[Stupid Idea Series] Corporate 'Messaging'

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@ics.uci.edu)
Sat, 31 Jul 1999 08:04:29 -0700


Here's something Whoreo or Kohn [1] can collaborate on. One of the problems
I have with office, home, and wireless phones is that unless they are all
handled by the same company, I have 3 different message center inboxes.
It wastes a huge amount of time having to serially search & retrieve messages
at each respective inbox. Some companies, like Pac Bell Wireless charge an
extra $3/month just to get your messages from a phone other than your own.
It's such a scam. The worst thing is when someone really wants to get in touch
with me, they leave multiple copies of the same message on all 3.

Here's the stupid idea for today, unified answering messaging through a corporate
Web portal. It automatically downloads messages from one or more answering
service messages or even a home answering machine into realaudio or MP3 format
which it can stream to a message center on any computer, sort of like an
email client except for phone messages. It can extract the relevant headers
and included them as meta information. You can 'inc' your phone messages across
a series of message boxes, see the phone tag threads, see the message headers,
easily sort, delete, swap, updated, etc. And, when you want to listen to the
message, you can pgp decrypt & pop up a QT4.0 or RealG2 client and skip ahead to just the
important parts. One of the most annoying things is someone leaving you a 10
minute message with the phone number at the end. You can set up a nice big corporate
messaging portal similar to efax or jfax and access it similar to hushmail.
Even better, you can give your portal contact information and it can figure
out what the best way to get in contact with you is with respect to time of day
or night, priority, known or unknown contactor, or a whole slew of other discriminators.

Just imagine how much easier everyone's life would be.

So, Whoreo, you want to use your webcasting skills for something better
than pirate Internet radio? ;-)

Greg

[1] http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/0719nextlink.html (free reg)