Wednesday, September 1, 1999

Personal Digital Assistant Message Boards

WINDOWS CE POWER SITE OF THE MONTH

By Denise Amrich

This month's Windows CE Power Site of the Month is the brand-spanking-new PDAMB.com, shown in Figure A. PDAMB stands for Personal Digital Assistant Message Boards.

FIGURE A

PDAMB.com is here! (click for larger image)

Launched on August 22, 1999, PDAMB.com is now open to the public. The folks at PDAMB.com invite you to use their resource to find the answers to any Windows CE or Palm OS related question. PDAMB has five PDA Message Boards on which you can post, reply, and view messages. Their press release indicates that they want to be known as "The Ultimate PDA Support Center".

Normally, since we offer the PowerBoards as a part of our publications strategy, it wouldn't be good "hard-nosed" business strategy to help a "competitor" gain publicity. After all, although the PowerBoards for Windows CE Power are not up yet (we usually don't launch the PowerBoards for a given publication until the publication has been around for a certain number of months), all the other ZATZ PowerBoards are extremely active and popular. But the folks at PDAMB are doing a nice job, providing message boards for all handhelds in one place. This struck the editorial staff at Windows CE Power as pretty cool. Since we also publish PalmPower (a publication about Palm Computing's Palm devices) we notice a lot of divisiveness and disharmony among folks who love their particular platform so much that it practically becomes a religion! But, in the spirit of Rodney King's, "Why can't we all just get along?", we decided a site that kept everyone together was worthy of notice.

When it comes to online communities, there's a critical mass factor at work. If you don't get enough readers, fast enough, your utopian online community can quickly become a ghost town. PDAMB.com is a new, fresh opportunity to get everyone talking. Let's try to help these folks reach critical mass, and us folks at ZATZ to attain even more good karma points!

Be sure to visit http://www.PDAMB.com and help them get the ball rolling.

Denise Amrich is the Managing Editor for Windows CE Power Magazine (at http://www.windowscepower.com), PalmPower (at http://www.palmpower.com), and DominoPower (at http://www.dominopower.com). She can be reached via email at denise@windowscepower.com.