At allNetDevices 2000, The Way Is Wireless

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September 20, 2000 (1:30 PM EDT)

By Mark Hammond,

Limitations on bandwidth and telecommunications service coverage. An absence of standards and a killer app. Devices and applications ill-suited to the demands of wireless Web. There's no shortage of culprits for why the mobile Internet has yet to ignite an inferno beneath U.S. businesses and consumers.

"This is a brand-new space with a lot of room to innovate, and the outcomes are incredibly uncertain," said Michael Karasick, chief technology officer of IBM's pervasive computing division, at this week's allNetDevices 2000, a conference on the wireless Web in San Francisco that drew several hundred attendees.

But Karasick and others in the growing wireless Web space are convinced it's only a matter of time before it hits critical mass and enjoys a meteoric rise similar to the Internet, with business and consumer applications becoming essential to commercial competition and personal productivity and entertainment.

Eventually, pervasive computing evangelists envision a transparently wired world that networks together across a high-speed Internet such devices as WAP phones, PDAs, home appliances, automobiles, television, radio, and video-on-demand. They foresee voice-driven interaction, location-aware systems, and exotic devices such as Internet browser goggles and a Web-savvy watch that would make Dick Tracy drool. They are brainstorming on innovative mobile commerce applications, such as reserving a spot at a parking lot and paying for it over a phone.

For that to happen, however, wireless software, hardware, and service providers have a great deal of work to do, they said. Karasick fingers inadequate wireless applications as a principal culprit.

"It's not that WAP stinks, it's the applications that stink," he said. "People haven't focused on making these applications really usable. Is there a killer app? I don't know. I haven't seen one yet."

Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., puts a large measure of the blame squarely on WAP phones that are maddeningly difficult to use and have screens too small to meet basic user demands.

Nielsen said that a study the company recently conducted with WAP phone users in London found the average time a user needed to locate a restaurant telephone number on the Web via a phone was two minutes and 10 seconds. Finding the score or a football game took one minute and 40 seconds.

"The ability of these devices is just miserable," Nielsen said. "They are very, very impoverished, unpleasant devices. I think WAP stands for Wrong Approach to Portability."

The VCR offers an important lesson in neglected functionality. Very few people program a VCR to record a television show simply because it's too difficult to do, and the same fate awaits this first generation of WAP phones, Nielsen said. He advocates that would-be users remain on the sidelines until the availability of the second generation of devices that combines phones and PDAs, for voice service and an ample data screen.

But with improvements in device form factors and functionality, more user-friendly applications, better bandwidth, and telecommunications coverage, players are banking that adoption of the wireless Web in the United States will enjoy the same market success that it has in Europe and Japan. And they are emboldened by projections from analyst outfits such as IDC, Framingham, Mass., which expects 1.1 billion wireless users worldwide in 2003.

Companies looking to deliver wireless content are struggling with daunting development and deployment questions. HTML Web content, for one, must be distilled into a form succinct enough for a small phone or PDA screen, and it must be translated into formats understandable by a variety of devices and platforms. The toil and trouble of such challenges has given rise to what have become known as WASPs, wireless application service providers, which offer outsourced wireless data development and delivery. Several, including AlterEgo Networks Inc., Air2Web Inc., and EveryPath Inc., were busily hawking their services at the conference.

Despite its shortcomings, more companies and consumers are finding very real benefits from the mobile Internet. For instance, Rent Tech, an apartment rental and roommate referral service in San Francisco, intends to roll out a system early next year by which apartment-hunters will be notified of new listings with a text message to a WAP phone, and possibly PDAs, said Michael Mason, Rent Tech's chief technical officer.

"It's a time-critical market, and we need to get information to our clients as quickly as possible," Mason said. "The real estate market here is so tight that properties can go instantly."

With the service, Rent Tech clients will be able to have messages dispatched to their own phones, or ones that they rent from the company. It expands on a system that now delivers messages to pagers and e-mail accounts, Mason said.

Freelance writer Mark Hammond can be reached at mark.hammond@mail.com