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Slow data is fine! -Sirenic launches mobile email client

Most systems which give you mobile email give you what the corporation decides is good for you; but you can give the user the power, says newcomer Sirenic - as long as you understand how to summarise data.

Sirenic has launched a mobile email and web-crawling service with a difference: it can work on a mobile phone, or on an ordinary phone, or on a pocket computer, even over the slowest data links - thanks to technology which does away with "synchronising" problems.

Where normal PDAs attempt to download all the data you need from your home base into your pocket device, Sirenic's servers aim to cope with the slowest links - spoken voice - as powerfully as with full broadband.

The company has launched with support from three partners: Teleca Solutions, 1 Source Inc, and Redtower, who will be promoting and installing Sirenic software in corporations who have mobile workers.

But the difference is that the workers themselves will decide what data they are interested in. The system "learns" what information is important to the user: whose emails are most likely to be of interest, which web sites are most critical, and which phone messages are from the highest priority callers.

"It's based on a profile held on the Sirenic server at the enterprise - behind the office firewall," said chief technology officer Nic Sheard "and the learning can be very quick. If you spend a long time on any activity, that gives it a higher priority than something you do very briefly; but if you do something often, it goes above things that took you a long time, but only once. And you can change your profile at any time."

Sirenic makes a demo available to any drop-by web surfers who visit their Web page which gives an idea of how email can be easily handled over an ordinary airport payphone or mobile, as well as over WAP and GPRS links. High speed data isn't needed, the company says; and security becomes less of an issue with the data remaining on the office servers, not being transmitted in full to the hand-held device.

"We make relevance the main key feature," said Sheard, "with it, we think content reliability is important, and ease of navigation. The corporate IT department has the ability to 'push' important data to the user, but the user decides on priorities. You can even set this up so that when a favourite Web site updates, you get a verbal summary of the changes."

The company will be exhibiting at the forthcoming 3GSM show in Cannes from 19th Feb.