I truly believe that by using this idle time, we dramatically improve people's productivity and, as a result of that, we're giving them more time for fun and play and they can be with their families when they come home from work.

DG: That's something everyone can appreciate.

ML: Another interesting example is an observation regarding the effectiveness of our internal communication. Before we had this wireless access to the Internet, people were so busy they tended not to read announcements, they missed email messages and then they were surprised when we introduced a new service. With this wireless access to the information, because of this better idle time utilization, people started reading more about what's happening in the company because it's available to them now wirelessly and it's truly in the "palm of their hands" right now. We noticed that people are actually more aware of what's happening in the company than prior to the implementation of this mobile portal.

DG: That does sound very interesting. Can you tell us more about the CIO-100 award?

ML: This year's CIO-100 award was really focused on innovation. They tried to recognize 100 companies for innovation and delivering either services or systems. Our specific award was focused on our innovative use of mobile and wireless technology because we're the first company that's really developed and used mobile and wireless devices in this way. We certainly were incredibly honored to receive this award. We've been in great company, actually. We received this award alongside such innovators as Charles Schwab, FedEx, and IBM and I certainly was very proud to be there among those very formidable companies that are known for their innovation.

DG: Although all this is really exciting, what are the real benefits? What is the real ROI (Return on Investment) that other companies will get as a result of implementing solutions similar to yours?

ML: Though this solution is very new--we started implementation in December 2000 and we've been rolling out additional components and additional functionality since then--we were able to do a case study regarding the benefits of wireless email at Palm.

This is just a small component of our program, but as a result of the study, we determined that we gained (these are very conservative estimates) between six and ten percent productivity per user. I think this is, again, a very interesting story and if you look at the productivity gains and you calculate the savings, the cost of the solution really pales in comparison with the benefits you can gain.

But then, of course, the strength of the solution is that wireless email is just one of the components. The architectural framework that we put in place here allows us to very easily add components on top of what we've already delivered. So if you look at email as just being one component, in addition to that we delivered access to our enterprise applications and access to our decision support tools, when you take this initial six to ten percent, this is just a beginning.