase penetration of PCs among small and medium-sized enterprises, the backbone of the Italian economy. This will make us more competitive with respect to Northern Europe.''

Claudia Flisi