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.