Have Web, Will Travel

For all the hype about a wireless Web, mobile users who log on find that there’s not much there, there. Today’s Web-enabled cell phone can display only the handful of sites that your wireless communications provider has partnerships with: your carrier decides what subset of the Internet you are able to see. An Oakland, CA, company called PocketThis has software that lets you choose Web content that you want to access-even while you’re on the road.

While at your desktop PC, you open a Web page-or other application window-and highlight whatever information you’ll want to see from your cell phone. Clicking a button sends the information to the PocketThis server. To view that same information remotely, you simply connect from your cell phone or PDA to the server, which can also retrieve the most up-to-date information on such things as stocks or online product prices. The PocketThis software is in market trials in the United States as well as in France and Britain-where, according to chief strategy officer Jonathan Sheena, people already think of phones as “something they can type into.”