This is a column I wrote for Editor & Publisher, published October 22, 2001, in the magazine’s technical section. At the time I was managing director of Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, and the column grew out of a few days spent watching more than 40 product demonstrations at the DemoMobile conference in La Jolla, Calif.
I opened by making clear what the column wasn’t about — selling news to tiny screens, which was the fashionable wireless topic of the moment.
THIS COLUMN IS NOT ABOUT trying to sell news and information via wireless services. So stifle that yawn. It is an early alert about interesting innovations in wireless workplace connectivity and tools that enable mobile workers to do their jobs better and faster.
The technology I singled out was 802.11b — already being called WiFi — which I described as the equivalent of a wireless Ethernet moving data at 11 megabytes per second. I had been carrying an 802.11b PC card on the road for a year, and noted that airports, universities, hotels and even some Starbucks locations were installing hubs. MobileStar had arranged to put hubs in American Airlines’ airport clubs. My advice to newspaper IT managers was to start thinking about how they would supply and support this new way of staying connected for reporters and sales staff.
The second half of the column was the part I cared more about: using wireless inside the building, in the departments that the wiring never reached.
The technology revolution, for the most part, has left behind mailrooms, pressrooms, and distribution centers. Wireless connectivity will bring instant data access to all departments.
I used UPS as the model — finger-worn bar-code scanners talking via Bluetooth to a wearable terminal, which fed the tracking database over an 802.11b network in real time. The newspaper equivalents were easy enough to imagine: tracking pallets of inserts as they moved to distribution centers, scanning bar codes on press plates as they went on the press, or simply giving production supervisors without fixed desks access to company network services. I also mentioned AvantGo, whose Mobile Delivery package-tracking system was announced at DemoMobile, and whose tools a number of newspaper online departments were already using for news content.
The closing point wasn’t really about wireless at all:
Wired or wireless, it’s all about sharing data quickly and simply.