Building upon the momentum generated at the EDUCAUSE higher education technology conference, StudentOnline.com Inc. and KenTech Inc. today announced the launch of StudentOnline.com, the world’s first wireless community in higher education. StudentOnline develops fully integrated campus Intranets by transmitting personalized and time-sensitive information to students directly from a school’s existing administrative and faculty databases. To facilitate its goal of making information instantaneously accessible, StudentOnline partnered with KenTech Inc., a full-service Internet systems integration firm and developer of wireless Internet applications. KenTech extended the reach of StudentOnline’s services via mobile phones using tools from Phone.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: PHCM) and via personal digital assistants.
"With the tremendous help we've received from KenTech in terms of integrating StudentOnline with wireless Internet technologies, we now afford students the opportunity to obtain instant information retrieval even when away from their desktop," said StudentOnline CEO Sunil Deshmukh.
By indicating which courses and activities they're interested in, students develop a Digital Personality that allows information to be constantly delivered to a Web organizer including alerts, noting changes of important events such as: class syllabus and assignment date changes, and student group meeting schedules. Students can access individualized content feeds such as local entertainment and cultural events, regional weather, job opportunities, local merchant student discounts, local and national news, college and professional sport information, and movie & TV times from a PC terminal or a wireless Web PDA or Internet ready cellular phone In addition, professors and students are able to create subscription groups and publish custom Web pages for posting important information to be distributed to be people that have a specific interest in the course or organization.
"StudentOnline and KenTech share a vision that wireless Internet functionality will become synonymous with electronic commerce in the twenty-first century," said Ken Nelson, President of KenTech.
"StudentOnline's wireless portal site is a great aid for students to access their class and social activity information from anywhere on the campus."
Phone.com is proud to supply the wireless internet tools to Alliance program member, KenTech, to deliver a new category of community application for the cellular phone," said Kathy Simpson, Director, Developer Marketing, Phone.com, Inc, "StudentOnline is a great example of extending a community’s web presence to mobile phone customers."
As multiple schools implement the StudentOnline system, each school's Intranet is instantly linked to a nationwide inter-campus network to facilitate the open exchange of information between students and professors across the nation. Students across campuses, with common digital personalities and scholastic interests, will inherently be part of national collectives, where they will be able to share ideas, collaborate on similar class projects, and view current social events occurring at universities nationwide. Currently, these communications are supported within StudentOnline's system via threaded discussion boards, chat, and instant messaging.
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