Handmark, Inc.Product: Handmark - Pocket Express
Description: Handmark Pocket Express delivers a bundle of seven wireless
services. It’s a mobile e-newspaper, plus white and yellow
pages, together with a national street-level atlas and driving
directions. All these services are tightly integrated with the built-in
PIM functions of today’s smart phones, and get even smarter
when location-based options are added onto supported devices.
The smart client design makes Express much faster than Web
browsing with information available even without a wireless
connection.
DEMO says: You know when you’ve encountered a customer of Handmark
Pocket Express because that person typically pulls out his Treo
and gives you a demo of this incredibly rich and useful informa-tion
resource. And, also typically, you’re left with a twinge of
jealousy because your phone isn’t a Treo and your phone does-n’t
support a rich data offering. No more. Handmark this fall
rolls out Express — a great example of an outstanding mobile
data application — to a range of mobile phone platforms,
beginning with the J2ME version here this week.
Market Outlook: As cell phones are replaced by smarter handsets and “feature
phones” become smarter than current “smart phones,” there will
be more than a half-billion new devices sold every year capable
of running robust applications. Within the next four years most
new handsets will be more powerful than yesterday’s uncon-nected
PDAs.
Funding: Private investors
Competitors: Competition comes from a consumer perception that information
is free and available from Web portals: MSN, Yahoo, AOL,
and others. However, the user experience is slow and incomplete
when compared to a smart client application with dedicated
wireless content servers.
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