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Net Not Lacking in Cool Apps and Concepts By Beth Cox March 29, 2000 There''s no shortage of novel ideas and cool concepts on the Net. So much so that my e-mail box is flooded daily with announcements about new products and services that it''s hard to keep up. So I thought I''d just highlight a few of the cooler and/or more useful things that I stumbled across in the past week or so. We all know about the wireless explosion, and although I have some doubts that billions of us really want to surf the Net using a tiny cell phone screen, the developments just keep coming. One that caught my eye was from PhotoNet Japan, which promises to let us use our wireless phones to show off family pictures. PhotoNet Japan is a joint venture between Herndon, VA-based PictureVision Inc., an independently operated subsidiary of Eastman Kodak, and PlazaCreate -- Japan''s largest bricks-and-mortar film processor. They already have teamed with Japanese cellular network NTT DoCoMo to make photos available via its I-Mode cell phones, which can display compact HTML images. And it won''t be long before the technology comes to the United States. Of course, I''ve been able to get my snapshots online for some time now. But in Japan, customers can view, use and share their pictures processed at thousands of locations across the country on their cell phones. The processing stores send the customer an e-mail when their pictures are ready. The photos are viewed one at a time by scrolling through the selections. An options bar at the bottom of the screen allows for output services such as printing and e-mailing the photo to PCs or other cell phones. Pretty cool. Rob Kelley, a research analyst for PacificVision Partners in San Francisco, says large information technology companies such as Oracle, Xerox and America Online are throwing their strength behind the effort to develop similar technology to make photo delivery via cell phones available in the U.S. Virtual Room Service Here''s another cool application. Want to remind yourself to take a vitamin everyday? Want to program your own wakeup call? Want to hear daily fitness and health tips, rung to your cell, home or office phone? iPing, an Internet-to-telephone notification service, offers a "Dr. Dose" solution that can call anyone, anytime, and remind them to take any medication. The company says it''s "perfect for the elderly and you only have to program iPing once They can be ''pinged'' for years" using text-to-speech technology. The service is free. Safeguards include a stated privacy policy: "Your recipients should be known to either you or to the organization to which you belong. Your message must have value to the recipients of that message." In other words: No harassment.

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