Hoping to build an internet start-up page for mobile professionals, Lucent Technologies Inc has licensed Custom Netcenter from the Netscape subsidiary of America Online Inc. Lucent’s portal, named Zingo, is designed to serve as a laboratory for testing Lucent and third party applications for wireless phones and hand-held personal digital assistants. Spyglass Prism technology will be used to translate HTML into voice extensible markup language (VXML) for interactive voice response systems, or into Wireless Markup Language (WML) for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)-enabled phones. With the voice-controlled interface, mobile customers can have messages and information read to them and can use their phone to customize Zingo features and browse the web. Future releases will offer services based on the user’s location. A beta of Zingo should be available for demonstration purposes at the Supercomm 99 show in Atlanta, Georgia, June 7-10 1999.
