Your databases on handheld computers - invitation to be involved

Mobile Software Ltd will shortly be releasing a database related product on the Psion Series 3 pocket computer.

Our product has been designed to allow the easy importing of data from most popular database packages, independent of application and hardware platform. We have published a simple neutral database format and expect that the majority of the popular database packages can output to this format very easily. Once we have imported a database (and compressed and indexed it, etc), our viewer product allows for fast and flexible searching on multiple criteria, together with good presentation of the results to the user.

We would like to work with a small number of you as summarised below :

1. We would like to test our product with as many databases as possible. If you would like to be involved or to know more, please email me directly.
2. If you can see an application for moving you database or subset of it onto handheld computers, in order to create a new product either for yourself, your company or your staff, or you can see the possibility of creating a new product that you would then want to sell (say, a directory on a handheld), then again, please contact me.

So, what kind of data is suitable. Well, any database that has a combination of text and 'attributes' associated with database records. By attributes, we mean fields that can have any of a number of valid values (age ranges, hobbies, industries, countries, etc).. Let's look at some examples :

1. Recruitment Database of job vacancies or candidates that have attributes associated with them such as : country, industry, education, interests, age, etc.
2. Consumer information Database of restaurants, hotels or pubs, that in addition to text based name, address, etc, have attributes such as food type, facilities, payment methods, childrens facilities, etc.
3. Business information Database of your (or fictitious!) customers, including information about, say, products used, industry, payment history (good, bad, average, etc), etc.

It is tempting to dismiss a pocket computer as not having the capacity to store all of your database(s). Firstly, remember we use compression! Secondly and probably more importantly, it is not always necessary to try to take all 1 million database records to a pocket computer! The user might only want to ever access 5 or 10 or even 20 thousand.

If you are interested in learning more, or joining this test, please email me, giving me a summary of you, your background & employment, and your specific application.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards

Stuart Ballan
Managing Director
Mobile Software Ltd

Tel/fax 0181-906-0002
Email : sballan_at_cix.compulink.co.uk Received on Tue Jul 04 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST