Phone.com Goes Beyond WAP
By Brad Smith
SAN FRANCISCO—A year ago Phone.com was a one-horse carriage pulled by a technology called the Wireless Application
Protocol. Now, with acquisitions and new applications and services, WAP has become less critical to the
little-company-that-could.
Even though WAP is only one of a stable of horses for Phone.com, however, it was evident at its Unwired Universe 2000
conference (see related story, Page 1) last week that the wireless Internet still is the Redwood City, Calif., company’s future.
Indeed, Phone.com sees itself as the Cisco Systems of the mobile Web. The company has a start in the right direction, since CEO
Alain Rossmann envisioned WAP nearly a decade ago.
Based on the company’s performance over the last year, that goal might not be far-fetched, but there still are a lot of “ifs” in its
future. The biggest question: No one knows how consumers are going to accept the wireless Internet, let alone what they want
from it.
During last week’s conference, Phone.com made several announcements, further delineating the path it has set itself on. The
conference was attended by about 1,500 mobile Web heads, which the company says made it the largest wireless Internet
conference yet.
Several of the announcements involved deals to develop location-based applications, including partnerships with Amazon .com,
DoubleClick, In-Fusio and Go2Systems. Technology deals for location applications were struck with SignalSoft Corp. and
France’s Webraska.
Phone.com, with Japanese handset manufacturer Hitachi Ltd., also showed off its next-generation color-enabled microbrowser.
And it announced membership in a new coalition called IMUnified to establish interoperable instant messaging services. Among
the group’s other members are AT&T, MSN, Prodigy, Tribal Voice and Yahoo!
During the past year, since Phone.com had a successful initial public offering, the company has made a series of seven
acquisitions that have given it expertise beyond the WAP world. These include the $850 million purchase of Onebox.com for its
unified messaging, $285 million for @motion Inc. and its voice recognition expertise, and $500 million for Paragon Software for its
synchronization technology. Phone.com also launched its wireless portal service called MyPhone.
Ben Linder, Phone.com’s effervescent marketing vice president, admits the company once was one-dimensional but says it has an
ever-expanding future, limited only by the unknown constraints of Internet protocol networks. He now talks about the company as
being “communications-centric” and providing a platform for a broad range of IP-based solutions yet to be uncovered.
It’s worth noting that Linder is no longer talking just about wireless. He sees his company playing in the converged
communications space and points to what British Telecom already is doing with Phone.com technology to integrate services
across wireline, wireless and Internet platforms.
WAP still plays a role in Phone.com’s future, but Linder says it is at the surface above the IP backbone. He likens Phone.com’s
role in WAP much like Cisco’s role with TCP/IP–it is a vital and essential open standard on which much of the company’s other
products and services are based.
“We believe in the power of WAP,” Linder says, “but we recognize there is a world of devices [that can use its services] that
aren’t WAP and may not even be mobile.”
Ross Bott, the company’s COO, says Phone.com’s revenues have primarily come from the sales of its WAP servers. But he says
applications and services revenue likely will equal the server side in a year. Most of these will be focused on integrated messaging.
A lot has changed about Phone.com since its IPO on June 11, 1999. Employees have grown from 125 to 900; Rossmann predicts
2,000 employees in another year. There are offices not only in the United States but Britain, Japan, Ireland and elsewhere. The
number of carriers using its software now stands at 77, up from 58 just three months ago. And handsets shipped with the
Phone.com microbrowser number 12 million in the past year.
Linder says acquisitions will be an important part of Phone.com’s growth strategy in the future. With the kind of cash it’s
generating, that could mean a lot more horses pulling the wagon. |
