Challenging WAP?

As reg­u­lar read­ers of this newslet­ter know, I’ve been look­ing a fair amount at how to get unteth­ered from the Inter­net lately. While I have played with a wire­less Palm and looked at WAP, there seemed to be some­thing miss­ing to the whole uncon­nected Inter­net issue.

What I came to real­ize is that what works for a com­puter does not nec­es­sar­ily work in a wire­less envi­ron­ment. The main issue is input and out­put. A wire­less Palm is great to get infor­ma­tion but some­what dif­fi­cult to use to send out email (typ­ing in graf­fiti being the biggest chal­lenge so far) and WAP works well to get lit­tle bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion but is lim­ited to a set num­ber of char­ac­ters (depend­ing on which ver­sion of WAP you’re using, you will get an allo­ca­tion of between 1500 and 2000 char­ac­ters). As a result, send­ing out some­thing like this newslet­ter over WAP does not seem to make sense.

How­ever, a new breed of ser­vices is now pop­ping up and it could be the next big thing: con­nect­ing to the Inter­net by just dial­ing into a phone num­ber. In order to test this out, I checked out sev­eral ser­vices: Tellme Net­works, which launched last month to a bar­rage of pub­lic­ity, and Quack, which has been qui­eter but is also launched. Other con­tender for the space (and all of those are launch­ing “soon”) are Inter­net Speech, BeVo­cal, and 888TelSurf.

Tellme Net­works

Mike McCue is no stranger to bleed­ing edge tech­nol­ogy. I met Mike back in 1995, when he was run­ning a com­pany called Paper Soft­ware. Paper did VRML browser, at a time when VRML was not only cool but also seen as the poten­tial future of the net. Netscape acquired his com­pany and Mike ended up as VP of tech­nol­ogy there. While there, he looked at the future of the Internet.

How­ever, as many other Netscapees, Mike ended up leav­ing Netscape and founded a new com­pany: Tellme Networks.

Their goal: to make the web as eas­ily acces­si­ble as using a phone. Pulling tal­ent from both sides of the browser war (Netscape and Microsoft), Tellme was a very secre­tive oper­a­tions until a cou­ple of months ago, when it announced its offer­ing: a phone ser­vice that gives you access to news, weather, sports, stocks, movies and restau­rant info.

An inter­est­ing con­cept but how well did it hold up? Would I be stuck in one of those hor­ri­ble menus (press 1 to access news, press 2 to access stocks…) or would it be bet­ter, I won­dered as I reg­is­tered for the ser­vice. To my sur­prise, it worked very well.

There are a num­ber of inter­est­ing fea­tures in this ser­vice. First of all is the text to speech engine, which is one of the best ones I’ve heard so far. It takes bits of infor­ma­tion and relays them in a clear and under­stand­able way, which I found quite amaz­ing. The voice recog­ni­tion algo­rithm also held up very well, clearly under­stand­ing what I was say­ing (for those of you who’ve heard me speak, you know I have a fairly strong French accent, which makes this all the more amazing).

But what about the selec­tion? Well it is, in one word, ade­quate. Not great but not bad either. I was able to get stock quotes (an inter­est­ing fea­ture allows you to use the touch­pad to spell out a stock sym­bol if the ser­vice does not rec­og­nize the name of the com­pany you gave it), grab the lat­est news from CNN (the only gen­eral news provider tellme offers), pick up the weather in New York, check out a movie sched­ule, get some restau­rant info and be con­nected to the restau­rant for reser­va­tions. Also inter­est­ing was the phone­booth, a fea­ture that allows you to make 2 min­utes phone calls any­where in the US for free (brought to you by AT&T). All and all, I was impressed enough to save the num­ber into my cell phone memory.

