September 4, 2000

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UPS To Offer Wireless Access

Service will let customers determine costs and track packages via cell phones and handhelds

By Aisha M. Williams

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nited Parcel Service of America Inc. will use Air 2 Web Always Interactive, a wireless hosting service launched last week by application service provider Air 2 Web Inc., to give its customers wireless access to its branded online services in the United States. UPS customers will be able to find out how much it costs to ship packages, track the ones they send, and locate package drop-off stations--all via Wireless Access Protocol-enabled cell phones, one-and two-way short-messaging services, pagers, Palm VIIs, and other handheld devices. UPS has been testing the Extensible Markup Language-based service for about a month.

UPS began its wireless initiative late last year when it offered customers access to package-tracking applications and drop-off locations on the Palm VII. "We found that more of our customers were going mobile and wanted different channels to access all this information," says Robert Conner, director of interactive marketing for UPS.

Always Interactive is designed to let developers build company-branded applications on an open platform without having to go through a telecommunications service provider. Analysts say that's a good thing. "Enterprises want to deploy these types of services, but they want to be able to do it behind their own firewalls," says Cynthia Hswe, a senior analyst at the Strategis Group.

Hswe says Air 2 Web's approach is unique because its XML platform does a lot more than the typical screen scraping--the term she uses to describe the way in which other wireless service providers take HTML content and transform it into WAP or HTML for a small device. That method works for content providers, but it won't work for companies delving into E-commerce, she says. "Air 2 Web's service lets users create a database of content that can be constantly updated and changed without companies having to reformat their entire Web site," she says. "This appeals to E-commerce companies because they always have to update their inventory databases."

Air 2 Web's service will be available Sept. 18, starting at $3,000 per month for 750 users.

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