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Microcap & Penny Stocks : The Hartcourt Companies, Inc. (HRCT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: funincolo who wrote (1388)	11/7/2000 9:08:17 AM
From: funincolo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2413

For billions of people around the world, the Web remains a mystery. And with cellular penetration spreading far faster than Internet access, the preference is obvious. Now, many new phone owners are getting Internet access without even knowing it. According to Scott Goldman, chief executive of the standards-setting WAP Forum, WAP (wireless application protocol) will be the first wired experience for many people in developing nations. "This is the way that people will get to the Internet from China. They are not going to know about PCs and Web cafes and all this," he said. "The Net, which they won't know is the Internet . . . is going to come to them from their wireless phones." And with 3G and the next generation of mobile applications at least two to three years away, WAP could remain the standard platform for Internet access in much of the developing world. While its potential reach is clearly appealing to developers, many are still scratching their heads and wondering how they might earn money from it. "There is no question that the potential for making money is there. Now it is a question of finding the right business model," Mr Goldman said. For developers, the field is wide open, with telecom carriers, content and applications-services firms and manufacturers lining up to invest. For carriers and content providers, the profit potential is a little hazier. Carriers dislike their subscribers using competitors' applications, but they have also found that the "walled garden" approach is counter productive. Restricting subscriber access to a handful of paying content and commerce firms results in subscribers turning their backs on the services. Advertising, much hyped for its targeting precision, has been criticised as potentially intrusive. "With a mobile phone, not only do you know who has got it, but you know where they are. And the two of those things together make for a very compelling reason to purchase advertising on the phones," Mr Goldman said. But he admitted the platform has not been a winner for advertisers. "To be candid about it, I don't think that advertising is really on the radar screen for a lot of operators or developers who are looking at WAP," he said. "I think it is a relatively small issue in the overall scope of what the business models are." While many subscribers are nervous about the prospect of shopping via a wireless device, Mr Goldman said the latest WAP standards should ease nagging security doubts. "WAP was built to be secure right from the very start," he said. "But if you look at it metaphorically, there was about a one-inch hole in a hundred-foot wall of security that had the potential to be breached. We have plugged that one inch hole by providing full end-to-end encryption." In theory, the added safety should encourage users to begin phone shopping. But there has been little evidence of that happening as mobile operators are loath to disclose their figures. "There is evidence that mobile commerce is becoming successful because of all the services that we are seeing," said Mr Goldman, citing share trading, ticket booking, toll payments, gambling and financial services. "Developers are building content and applications for mobile commerce because they see the potential in it and they see the success of other applications." Despite the applications now available, critics have frequently dismissed WAP as a second-rate Internet application impossible to use on the average mobile phone. Mr Goldman agreed that most WAP phone displays were too small and their keypads a hindrance to data input. However, he predicted the latest generation of mobile phones would be superseded by multi-function devices such as the Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry 957, which has a large screen and a miniature "qwerty" keyboard. "It is a different kind of experience. It is not supposed to be a parallel Web, or the Internet on your phone . . . it is designed on a transactional basis to deliver information to you, when you need it, on a personalised, localised basis," he said. "There is always going to be a market for different devices. Not everybody is going to want to browse the Internet from a PC . . . And that is what WAP is all about. It is providing access to Internet-based information from the device that 400 million people around the world have already said they want to carry."