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Orange Delays Wildfire Closure After Customer Pressure
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LONDON -(Dow Jones)- Orange, the mobile telecommunications arm of France Telecom SA (FTE), Friday said it has delayed the closure of its Wildfire voice-activated personal assistant service until July 1 in response to customer pressure.
The company will also foot the bill to migrate some aggrieved Wildfire users to new software, at a cost of GBP150 a user.
Orange bought Wildfire Communications for $142 million in April 2000. Wildfire allows users to make calls and take messages without needing to dial numbers. The service is used by visually-impaired people, as well as other customers who like the voice activation.
But Orange has decided to discontinue the service after customer dwindled to around 10,000 over the past 18 months. Orange had originally planned to cut off the service at the end of May.
But a vociferous campaign against the closure seems to have given Wildfire a stay of execution. A Web site designed to stop Orange shutting Wildfire down has been inundated with angry messages from users outraged that Orange has taken this decision. The site particularly highlights the usefulness of the voice-activated service for visually-impaired customers.
Some users have urged other Wildfire customers to demand Orange refund the GBP10 activation fee many paid to access the service, adding further cost to Orange. However, over the past 18 months, Orange has waived the activation fee.
An Orange spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires that it has extended the closure deadline to provide customers with a more reasonable timeframe in which to migrate to standard Orange voice mail services.
It added that for visually-impaired users, as well as selected other users, Orange will cover the GBP150 cost Wildfire customers will incur to download 'Talks' software which adds speech-activation capabilities to a normal handset. Talks is developed by U.S. company ScanSoft Inc. (SSFT).
The spokesman added that Orange will also upgrade those users' handsets that don't support Talks. He added that feedback from users that have migrated to Talks from Wildfire has been initially positive.
Nevertheless, he said the decision to close Wildfire won't change, despite the stay of execution.
Company Web site: Http://www.orange.com; Http://croftsfamily.com/
-By Nic Fildes, Dow Jones Newswires; 44-20-7842-9264; nicolas.fildes@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires"
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