AmikaNow!, an artificial intelligence solutions provider for wireless Internet services, unveiled a line of plug-in products for Microsoft Outlook 2000, as well as an online service called AmikaFreedom.com.
AmikaFreedom and AmikaWisdom are e-mail management and wireless messaging solutions that use artificial intelligence to recognize keywords and key phrases from e-mail content and forwards the highlighted content. AmikaWisdom sends the highlights to personal computers, while AmikaFreedom forwards the information to text-enabled wireless devices.
AmikaFreedom.com is an online service where users with text-enabled wireless devices can go to sign up for the service without needing to buy any software. Users need only register their name, e-mail address, domain information and wireless e-mail ID, and AmikaNow!’s AmikaHighlighter intelligent agent technology does the rest.
“We pull their e-mail to us,” said Dr. Sue Abu-Hakima, AmikaNow! president and chief executive officer. “Then we pull out the highlights using our pool of intelligent agents to do so, and use our server to route the information to the wireless device.”
AmikaNow! plans to market AmikaFreedom.com by establishing partnerships with Internet portal companies and wireless carriers, letting each license the technology and charging a per-user royalty fee in return. The portal or carrier brands and sells the service to their own customers.
The service is available only on a Beta user trial for now, but some 30 wireless carriers and Internet portal companies are in talks with AmikaNow! for commercial launch, the company said. Users interested in testing the service may register at AmikaNow!’s Web site.
The AmikaFreedom.com basic service, which forwards all received e-mail to the user, is free. The premium plan will cost about $5 to $10 a month, Abu-Hakima said, and will allow users to have greater filtering control over what messages are sent to the wireless device, based on key words, key phrases or people’s names. Also, the highlighting service can block certain e-mails based on the same criteria.
“We developed our products as part of a distributed architecture resident in the client, server or service,” Abu-Hakima said. Messages can be sent to any text-enabled device, not just a browser-enabled one.
Down the line, Abu-Hakima said the AmikaHighlighter technology could be licensed for Wireless Application Protocol servers to further filter the information sent to WAP devices. So the information sent to a WAP browser from a WAP server would be filtered even further based on the key words and phrases selected by the user through the AmikaHighlighter technology, enhancing the user interface and experience, Abu-Hakima said. However, either the portal or network provider must be licensing AmikaNow! technology.
Also, AmikaNow! plans to introduce soon technology allowing users to view and forward e-mail attachments, such as PowerPoint applications and others.