Quack

Quack offers basi­cally the same things as tellme (with the excep­tion of the phone booth) but requires you to set up per­son­al­iza­tion largely through the web. As a result, the ser­vice may seem a lit­tle kludgier. On the plus side, how­ever, the voice recog­ni­tion algo­rithm gets some points. For exam­ple, I requested stock price on Internet.com on both ser­vices. Tellme was unable to find Internet.com and asked me to enter in the stock sym­bol using the key­pad. Quack imme­di­ately rec­og­nized the stock, gave me its sym­bol and, while play­ing ads, went on to retrieve the infor­ma­tion. What was dis­ap­point­ing, how­ever, was that their text to speech engine is not as advanced as tellme’s. The voice on the other end of the line was unmis­tak­ingly a com­puter when it came to par­tic­u­lar bits of infor­ma­tion (weather reports, stock quotes) com­pared to the syn­tax used by tellme.

Another plus for Quack is their caller-ID sys­tem: The ser­vice also rec­og­nized that my call was com­ing from New York and imme­di­ately gave me the weather report for that city (I had to request New York on tellme’s service).

All and all, I found very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between the two ser­vices, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Quack car­ry­ing traf­fic reports (which tellme did not offer when I tried it). How­ever, since I am one of those New York­ers with­out a car, traf­fic reports held lit­tle value for me. If I were out­side of New York, I am sure that this ser­vice could be a godsend.

Look­ing at the future: the other contenders

Inter­net­speech and bevo­cal seem to be aimed at the same mar­ket. They both plan to offer sim­i­lar ser­vices. Inter­net­Speech seems to go a step far­ther by try­ing to cap­ture an audi­ence that will be able to say a URL and get what’s on that page read to them. This could be inter­est­ing but can get kludgey as the exam­ple on their site shows. Going to Yahoo means that their ser­vice will read the links but also shows that it doesn’t know how to stop on a par­tic­u­lar link.

How­ever, a some­what more promis­ing con­cept is that of 888Telsurf, which plans to not only offer infor­ma­tion but also access to an online cal­en­dar and address book as well as over the phone read­ing of emails. Adver­tis­ing rev­enues will finance their ser­vice, like the oth­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, none of those ser­vices are avail­able now nor do they have announced launch dates.

Where is it all going?

Obvi­ously, those ser­vices do not plan to stand still. Each of them is try­ing to estab­lish a beach­front as the new “por­tal” to the Inter­net. I per­son­ally believe that a lot of those will end up either being acquired or strik­ing sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ships with the cur­rent group of already exist­ing por­tals. Ulti­mately, all of them will have to fol­low the lead of 888telsurf by offer­ing email, address book and cal­en­dars as part of their stan­dard package.

While they are all squarely aimed at the con­sumer mar­ket, I think that at least one of them will break away and start offer­ing the tech­nol­ogy as a soft­ware offer­ing, allow­ing cor­po­ra­tions to set up pri­vate intranets with dial in inter­faces. For exam­ple, one could be able to call into the main office to get part num­bers on some­thing they are sell­ing, or check the lat­est sales sta­tis­tics for a par­tic­u­lar region.

Another poten­tial use for the tech­nol­ogy devel­oped here is in the Ecom­merce arena. Why not use that tech­nol­ogy to offer a call-in ser­vice for order­ing. Wanna get that new book from Amazon.com? Why not call 1–800-AMAZON (or what­ever their num­ber will be) and order it via phone. This could go over the scare hur­dle that some peo­ple still have about online commerce.Or at least, it will give it a new dimension.

The other thing that could help those offer­ings become more pop­u­lar would be the inte­gra­tion of com­par­a­tive shop­ping fea­tures. I can see myself in a store, look­ing at prices on a par­tic­u­lar item I want to buy, then pulling out my phone to check if some­one will offer the same item for less.

Either way they play it, I think that this group of com­pa­nies will present the first seri­ous chal­lenge to WAP, unless more con­tent providers start offer­ing WAP-enabled con­tent (at cur­rent time, the selec­tion is fairly weak).