Last week heralded a slew of fairly positive announcements from the still-struggling paging industry, with PageMart Wireless Inc., Paging Network Inc., SkyTel and TSR Wireless L.L.C. announcing significant partnerships.
PageMart
PageMart announced a strategic agreement with the MSN.com Mobile Service to provide customized personal information services to PageMart paging customers.
MSN.com Mobile is the mobile initiative of Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.com Internet portal. Information services provided include news, weather, horoscopes, sports, stock quotes and reminder messages.
PageMart said it will provide the service for free as part of a bundle of services the company plans to offer.
When Microsoft introduced MSN Mobile in May, it stated its goal was to give cellular phones, handheld devices and pagers full access to all MSN services via wireless Internet connections. PageMart is the first paging carrier to offer the service.
“MSN is a strategic relationship for us,” said John Beletic, chairman and chief executive officer of PageMart. “This is an important step in our strategy of delivering the information power of the Internet to our mobile customers as a means of enhancing the value of our products to our customers.”
PageMart reported a third-quarter net loss of $24.2 million, or 60 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $9 million, or 22 cents per share, for the same period last year.
Revenues totaled $87.3 million, 10.8 percent more than the $78.8 million earned last year. PageMart also added 85,780 new subscribers during the quarter, 24,585 of which were advanced-messaging customers.
Cash flow was $12.9 million. Average revenue per unit increased from $7.87 in the third quarter of 1998 to $8.30 this year.
PageNet
PageNet announced an agreement with HotOffice Technologies Inc. to offer wireless communication services to the small business and road-warrior customers of the HotOffice virtual office service.
In the first stage of the alliance, PageNet’s VAST Solutions subsidiary will offer PageNet paging services to HotOffice subscribers, the company said, as well as market and promote the HotOffice service on its Web site.
This is the second customer acquired by PageNet’s VAST group in as many weeks, good news to a company that hasn’t had many positive announcements to make in recent months. PageNet’s stock price was at $1 last week, up from 75 cents the previous week.
SkyTel
SkyTel said it will begin broadcasting daily news updates from The New York Times as part of its custom newscast of information services. The Times is providing daily headlines and abstracts in five categories-top news, business news, technology, sports and “On This Day” features.
Each channel is free and can be customized, along with SkyTel’s other newscast options.
Also, SkyTel said it expanded its relationship with Bloomberg L.P. to allow subscribers of Bloomberg’s Web site to track their stock portfolios over SkyTel advanced messaging pagers.
Portfolio to Go allows users to receive daily updates at market close on the total portfolio value of up to 10 stocks, along with the individual values of the five best and worst performers. The prepaid service begins at $10 a month.
Bloomberg also provides SkyTel with a choice of eight broadcast news feeds on business and financial news for the News to Go part of SkyTel’s Custom Newscast line.
TSR Wireless
Finally, TSR Wireless said it will add Xact TeleSolutions Inc.’s ibyphone mobile e-mail service to its wireless solutions portfolio, as well as its text-messaging capabilities featuring Web-based activation to support TSR’s alphanumeric paging market.
The ibyphone service provides live operators who send e-mail messages dictated over the phone to accounts in a way that makes it look like the messages came from the sender’s computer. The service also helps subscribers filter and check their e-mail.
