BellSouth offers new wireless service

BellSouth began offering business customers a new wireless service this week, a result of a joint marketing agreement with wireless Internet services firm Air2Web. The service allows a company to give its employees, customers and partners access to sales, inventory, e-mail and other business information from Web-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants. BellSouth will host the Air2Web application at its data center in Atlanta and market the service to its business customers as part of a revenue-sharing agreement. BellSouth holds a nearly 10 percent stake in the wireless start-up. The Air2Web application pulls data from companies' back-office order management and customer service systems using standard Internet protocols and renders the information for presentation on various wireless devices. BellSouth has yet to set standard pricing for the service, but several Air2Web customers, including United Parcel Service and The Weather Channel, are already planning to use BellSouth's hosting centers to house and manage the service.