In many respects, the wireless phones sold by Nextel Communications work pretty much like any wireless phone. The major difference is that Nextel’s units also work like walkie-talkies.
Used mostly in businesses, Nextel’s phones enable people in the same organization to call up a colleague’s name on a menu, push a button and connect. This can work one-to-one or one-to-many. The caller then talks into the unit and awaits a reply, the way a taxi dispatching system works.
An advantage to this system is that it puts colleagues at the head of the line of faxes, voice-mail, e-mail, phone tag and so on that trail the modern exec through the business day. Another advantage is that it ducks the access line charges assessed by phone companies for regular calls.
Now the company says it will expand this function so that people from different companies can reach each other, enabling contractors, for example, to gain immediate access to preferred vendors.
John Shelton, president of Nextel’s Chicago market, compared the move to what happened when computers were first linked in local area networks, then into more extended networks up to and including the Internet.
Long-distance gaze: The Cold War may be over, but if you want a spy satellite photo of your own backyard or any other address in the Chicago area, point your Web browser to www.imagescans.com.
A Wheat Ridge, Colo.-based company, Vexcel Corp., is promoting its satellite mapping product line designed mainly for industrial-strength business use by selling to the general public satellite photos taken by NASA of any square mile in Chicago and several other cities.
The photos come with any address you want to specify as the center point. Every object wider or longer than one-half meter shows up on the spy photos, which means they should show everything right down to the family’s German shepherd taking a nap on the lawn.
This is a technophile’s lark, but a bit costly at $20 for each picture and another $30 for shipping and handling. If you use your own Federal Express account to pay for shipping, the $30 is waived, the company says.
The $20 Chicago map deal is a promotion gimmick to call attention to the company’s major project aimed at Chicago area businesses, coverage of the entire area for $6,000. Now that’s being nosy.
A shoulder to cry on: When it comes to lending a sympathetic ear to someone’s troubles, many people have long believed that a good bartender is better than your average doctor. Now it turns out that even a computer makes the grade.
A study published in the Chicago-based Journal of the American Medical Association finds that a computer is just as good as a doc when it comes to diagnosing mental disorders.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin who arranged for 200 people to be asked questions intended to diagnose mental disorders and maladies. The people were questioned by human clinicians over the phone and also answered phone questions administered by a computer.
In general, the results from computer interviews were about the same as from human interviews, with one exception.
People were more likely to reveal signs of drinking problems to a machine than to a clinician. These may be the ones who’d rather see a bartender.
Ultimate Yellow Pages: Say you need a pair of left-handed poultry scissors and a box of paper clips. Barb Chilson, chief of Internet commerce for W.W. Grainger Inc., says her company can make sure you are directed to a store that has both of those items in stock under one roof using Grainger’s new World Wide Web site at www.grainger.com. The page gives you access to huge databases listing every item in stock.
With a staggering inventory of everything from nuts and bolts to clocks and window shades, Grainger’s stocked items now exceed 180,000 products, and the company’s executives say they are trying a wide variety of computer catalog tricks to make their merchandise more visible.
Strangely enough, browsing the Grainger Web site becomes one more place Web surfers can while away their time exploring a rather amazing array of office- and factory-oriented gadgets.
By the way, searching the Grainger site for paper clips brought a response that Grainger does not carry this particular item among its inventory of 189,000 products.
