PHCM.. a mighty contender. The company has spent four years forging deals with wireless carriers and handset makers to put its minibrowser on phone screens the size of a small Post-it note Soon, thanks to a technology Phone.com helped pioneer, those screens and browsers will surf the Web.
This up and coming technology called Wireless Application, or WAP, is needed because spotty connections, lack of bandwidth and low processing in phones makes it impossible to zap mini-web pages onto a phone screen. HTML, won't fit. With WAP, a content publisher has to rewrite its in a special markup language. That code must then travel through a WAP-compliant server before it hits the airwaves and goes to a phone. No surprise: Phone.com sells WAP servers. That's where most of its $40 million in anticipated fiscal 2000 revenue up from $13 in 1999 is expected to come from.
with 46 customers already lined up. But it is not a sure thing. No one but Phone.com is sure that WAP is the technology of the future. That's why the company has to move fast to make the wireless protocol indispensable before bandwidth gets better, phones gets smarter and WAP, as it stands today becomes obsolete.
When you have a strong foundation, the future comes from extending it, says Rossman who likens WAP to Microsoft's DOS, which became he underpinning for Windows, "We have all the elements to quickly build that foundation."
If he's right, Phone.com could become the Microsoft of the Net-enabled cell phone, with a lion's share of the client software, server software and key applications that run on the phone.
Phone.com has even cribbed a page from Microsoft's playbook. Certain wireless carriers that license Phone.com's server pay per user, even if some users don't activate WAP feaures.
But WAP has to survive first. Critics call the technology a short term solution that helps move data through today's narrowband airwaves to and from relatively low-powered phones. Increase bandwidth and make phones more powerful, though, and the need for the extra step of translating Web pages into WAP will be eliminated say critics.
Its got competition from Nokia, Ericsson and even Motorola but Phone.com with its $6.7 billion market capitalization must do what previous Net stock superstars have learned to do: flash the virtual cash. It moved quickly to buy Belfast, Northern Ireland based Apion, its biggest WAP gateway rival for 1.3 million Phone.com shares ($239 million when the deal was announced October 11). The company will also spend $10 million in the next three quarters to ready its MyPhone portal tools for commercial deployment in fiscal year 2001..
excerpts from November 15, 1999 The Industry Standard |
