Goodbye operators, page it yourself with notify!
Goodbye operators, page it yourself with notify!
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): "So, you're now a Simatupang," a friend said to
me some time ago when she learned I always had a pager with me.
Actually, "Simatupang" is the name of a clan in Tanah Batak,
North Sumatra. One acquires the name at birth or through
deliberate rituals involving all the clan's elders.
I've never been a Simatupang in that sense. The word she used
was actually the abbreviation of "Siang Malam Tunggu Panggilan",
or "on call day and night". This, unluckily, is the image
associated with people who carry a pager. In our society, where
public image -- no matter how false -- is so important and so
crucial, a pager cannot be compared with a handphone. Indonesians
will chat through their handphones for a long time in public, but
they very rarely have the courage to read their pagers in the
presence of others because pagers are only for the lowly
professions.
As Nick Louth's article in last Monday's newspaper forewarned,
in more advanced societies the tiny chirping box is undergoing a
fundamental transformation. A good friend of mine, a businessman
from Singapore, for instance, leaves his handphone off and tells
his staff and clients to page him instead. He only uses his
handphone to reply to messages. For a person who rakes in the
money, he is indeed a stark contrast to the Indonesians who talk
endlessly into their handphones. But, more than that, he
demonstrates that a pager user can actually be perfectly
respectable.
What is it that makes the pager a more powerful communication
tool than a simple gadget usually associated with those who
engage in, shall we say, the private entertainment business? It
is the enhancement of the basic paging service.
Courtesy of PT Sky Telindo Services, I was able to test drive
two products that give a taste of these enhanced paging services.
Notify!
The first product was an interesting piece of software written
by Ex Machina, Inc., a New York based company that is also backed
by Delrina Corporation. Now, the moment I hear the name Delrina,
I know who is the big guy behind the product. People who use
WinFax Lite or WinFax Pro are familiar with the user-friendliness
and hassle-free installation of the products that have granted
Delrina such a strong presence in the PC-based communications
industry.
This particular product, notify!intro, is the entry level of
the software package that enables users -- using a PC and modem
-- to send messages directly to a pager. As you can see in the
accompanying illustration, the program's screen interface looks
exactly like a pager. PT Sky Telindo Services will soon be
distributing a customized version of this software, allowing
messages to be sent to the company's pagers without the
assistance of an operator. The tentative price list will be Rp
250,000. It sells for US$119 in America.
Why is notify! better than dictating your message to the
operator over the phone? With this software, you can type in your
own message. Not only does that give complete privacy and allow
personal messages to be sent without embarrassment, you can also
edit and spell-check the message before it is sent. I sent a 240
character message in English to a friend using this beta version
of notify!intro for SkyTel, and the recipient was surprised to
see there was no spelling errors. Suppose you have a list of
difficult and unusual terms -- such as the names of chemical
substances used to produce a drug -- to be sent to your
purchasing staff, would you feel confident that the operator
would be able to type it in accurately? Of course you would feel
a lot better if you typed the list on your PC and sent it with
your modem.
It is also the safest way to send messages in foreign
languages, such as Mandarin and Japanese (if the recipient's
pager is equipped to receive and display the characters). I doubt
it is easy to find an Indonesian operator who speaks these
languages.
Installation of notify!intro is as straightforward as any
Delrina's WinFax software product. The software auto configures
everything for us and saves the correct parameters when the
process is completed. If you insist, you can still tweak these
parameters, although there may not be much you can do. The pager
service number and the recipient PIN needs only be set once, and
we're set.
User-friendly
On the bottom right of the on-screen pager, there are three
buttons that can be clicked with a mouse. The Clear button
deletes all the text in the green Message area. A pre-typed
signature can be added by clicking on the Sign button. The
signature can be your name or phone number. The message is sent
to the service center's computer simply by clicking the Send
button. In my tests, the message was received in less than three
seconds after the modem hung up.
Being the entry level product, notify!intro can only send
messages to a single pager through one paging company. The
software must be reset for each new recipient. The high-end
notify!classic offers more features.
The advanced product can broadcast messages to groups of
pagers. In addition, if you have a very long message -- something
most operators would resent -- notify!classic can send it to the
pagers in installments.
I've also been told that notify!mobile can send an Excel
spreadsheet to a pager after the program converts the file into
its proprietary format.
The notify!intro software requires a Windows-based PC and a
modem. My only wish is that the text entry function had more of
the features of a typical word processor. An automatic spell-
checker in Winword-style would be nice.
WordSender
If you don't have a PC and a modem at home, take heart. Here's
another interesting gadget you can use right out of the box. Made
by Motorola, WordSender looks like an ordinary telephone set
equipped with a full QWERTY keyboard. It functions as a regular
phone until the "Page" or "Speed dial" key on the bottom left of
the keyboard is pressed.
In the picture of my cramped desk, you can see WordSender
between my keyboard and my mouse. It feels very sturdy, and as a
telephone set it has great sound. A timer starts clicking when
the receiver is picked up, and the elapsed time is displayed on
the clear LCD screen.
Relying on a 9V battery, WordSender can maintain up to 20
names in its memory, each with a telephone number for speed
dialing and a paging service number plus a PIN. To send a message
to my wife's pager, for instance, I just press the Page key,
followed by either her directory number or her name. WordSender
is intelligent enough to match patterns, so that each time I type
the first letter of my wife's name her entry will appear on the
screen immediately. Then I hit the Return key (equivalent to the
ENTER key) and start typing my message. When finished, I hit the
Return key once again and the set will dial the number of the
paging service center and download the message to the center's
computer, which in turn will send it to the transmitter. Within
three seconds my wife's pager will start to beep.
I like WordSender very much, although its price tag of Rp
500,000 might make it hard to justify buying. People who become
frustrated when their messages are misspelled will love it.
Besides a lower price, I wish WordSender had a full-sized numeric
keypad in addition to the QWERTY keyboard. To keep the size
small, the numeric keypad could be made retractable. I assume
Motorola would have no problem designing it.
Enhanced services
Compared to handphones, pagers are going global much more
quickly. During the recent Non-Aligned Movement Summit in
Cartagena, Colombia, for example, several Indonesian journalists
covering the event were already carrying SkyTel pagers that
enabled them to receive messages from Indonesia in several of the
cities where the entourage stopped. The sender simply dialed the
local access number of the paging company. In fact, the
journalist were also able to send messages home by dialing the
local access number in many of the cities where they stayed.
Nick Louth also briefed us about the two-way paging and paging
cards that can be inserted into a notebook or Personal Digital
Assistants to enable paged messages to be read on screen.
Furthermore, Roy Breslawski, HP product manager, recently told me
that, after the Oklahoma bombing incident, police officers and
FBI agents in the field immediately got a picture of the suspects
through their paging system. In Hong Kong, people use pagers to
get the latest info on precious metals, stocks and currency. With
all these possibilities, it's hard to imagine that pagers will
forever belong only to those working in the private entertainment
business.