A front-page story in USA Today several weeks ago introduced a new technology called electronic ink, marketed by a company called E Ink, and paging technology just may be what brings it to life.
The result of research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, electronic ink is real ink that can be applied to paper, the form of which can be changed using electrical charges. The ink basically is a dark substance containing hundreds of white balls. The electrical charges command the white balls to rise to the surface of the dark liquid, changing the shape of the background to form different letters, much like a road sign display.
Paging technology is expected to be the means by which these electronic commands will be transmitted.
Innovations such as this one hold great potential for paging carriers, say certain industry visionaries who believe paging technology will be an integral part of the interactive networked world of the future.
Off-the-hip paging applications have been discussed at length as a potential new market and added revenue stream for paging carriers. Looking beyond the telemetry applications mentioned to date-such as meter reading-innovations taking place outside the paging industry reveal just how great a potential the new market may hold.
For instance, electronic ink may change the entire concept of books and newspapers. The technology could get to the point where customers buy just one book or just one newspaper, for which the content is updated every day by a broadcast page.
The Internet and computer industries are propelling the world to an interactive paradigm of virtual connections unheard of just a few years ago. The timing of such innovation comes when the paging industry is migrating from a cheap-beep growth model to one of value. Whereas competition was based on price in the past, the new differentiator for paging carriers will be features. A year ago, the industry remained at the crossroads of that transition, but today is taking its first steps on that new road.
Also, the technology is being upgraded to two-way paging, opening doors to features never dreamed of just years ago.
Jim Page, vice president of market development for Motorola Inc.’s Smart and Connected Products Group, called this an intelligent environment, or virtual world, in which all objects are able to communicate with each other.
“In a virtual world, communication patterns change,” he said.
In this world, a command to open a door electronically could result in another automatic command to activate the lights. Homes all would be connected through an electric meter, which if equipped with a paging module would allow users to control remotely lights and appliances in the home.
It is the computer industry that will create this connected world, and Page believes paging will play just a small part in it. Just as the Internet came along and created an e-mail world that paging takes advantage of now, so will the virtual connectivity environment create a new space for paging to play.
“We think paging will play a role in the intelligent home. Turning lights on and off, locking and unlocking doors. Low-end cybernetic kinds of things used to control the home remotely,” he said. “Pagers will be one of the devices people will carry all the time. Why wouldn’t a pager be an integral part of the intelligent environment?”
With this in mind, Motorola is looking to non-pager industries to include the FLEX family of transmission standards as a means of wireless connectivity. The widespread popularity and prevalence of the FLEX protocol suite is a key driver in this effort.
Page said the company has some 600 application developers who have accepted the FLEX environment and are working on embedded solutions using FLEX.
Going further, Motorola sponsored the “things that think” initiative at MIT’s Media Lab. The company set up a two-way ReFLEX paging system on campus, which students can use in their inventions. The system played a central role at MIT’s Junior Summit, where gifted students ages 8-15 from around the world were given two-way pagers to “play” with.
“That’s a major initiative within the MIT Lab,” Page said. “I think there’s fairly broad acceptance of FLEX among the technological community.”
MIT students are working on things like electronic billboards, where a user can point a two-way pager toward a billboard and request more information about what is being advertised. The billboard then sends the pager more individual information about the product on which the user may act, perhaps even making a purchase on the spot via wireless e-commerce.
“Many of the applications that will make this intelligent world proliferate (are) based on software,” Page said. “We’ve got software development kits available and people working on software products for the PageWriter platform, some of which are just beginning to get to market.”
That effort took a huge leap forward when Motorola introduced its ReFLEX chipset, which allows developers not familiar with paging technology to add paging capabilities to devices.
“With embedded FLEX Stack software or ReFLEX Stack software, these chipsets promise quick-turn pager designs or embedded paging applications requiring minimal first-hand paging knowledge or experience,” Page wrote in The Future of Paging. “This begins to address the strategic goal of linking everything as FLEX paging becomes widely embedded with non-pager devices.”
The recent alliance formed to include FLEX in personal digital assistants is just a start, Page said. He sees adding paging to products like cars and even toys.
“When everything becomes a client device, paging becomes the means of communicating.”
This connected world is not far, Page said, as the technology is already available. Still needed is more carriers building out ReFLEX 25 networks, as well as further innovation by developers like those at MIT.
“It’s all available now,” said Darryl Sterling, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. “Companies have been isolated and have created different and separate components of the entire solution. Now they need to come together.”
However, Sterling stressed that devices need advancements before many of Page’s ideas reach reality.
Devices need increased processing power, most particularly because e-banking and e-commerce applications require more sophisticated security encryption than is available on pagers today. Device screens must get larger so users can more easily handle multiple tasks. Also, more memory and easier input methods are needed.
