"Pagers? Who uses them?"
Ralph Heredia, CEO of handheld firm ZipIt, had a pretty common view when he got a call from Verizon Wireless last year asking him to develop a next-generation beeper. After all, beepers are one of the iconic technologies of the 1990s. For most people today, they're long gone.
But it turns out there are a few critical industries still using pagers. Doctors, for instance: there are more than 5 million pagers still in use in the U.S., and an average hospital might have 5,000 pagers for its staff, Heredia said. Electric utilities have thousands of pagers for their linemen and meter readers. Pagers are cheap, with service plans around $10/month; they're durable, easy to use for group messaging, and they work well within buildings because they sometimes operate on a ridiculously low radio frequency.
"To try to replace that with traditional handsets or smartphones, they can't afford it. They can't afford to swap out something they're paying $8-10 a month for," Heredia said.
Verizon came to ZipIt because the company's previous devices were a lot like pagers. ZipIt makes little Wi-Fi handhelds that let kids IM within their house without using a computer. Boil that down a bit, and you have a pager. The imposingly named new Enterprise Critical Messaging Solution switches seamlessly between the Verizon 3G network and various in-building, Wi-Fi access points to let doctors and other professionals keep receiving pages wherever they are.
The ZipIt Now device, which replaces pagers, is a little more expensive than a pager at $149.99 with a $15 per month service plan, but it offers a lot of things pagers don't. The system has flexible group messaging (doctors nowadays have to carry multiple pagers if they're in multiple groups), guaranteed delivery, remote management, remote data transfer and wiping, the ability to turn off cellular data in sensitive areas, and all the stuff that has made BlackBerrys so popular in businesses. It's just a lot less expensive than a BlackBerry.
Some features are particularly pager-specific - for instance, high-priority messages turn the screen red and lock the device until they're answered, while medium-priority messages show up in yellow, and low-priority notes in black.
"You can see the type of message based on the color of the message," Heredia said.
The rugged device does have one down side: based on modern technology, its battery life isn't as good as a traditional pager. Pagers can live for a month on a pair of AA batteries. This gadget needs to be recharged every few days, like a phone.
You're not going to find ZipIt's ECMS being sold at Beeper King downtown. ECMS requires a business installation, although management is all in the cloud. Messages transfer using a proprietary data protocol, not SMS, because ECMS needs to guarantee prompt delivery.
Heredia knows that this isn't going to win executives away from their iPhones. But as long as big institutions have limited budgets and need to send messages to many people, pagers may still have a place.
"It's cost effective, and it's designed for critical messaging," he said.