Wireless IM leaps compatibility hurdle.Plagued by interoperability problems, instant messaging (IM) for wireless devices has been slow to take off. To the rescue rides Air2Web 21M, which lets users of IM systems from Yahoo, Microsoft MSN (1) (MicroSoft Network) A family of Internet-based services from Microsoft, which includes a search engine, e-mail (Hotmail), instant messaging (Windows Live Messaging) and a general-purpose portal with news, information and shopping (MSN Directory). , and AOL (A division of Time Warner, Inc., New York, NY, www.aol.com) The world's largest online information service with access to the Internet, e-mail, chat rooms and a variety of databases and services. swap messages on wireless PDAs. "One of the challenges associated with IM, in general, is there isn't a dominant instant messaging service. You might have one set of colleagues on one service and another set of colleagues on another, and friends and family on still other services. That means, if you want to communicate with all of these groups, you have to be logged into multiple networks," says Air2Web CTO (Chief Technical Officer) The executive responsible for the technical direction of an organization. See CIO and salary survey. Dale Gonzalez. "On a PC, it's a drag, but not debilitating de·bil·i·tat·ing adj. Causing a loss of strength or energy. Debilitating Weakening, or reducing the strength of. Mentioned in: Stress Reduction . On a wireless device, it's almost impossible. You can't reasonably run multiple applications simultaneously and flip from one to the other as easily as you can on a PC where screen real estate isn't as much of an issue." With 21M, users can access any IM network through a single interface. Users get a consolidated alphabetical buddy list, regardless of the IM service each buddy uses. Experiencing technical difficulties Instant messaging was created for wired networks, so wireless IM is tricky. IM uses a socket protocol, establishing a connection between the client and the server that's kept open for the length of the conversation. However, socket-oriented communication doesn't work with a wireless device that's going in and out of coverage. To solve this problem, 21M creates a bridge that supports socket protocol from the 21M server to the IM server, but packet protocol over the network to the wireless device. 2IM is available for Palm devices, RIM wireless handhelds, and Cingular Wireless' myBiz pagers, and soon for other wireless handsets including J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) A version of Java 2 for cellphones, PDAs and consumer appliances. J2ME uses the K Virtual Machine (KVM), a specialized Java interpreter for devices with limited memory. devices. Users can connect via Wi-Fi and cellular. Air2Web plans to support the Pocket PC, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) Lotus Instant Messaging (formerly Lotus Sametime), and Jabber An open standard for instant messaging (IM). There are tens of thousands of Jabber servers on the Internet, most of which are privately run within a company or college campus. There are also hundreds of public Jabber servers that any user can register with, Google Talk being the largest. by the end of 2003. |
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