The Association of Public Safety Communications Officials-International conference served as a forum for several announcements of company partnerships in 2001. Sierra Wireless and Wirelessready Alliance members, Padcom, Panasonic and AT&T Wireless, announced that they would offer a bundled wireless data product for law enforcement officials and the public safety industry. Dictaphone and the Genesis Group also announced that they were partnering to provide voice recording and retrieval capabilities for users of Motorola Smartzone, Smartnet and other trunked radio systems.

Under terms of the Dictaphone-Genesis Group agreement, Genesis has integrated Dictaphone’s Freedom digital recording system with its Genwatch and GenSZAI trunked radio system management and billing products.

The technology alliance will combine Genesis’ ability to reconstruct calls for time billing purposes according to radio ID numbers with the voice recording technology of Dictaphone’s Freedom system.

“By joining forces with Genesis, we’ll be able to extend the powerful search capabilities of the Freedom recording systems to trunked radio conversations on Motorola systems,” said Art Schoeller, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances for Dictaphone’s Communications Recording Systems group.

The Wirelessready alliance product will allow law enforcement officials to intelligently switch between wide-area networks and local-area networks without dropping their connections, providing them with access to critical data anywhere, anytime. Wirelessready Alliance members demonstrated the service offering at their booths at APCO.

The new bundled “solution” will include Padcom’s Totalroam Ellipse WLAN/CDPD seamless switching applications, a wireless LAN card, the Sierra Wireless Aircard 300 wireless network card, an always-on wireless WAN interface card, Panasonic’s Toughbook CF-27 and AT&T’s wireless network service. The total service creates a mobile office with high-speed access to large file downloads such as reports and mug shots that can be delivered through LAN access while retaining ubiquitous WAN coverage and connectivity for low bandwidth applications.