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	VoIP Wi-Fi Paging Wi-MAX Telemetry Location Services Wireless Messaging	WIRELESS MESSAGING

From: wreid@indianapaging.com
Subject: Corrections and Clarifications
Date: March 3, 2006 3:45:19 PM CST
To: brad@braddye.com
Cc: weisele@indianapaging.com
Reply-To: wreid@indianapaging.com

Brad,

My response to the local paper that discussed tower rental in Brown County Indiana. "I don't know where Kathy Dayhoff-Dwyer gets her information but I can assure you that Indiana Paging Network has NEVER paid ANYWHERE near even $2,000 for monthly antenna rental." Please call me if you would like more information.

Since we rent over 100 towers out of our 190 sites I don't think we could make it paying $2,400,000.00 to $6,000,000.00 a year in antenna rental and still be here.

Regards,

Bill

Bill Reid
VP of Sales & Marketing
Indiana Paging Network, Inc.
1-800-INDIANA (463-4262) ext 6575

From: Brown County Indiana

Corrections and Clarifications
An article last week contained inaccurate information about a contract between Brown County and Indiana Paging Service. For allowing the company to house paging equipment on a county tower, the county received free paging service for the first three months of each year between 1999 and 2002.

Source: BrownCountyIndiana.com

It’s no news that paging has had to reinvent itself in recent years and look for new opportunities. Paging carriers around the world have faced the adapt-or-die scenario with varying degrees of success. Earlier strategies attempted to take on the challenge of cellular person to person messaging (i.e SMS) head on, with, in hindsight, predictably disastrous results. Those who survived the resulting shake out have moved to position their paging offering as a lowest common denominator “failsafe”, i.e when all else dies paging is the last man standing. Post 9-11, there was suddenly value in this proposition and much work has been done to reposition paging as the weapon of last resort in disaster situations to governmental organisations. Of course, not all crusaders will win the ultimate prize of the coveted government contract and a further wave of attrition may well ensue, the size of which only time will tell.

In parallel with this, many paging companies evolved  to become ‘messaging’ companies in order to continue to provide value for their corporate customers, offering a suite of messaging services of which paging was just one element. Finally, the former cash cow of the industry, the personal customer went the way of the dinosaur,in Europe at least, failing to retain traction in a market increasingly dominated by cellular services.

Meanwhile bubbling under the surface as a revenue stream have been telecontrol and telemetry applications. These applications range from meter and device control in one way networks to more sophisticated two way applications. In general, however, telemetry applications serve specific market niches in very specialised segments with low volume high value transactions.  What has proved elusive until now is a high volume application which could reopen the potential to address the mass market. This is the space, ParkMagic believe, can be reopened to paging carriers with little if any direct investment.

So What's It About?

ParkMagic was founded in 2004 to address the on-street parking market in Europe and North America. It is, in essence, a mobile payment service for on-street parking and other transport payment, a market estimated in the US alone to be worth in excess of $25bn (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10003018/).

Now of course mobile payment is not news and there are many solutions in this space, however, experience has levied a heavy toll with many systems having a level of investment, complexity and usability so high as to consign them to a niche.

ParkMagic's view is simple. Parking isn't rocket science, for parkers the need is to park, pay and go. For enforcement the need is to eyeball the car, validate and move on. It’s been that way since 1935 when the first meters were introduced and since then only changes that stuck to these rules have gained any real market traction.

Everything and nothing. ParkMagic have developed a patent pending system (under PCT) to deliver on the simplicity that has made the plain old parking meter such a success. It simply replaces the parking meter with a cheap in car wireless meter (you see where this is going right?). For the driver, it’s just magic, they call and up pops the parking permit. For the meter maid, they just do what they always did, read the permit. In the background is the ParkMagic billing system with a connection to the local paging carrier.

Well, yes of course! Technically it’s all proven technology as paging carriers will well know but of course that’s not the real issue, the real issue is does it work on street for Joe and Jane Public? This we had to test and did so publicly in 2005 using 350 randomly selected drivers in a local city for a period of 3 months. During that time our volunteer citizens used the system as a ‘live’ system monitored by a local university marketing department. They were given no slack by the city, they either paid or got ticketed just like any other citizen. We then compiled and published the results which were very strong but we’d rather you judge it for yourself. You can download the report from www.parkmagic.net

The beef is in a heavily populated market, untouched as yet by the wireless industry. Paging, we believe, can deliver what cellular cannot. Cheap and ubiquitous coverage at a street price untouchable by cellular.

