Ephraim Schwartz

In the old days, when General Motors and Ford spoke, people listened, especially people in the government. But when it comes to the world of high-tech, GM and Ford may have met their match.

At the JavaOne developer conference wireless operators and mobile software infrastructure vendors unveiled so-called value-based pricing schemes on their packet data networks as an alternative to charging users on the basis of per kilobyte of downloaded data.

As data gets collected over wireless and the demand for a warp-speed response increases, well-established database companies may soon get a rude awakening.

With a promise that the Los Angeles Police Department is open to innovative technology solutions, Captain Randal Quan, project manager for the Portable Officer Data Device System (POEDS) program, said the LAPD is about to publish its RFP (request for proposal) to use wireless PDAs and software to monitor racial profiling.

With a promise that the Los Angeles Police Department is open to innovative technology solutions, Captain Randal Quan, project manager for the Portable Officer Data Device System (POEDS) program, said the LAPD is about to publish its RFP (request for proposal) to use wireless PDAs and software to monitor racial profiling.

Microsoft Corp. will unveil this week at the Internet Wireless World conference in New York its Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002, the next iteration of its application server for wireless access to Exchange server.

Palm Inc. will unveil next week its first handheld device with built-in wireless carrier support that provides access to personal and corporate e-mail accounts.

Consider for a moment an application-development environment for cell phones created by a company that once made handsets and chip sets for cell phones and that now owns the patents for CDMA. Sound like a good idea? That