OracleMobile added support for two-way wireless messaging devices to its OracleMobile.com wireless Internet portal service, which Metrocall Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. both agreed to make available to their messaging customers.
The two-way pager service, called Ask@OracleMobile, allows users to access information based on their OracleMobile.com profile from their two-way devices. Services today include stock quotes, traffic updates, flight information, driving directions, horoscopes, lottery results, dictionary and translation services, UPS tracking and weather.
Users send an e-mail to the address ask@oraclemobile.com with a keyword such as “stocks” or “flights” in the subject or body of the message, and wait for the response. The OracleMobile server determines who sent the message and accesses that profile, then sends back the latest updates of that user’s stock, based on the stock portfolio set up beforehand.
For driving directions, users can type “directions” in the subject field and then the origination and destination addresses into the body of the message.
“This is the first time a portal has been extended out to two-way pagers,” said Jacob Christfort, OracleMobile chief technical officer and vice president of product development. “We haven’t built a specific service for these devices. It’s still the OracleMobile service, just extended to two-way pagers.”
The Ask@OracleMobile service does not use Oracle’s Portal To Go technology, which is a transcoding technology for Web-enabled phones. Instead, the company built a custom gateway to the OracleMobile service to support paging protocols.
“We built a gateway where you can interact with our wireless Web portal on a two-way pager … Pagers have a totally different protocol,” Christfort said.
Free service for some
The service is free to consumers and carriers. Retailers and other service providers pay for OracleMobile’s hosting services, giving them a presence on the portal site. OracleMobile also takes a share of any transaction undertaken through the portal, which Christfort said is a small percentage of its revenue now, but expects it will be the primary revenue generator in the future. In addition, certain enhanced services will be introduced that will carry an extra fee for end users.
Christfort said the company wanted to target two-way pagers because there are more of them in use today than there are Internet-enabled Web phones, and two-way paging networks are more prevalent than Internet-enabled networks as well.
“Right now, there’s a lot of two-way pagers out there.”
Some services are optimized for one-way paging devices as well. OracleMobile users can provision their profile at the oramobile.com site and have alerts sent to their one-way pagers when certain things change, like stock prices or airline flights.
This is the first major addition to the OracleMobile service since it launched earlier this year. In that time, the company added several content providers to the site, like MapQuest location-based Yellow Pages, eBay auction updates, FTD Flowers and FedEx package services, among others.
Christfort would not discuss the exact number of users but said it is “beyond the tens of thousands.”