To hunt down this opportunity, we are looking for local partners who have the broadcast ability, call centre, hosting, DDI and other services to allow us to offer our services to cities and towns across any country with paging coverage. In return we offer a margin and the sales resources with parking experience to turn prospects into customers.

Interested in this market as a way to push more revenue through your existing infrastructure? Well, in the Google age there is no shortage of information, heck there is probably too much of it. On the market sizing, a good place to start for those in the US is the NYU Rudin Center report  (http://www.nyu.edu/wagner/transportation/files/street.pdf). From there, as they say, you can go anywhere!

Source: ParkMagic

BlackBerry case shows what's wrong with U.S. patent law

March 11, 2006

BY SHELDON RICHMAN

For the last few years we've been reading that Research in Motion's popular mobile e-mail service, BlackBerry, may be shut down because the company "infringed the patents" of a company called NTP. That's all the newspapers said.

Curious readers would want to know more. Did black-clad RIM operatives break into NTP's office safe and steal the idea for mobile e-mail? Did RIM spies tap the phones at NTP? Did RIM gumshoes tail NTP's engineers and eavesdrop on conversations?

No, nothing like that. "There was never any dispute that Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian firm that introduced the world to the BlackBerry in 1999, came up with its own technology to power the wireless e-mail device," the Washington Post writes. But the BlackBerry resembled something already patented by NTP. It doesn't matter that RIM formulated its similar idea independently. Under the law, that's enough to get RIM into trouble. After years of legal tangles including a jury trial, a lost appeal, and an injunction threat, it finally agreed to pay NTP $612.5 million to settle the case.

NTP doesn't make a product that competes with BlackBerry. It doesn't make anything. NTP is a patent-holding company, a lawyer's office in Virginia. The company was started by an attorney and an inventor, the late Thomas Campana, to "manage" Campana's patents -- not to make products. According to the Wall Street Journal, Campana "worked on ways to send e-mails wirelessly. In 2001, NTP sued RIM, saying it held patents covering the 'push' aspect of wireless e-mail." "Push" is the feature that lets e-mails automatically appear on a BlackBerry.

To recap: RIM created a successful product and service that in some way is similar to ideas another inventor had patented but never implemented. As a result, it was forced to pay a lot of money or shut down. What's wrong with this picture?

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." But I'm not talking about what's law. I'm talking about what's right, and something is wrong when the government can grant someone a monopoly over an idea and threaten to punish anyone else for using similar ideas.

Some software engineers can't understand why Campana got his patents in the first place. As BusinessWeek reported, "Not all of Campana's associates support his legal battle. [Murali] Narayanan [formerly of Bell Labs] ended up testifying on behalf of RIM. 'I was surprised [Campana] got the patents,' he said. 'As a computer guy, putting e-mail and paging together seemed obvious to me.'" In other words, the U.S. Patent Office's criteria for granting or denying patents are arbitrary. There are no clear "boundaries" between ideas. Thus an innovator can't know if he's violated a patent until a judge or jury says so -- a practice that conflicts with the objective rule of law.

What's more, the Patent Office has been reconsidering, and preliminarily decided to withdraw, NTP's patents. According to ComputerWorld, the patents received "nonfinal rejection" because "something similar had been described in print at least a year before the patent was filed." Yet RIM was forced to surrender $600 million or see its business devastated.

As this case makes clear, patents don't stimulate innovation; they stifle it. How many useful products aren't being made because developers fear the kind of extortion RIM just submitted to? As the Washington Post reported, "Intellectual property attorney Donald R. Steinberg said the size of the settlement might spur more lawsuits from patent-holding companies, but that in most cases a settlement is often desirable because it limits risk on all sides." More extortion; more tribute.

The notion of "intellectual property rights" is spurious. The principle of property is needed for physical objects because they are finite; hence, property rights prevent conflicts over the use of things. But ideas can be reproduced infinitely and used simultaneously without conflict. Hence, as Thomas Jefferson realized, "Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the newsletter interesting this week. Please don't assume that I already know about a newsworthy event—sometimes I am the last one to know. Share the news!

With best regards, K9IQY	Brad Dye Wireless Messaging Consultant P.O. Box 266 Fairfield, IL 62837 USA
	Skype:	braddye		WIRELESS MESSAGING
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