The 'Wireless PDA' Strategy

There is a posting on the Online-News listserv today that asks this question about Sybase’s acquition of AvantGo:

Do you foresee this changing your wireless/PDA strategy? (Is that question moot?)

I think it’s sad to see American publishers mistake PDAs as having anything at all to do with wireless. Yes, I myself carry a MDA (Mobile Digital Assistant, a merged PDA and cell phone), but suchwireless devices have almost nothing to do with AvantGo’s type of service. How many truly wireless subscribers does AvantGo have? Hardly any. AvantGo users are chained to their desktop PCs; they must insert their PDAs into a cradle attached to a PC in order to use AvantGo. Nothing wireless there.

An example of real wireless is Short Messaging Services (SMS), delivery of regular Web pages to truly mobile wireless devices, and even the old Wireless Applications Protocol (WAP). For example, one of my clients, Ireland.com, sends one million SMS news messages per month (and earns gross annual revenues of nearly half a million Euros doing this). That’s a wireless strategy. But then, that’s outside of North America, where we’re two years behind everyone else in recognizing what true wireless is and can do.

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Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

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