Subject: [NEXTEL-1] How about IM via a Dick Tracy watch?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 01:36:57 -0400

How about IM via a Dick Tracy watch?
10/14/03
By Susan M. Menke,
GCN Staff

The .Net Common Language Runtime can power Internet-aware devices ranging from PCs
to wristwatches that exchange instant messages.

Soon CLR will keep dashboard and refrigerator magnets up to date with whatever
Internet data their owners want to see, said
Rick Rashid, Microsoft Corp. senior vice president for research. Rashid, who
helped develop the Mach operating system at Carnegie Mellon University before
joining Microsoft 12 years ago, said Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT)
using CLR is the foundation of what he called “an ecology of devices that know
about you. The intelligence is in the device, not in the network.”

A SPOT device downloads Extensible Markup Language data via Web services. It
continually displays or scrolls through a user’s desired data—time, weather,
calendar, news, instant messages—via MSN Direct’s nationwide agreements with radio
stations across the United States and Canada.

About 80 percent of each country’s population can receive the signals on devices
with FM subcarrier chip sets from Motorola
Inc., Rashid said. Fossil, Citizen and other watchmakers will charge $100 to $200
for a SPOT watch, he said. The prototype he wears has a black-and-white bitmap
screen with 90- by 120-pixel resolution in a boxy Dick Tracy style; see
www.microsoft.com/SPOT for more information.

MSN Direct’s monthly charge for the Internet service has not yet been decided, he
said.
A SPOT device’s private key is installed during manufacture to receive signals
from MSN Direct. The user can set up a
secondary private key for instant messaging with chosen persons, but no others
will know it. “You don’t want to get spam on
your watch,” Rashid said.

Microsoft has adapted CLR for Windows CE devices such as a forthcoming Global
System for Mobile Communications smart
phone, code-named Stinger, that will be available soon through AT&T Wireless.

http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/23875-1.html

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