There were a number of news announcements by Verizon Wireless made at the show, including a deal with Gateway that will have Gateway selling equipment and services for Verizon Wireless' Express Network (CDMA 1x). The company also announced a new version of its Short Message Service (SMS) platform to introduce the concept of 'communities' in SMS to the U.S.
Gateway is calling its new service the Mobile Wireless Solution. The service is available now in the Las Vegas, Dallas and Houston areas, and other areas will be added later this year and nationally by mid-2003, Gateway says.
The service is aimed at small businesses to give them a single location for mobile computing and connectivity (including service, installation, security and equipment), Gateway says. Business users can go to this site (www.gateway.com/work/products/wireless/index.shtml) for information on service plans and locations for the service. For $99.99 per month, customers can get unlimited access to the Express Network (with some restrictions), or they can purchase time-based or megabyte-usage plans. Time-based plans start at $35 for 150 minutes per month; megabyte plans start at $35 for 10M bytes of data sent and received per month.
Equipment includes the Sierra Wireless AirCard 555 to connect a notebook or PCMCIA-enabled PDA to the Express Network.
The new version of Verizon's SMS platform, Vtext.com, includes the new "communities" feature, which creates a group chatroom. The groups and communities feature lets one or many people send SMS messages to members in the group. Users can set up their own communit or join one of the 10,000 already established chat rooms on a variety of subjects.
For example, a "celebrity sighting" community would allow any member of the community to send an SMS message to everyone else.
As an example for businesses, members of groups could be created to coordinate messages in times of crisis, etc.
For more information on the new software, go to the Verizon Wireless Web site.
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