Honk if Your Car Gets Motorola’s New Pager
Doctors were the first to become hip to pagers. Then came teens. Now Motorola Corp. has created a device to let cars get in on the act.
CreataLink, a pager installed in vehicles, helps you find your car if you’ve forgotten where it’s parked. The pager will also lock the car and start it from afar. And if the car is stolen, a quick page will cut the engine.
“If you’re locked out, you can take seconds to change that,” said Allan Spiro, marketing manager for Motorola’s paging systems group in Boynton Beach, Fla.
The device, which is installed in the dashboard or engine compartment, is similar to remote car starters but has more features and greater range.
The paging system can be used from anywhere in the country. Remote starters usually have a range of no more than 50 feet and can be blocked by buildings or other objects.
CreataLink gives a customer a toll-free pager number in which to enter a code to identify the vehicle. The customer then enters another code to activate functions in the vehicle, from unlocking the door to turning on the lights and air-conditioning to starting or killing the engine.
For those who’ve forgotten where their car is, the pager will set off the car’s horn and flash its lights.
The pager costs $100, plus $25 for unlimited paging for a year. There is a $50 charge to install the equipment in the vehicle.
The device is likely to be shipped to car alarm companies within six weeks, Spiro said.
Analysts say Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola is being forced to look at other uses for pagers because of the advent of digital cellular phones, which combine paging and telephone functions.
“Paging as we know it has pretty much come to the end of the line as a person-to-person messaging technology,” said Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research Co. “Something like [CreataLink] is exactly where the paging industry has to go--focusing more on remote-control applications,” he said. “The potential market there is probably in the billions of dollars.”
