Downtown company is bringing back the pager

By Dick Hughes  

MARCH 24, 2011 11:40 a.m. (0)

Zipit Wireless, a small Greenville company, and Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless provider, are teaming up to bring new life to pagers with the first significant advancement in that messaging or “beeper” system in 40 years.

The two companies see a ripe market, particularly in hospitals, where an advanced system of paging makes more sense for communication than the cell phones that turned the once ubiquitous pager into a dinosaur.

“We have high expectations,” said Frank Greer, 48, who founded Zipit with Ralph Heredia, 46.  “If we did it on our own, it would be a completely different ball game.”

Zipit, with offices on North Main Street, has 15 employees, though that number is expected to grow if the pager is successful.

Under the deal, Verizon pays Zipit for the pager, which is made in China, and the messaging infrastructure. Verizon sells to businesses.  It is not a retail item.

The device, Zipit Now, addresses the shortcomings of traditional pagers by allowing two-way communication, infrastructure management through a Web portal, memory storage and the ability to operate seamlessly between local Wi-Fi networks in buildings and Verizon’s 3G network outside.

“Inside the building, the device uses Wi-Fi and when you walk it outside the building it switches to the Verizon paging network so that gives it full nationwide coverage,” Heredia said.

The technology comes out of an inexpensive device Heredia developed to allow for messaging by multiple people through the Wi-Fi network of one computer.  It was marketed for pre-teens and teenagers to connect on e-mail.

Z1 came on the market in 2004 and a second generation, Z2, was introduced in 2007.

Initially, they were successful, but it didn’t last long as kids moved on, leaving e-mail behind for Facebook and other social media on their cell phones.

“We’re still shipping those products, mostly to younger kids, but it is not a key business for us,” Greer said.

The targeted market for the new pager is hospitals. Half of the 5 million traditional pagers still in use are in health care, but Greer and Heredia and their Verizon partners think there is untapped potential wherever low-cost messaging is needed.

According to the American Hospital Association, there are 5,800 hospitals in the United States, and Greer and Heredia say there are 2,000-2,500 of the antiquated pagers on average in each one.  They found one with 20,000.  That, said Greer, “adds up pretty quickly.”

Before development of the Zipit pager began, Heredia joined a Verizon wireless team in a visit to a Texas hospital to understand why and how they use pagers and the challenges and problems they face.

Hospitals like pagers for several reasons.  They are cheap.  Verizon came up with a monthly plan of $15 for the Zipit-Verizon pager, including service and the device. The basic fee for a cell phone is $35 and climbs to around $60-70 with data and message service.

Also, pagers are based on a different frequency, allowing them to work where cell phones don’t, like basements. And hospitals need to send messages to many devices at once.

When Heredia developed Zipit 1, he and Greer were at Aeronix Corp., a small electronics and engineering company based in Melbourne, Fla.   They spun Zipit off as a separate company in 2007. Greer became president and chief executive officer and Heredia vice president of business development.

At the time, they envisioned using Zipit technology for other uses but not as a pager.  In 2009, the created a digital picture frame for Hewlett Packard.

The idea for a modern pager came out of a dinner Heredia had in 2008 with a Verizon executive in New York.  Heredia showed him the Zipit 2, which had been introduced six months earlier.

Patented in 1949, the first beepers were used in Jewish Hospital in New York in 1950.  The FCC approved them for consumer use in 1958, and they took off for business use and later with the Motorola Pageboy for personal use.  By 1994 there were 61 million pagers in use.

Motorola coined the name pager. The company stopped making pagers in 2002.