Personal data interchange - technologies and protocols to make exchange of business card and calendar-event data more useful and transparent among hand-held and desktop computing platforms - includes related article on telephone intrusions into private lives

RELease 1.0, Sept 23, 1993 by Jerry Michalski

The top half of the chart is rife with opportunities for third parties to create unique modules that enhance a user's experience with any devices that can hold or process PDI information. How about a "pack my briefcase" command that instructs your PIM to download to your cellular phone the 50 names and numbers you've dialed most recently via an infrared transceiver attached to your pc's serial port and a similar part built into your next phone? Their value (and everyone else's devices) will be higher if all parties agree to simple PDI formats.

Social change: a return to civility

In the 1800's and early 1900's, people customarily presented calling cards when they visited a house or business. They used the calling cards to seek admission to someone's presence. The telephone system, which has no such mechanism, dramatically changed that protocol (along with major demographic changes that reduced the number of intermediaries -- butlers and maids). Nowadays, people Just call and interrupt (and some of us have secretaries).

The effects on our private lives are extreme, yet subtle. You probably have a telephone on your night table, and you don't think much about it. It can ring any time of day or night, and you have no way of knowing who is on the other end of the line. Yet you do this, possibly in the hope that the caller will be someone you would like to talk to or in the dread that it will be a family emergency. But autodialers and other junk callers can disturb your peace at any time. To avoid them, you have to take active steps such as unlisting your number, turning your phone's ringer off (and remembering to turn it on again!) or screening calls with your answering machine. These are the kinds of problems that PDI and filters can solve eventually.

Caller ID is an early form of the solution, but it offers too little information, too late. It provides only the inbound number, which isn't very useful: An application still has to match it to a name. Most calls don't arrive with Caller ID information, anyway, and probably never will: Caller ID can't identify callers using PBXes, or those calling from phones other than their own, or those in areas served by older switches, even if their state has permitted (and their telco has delivered) the service. Regulation by state PUGs rather than the FCC has also hurt Caller ID. Finally, it only works within the so-called advanced intelligent (wired phone) network. It's not implemented in cellular, and it doesn't translate to the e-mail world, which uses completely different addressing. Several entrepreneurs are suggesting new methods that are completely independent and above the phone network (see. eCard, page 11).

(1) Discussion of similar needs motivated the Release 1.0 issues on unified messaging (12-92 and 1-93) and directory services (4-93), which were about requisite infrastructure; PDI's focus is on the data we'd like to exchange.

(2) Cellular and cordless phones have microcontrollers with embedded code, DuE not an OS. These devices can already hold names and numbers, and it isn't too expensive to add an infrared port (see page 21).