A group of 11 paging companies has approved a broadcast standard that will enable customers to choose the information they wish to receive from the Web, such as stock quotes or news headlines, and have it beamed directly to their pagers.

Prior to this agreement, paging customers could receive information from the Web, but were limited to the set menu offered by their providers. “You could have any news you wanted as long as it was the news we were offering,” says the CEO of SkyTel Communications, one of the companies endorsing the new standard. Other companies supporting the standard include AirTouch Communications, Ameritech, Metrocall Inc., and Preferred Networks Inc.

http://www.skytel.com/

((c) WSJ)