In an attempt to position paging devices and services as Internet appliances, as opposed to telephone appliances, PageMart Wireless Inc. said it will change its name to WebLink Wireless Inc., effective Dec. 1, and also introduced a new line of products and services called e-pager, available nationwide.
“If we were just in the traditional paging business, the PageMart name would be fine,” said John Beletic, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer. “But we have three-fourths of our capital invested in something radically different, and PageMart is a poor descriptor of this new world.”
While all one-way numeric pagers and service will continue to be marketed and sold under the PageMart brand, Beletic said all advanced messaging products and services will fall into the e-pager family.
“The e-pager clearly positions itself in the consumers’ minds that this is different. This is Internet-based. It brings out a hidden attribute not associated with alphanumeric pagers.”
In support of the e-pager debut, PageMart launched a new Web site-www.e-pager.com. At the site, customers may purchase and activate e-pager devices and services, as well as choose the information services they desire.
PageMart has several agreements with Internet content providers like eBay, MSN.com Mobile, CallWave and Yahoo!, through which customers can self-provision the type of content they wish to receive on the e-pager device.
Beletic said there are some 60 other information sources providing content that don’t require formal agreements, a list he expects to continually grow.
Internet-based content is key to this e-pager initiative, Beletic said, to the point where he believes content will drive usage of the network.
“We believe many customers bill by these only for the customized information they can regularly receive,” Beletic said.
The e-pager will be identified with an Internet e-mail address instead of a phone number. Customers who want a phone number attached so others can dictate messages by phone will be provided one free of charge.
“The introduction of e-pager and the e-pager.com Web site is just the beginning of the information and wireless data services we will be announcing over the next 12 months,” Beletic said, pointing to three areas in which paging will play a role in the future.
The WebLink name and e-pager represent the company’s steps in the first area-the ability to wirelessly get Internet-based information. The second area is short message service. Beletic defined SMS as device-to-device communications in a two-way mode. In this space, Beletic envisions two-way pagers communicating with phones equipped with their own two-way text communications ability using Internet gateways as the link between the different networks. So a person using a WebLink two-way pager could compose a message on his device, send it over the WebLink network to an Internet gateway, which then passes the message along to the recipient over her PCS carrier’s network.
“We want people on the go to be able to communicate by sending short data messages whether they’re using a mobile phone, a PDA or two-way pagers, and I believe WebLink Wireless is one of the key companies that will help make device-independent SMS a phenomena in the Unites States like it is in Europe.”
The third area is providing transmission for machine-to-machine telemetry services.
Once the name change goes into effect Dec. 1, PageMart said it plans to conduct nationwide advertising to support it.
