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| Subject: | MobileLBSList: Re: Really Need WAP ? |
| Date: |
11/09/2000 08:33:12 PM |
| From: |
Anthony |
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Dear all,
The following article from TheStandard.com includes some very interesting
points from both inside and outside the WAP Forum. It makes people wonder
if we really need WAP ?
Regards,
Anthony
________________________________________
TOP STORY
~~~~~~~~~
Wireless Without WAP
Got your WAP phone yet? Maybe you don't need it if all you want to do
with your phone is receive news, stock quotes and weather updates.
Although phones using the wireless application protocol aim to deliver
a Web-like experience with browsing and interactive forms, short
messaging service, or SMS, can deliver a lot of the same content to
standard digital phones. What's more, some companies are saying they
can skip right past WAP and deliver true HTML to the phone, enabling
access to all of the content that's already out there.
SMS may be best known as the protocol that carries the text messages
that phone users in Europe and Asia have been sending to one another.
The service uses the part of the cellular network reserved for
messages to deliver chunks of text up to 160 characters. Among the
companies doing it: GiantBear of White Plains, N.Y. Under GiantBear's
plan, mobile phone customers visit a Web page, most likely the Web
site of the carrier they subscribe to, and choose the content they
want downloaded to their phone when they request it - for example,
international news headlines, basketball scores and key stock quotes.
Then, when they're out with their mobile, they only have to hit the
pound key and dial an access number. The phone retrieves their
customized package within 15 seconds.
Sounds simple and effective, right? But the company still pays its
respects to that other protocol. "WAP is probably the preferred method
of rendering Internet content," on a mobile phone, says GiantBear's
vice president of engineering, David Annan. "Nevertheless, there are
an awful lot of non-WAP phones out there, and we think there's an
awful lot of demand for Internet services among people who haven't yet
transitioned to WAP."
The WAP Forum cites IDC figures that 40 million WAP phone numbers have
been issued worldwide, the vast majority of these in Europe. But Annan
says that there are between 50 and 60 million non-WAP digital phones
in North America and another 40 million analog phones in the same
area. (GiantBear has a service for them, too: sending news and other
Internet content in prerecorded or text-to-speech translated audio.)
As for the digital text content, Annan says the popularity of SMS on
European phones has resulted in some effort by content providers
(especially news wire services) to deliver news in 160-character
chunks - the limit each SMS message can carry. Want more depth on a
news story? Tap on "more" to get the next chunk. Or, hit "next" to get
to the next story. GiantBear was founded in 1999 and took in $9
million in a funding round this spring.
When users are ready to move up to a more Web-like interaction -
browsing sites, entering form data - most will upgrade to a WAP
service. At the moment, WAP phones will only read sites coded in the
wireless markup language, or WML. But some companies are trying to
deliver HTML to the phone. Pixo, of Cupertino, Calif., is one of these
companies, offering a platform for developing applications for mobile
phones and delivering standard Web content (in HTML) or WAP content
(in WML) to a Pixo microbrowser on the phone.
Dave Rothschild, president and CEO of Pixo, says he looks to NTT
DoCoMo's success with iMode in Japan for inspiration. DoCoMo's
wireless Web service there has grown from zero to more than 13 million
subscribers since February 1999. Rothschild attributes it in part to
iMode's ability to handle Web sites in compact HTML, an easy
conversion from HTML - though there are no doubt many other factors,
like the color screens and interesting customized games and
entertainment features on iMode.
"We focus on HTML and compact HTML because we're big believers that
the market is speaking in at least one part of the world, in Japan,"
Rothschild says. "Let's try to bring part of that blueprint over to
the United States and other parts of the world." The browser handles
basic Web content, including images and animated GIFs.
"Clearly people need to create sites that are friendly to the phone
.... we just happen to believe that you should do it around Internet
standards, rather than the WAP standards," he says.
Rothschild came to Pixo from Netscape, where he was vice president of
the Netscape/AOL's client products. He cites a deal with Samsung to
offer a code-division multiple access, or CDMA, phone in North America
that uses Pixo software for browsing the HTML Web, deliverable
sometime next year. These and other next-generation phones should have
larger screens, approaching what Japanese consumers get with an iMode
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