Wireless Suggestions... Last week's Dispatch, What's the Best Wireless Real Estate Service? (March 16), generated many suggestions, which I'll highlight below and continue in next Thursday's Dispatch. Nobody's raving about real estate wireless applications (yet). Instead, they're excited about cutting the wire tether to their offices and communicating on the road (or the golf course!).

Michael Kuras with Sperry Van Ness in Norcross, GA: "The Treo 600 is the device for me! It is the culmination of Palm and cell phone technology to this point. Having ALL my contacts in the same device is fantastic. No more looking people up on the Palm and trying to dial the cell phone while driving."

Shawn Nelson with BlackRock: "GPS navigation is huge. I frequently travel to cities and towns unknown with a big agenda and little time. Though I roughly scout out property locations on a paper map, being able to put in an address into a GPS system (Hertz's NeverLost is my favorite) and get the shortest directions is huge. Because I don't have to pay attention to the map, it saves me time because I don't have to constantly refer to the map, and it gives me the ability to soak in the surrounding real estate. Plus, it's given me some great restaurant recommendations."

Bob Horn with Sperry Van Ness in Indianapolis, IN: "We recently switched our office to Blackberry 6230's from T-Mobile. They combine phone capabilities with the e-mail and PDA features of the earlier versions. One unit does it all. We are a very small, three-broker office, but we use remotely hosted Exchange Server service from Intermedia.net that includes the Blackberry connection. So, even though we are tiny, we have a real-time connection, 24/7, nationwide, to our office through wireless Exchange service, just like the big boys. And the best thing is that the cost for all this capability is considerably less than just our cell phone service was on a two-year-old contract from another supplier."

Tell the World... Many thanks to Rob Cain of REApplications, which announces job openings in this week's Dispatch. If you would like to make an Announcement about your product or service, send e-mail or call me at 415-485-6700.

--Peter Pike