WAP to help reduce distraction at seminars and elsewhere

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): You are sitting in the seminar room and listening intensely to the speaker. Suddenly you hear a piercing, continuous screech from a cellular phone nearby. The guy next to you frantically scrambles to find the offending gadget in his pocket and fumbles for the Talk button to kill the noise. How do you find the familiar episode?

I have to admit, I find it quite amusing. And it helps to remind me if I haven't switched off the ringer on my own cellular phone. Normally I will take it out from my pocket and do so right away. So far, the disturbance is still tolerable.

But, when the guy starts talking on his phone, I begin to feel a rage starting to brew inside me. He's obviously too lazy to stand up and walk out of the room. Instead, he chooses to continue disturbing me with his voice. I have had this experience time and time again, and I cannot help feeling annoyed by the total disregard of my desire to concentrate on the speaker. I come into this seminar room to learn, and I believe it's my basic right not to be disturbed by his conversation. Besides, it also shows disrespect to the speaker.

Unfortunately, inconsiderate people are everywhere. As Steward Alsop of Fortune writes, these boors are all around us -- even during church services! If the Short Message System (SMS) were free here, it would have gained popularity and would somewhat help reduce the need for voice communication.

Unfortunately, unlike in the Philippines, SMS is not entirely free here. I remember how my friend Veronica C. Silva of I.T. Matters, the Philippines, was able to receive messages without having to disturb anybody around her when we were sitting at a roundtable discussion. What a very thoughtful way of communicating.

There is still another hope, and it is WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). You must have read about it a lot in this newspaper in the last year or so. Among other things, WAP will enable us to receive e-mail on cellular phones. The service is still under construction, but, as usual, it will become available before we know it.

The birth of WAP

Why is e-mail is considered a killer application for the Internet? Because, among other things, it enables us to communicate without having to rudely intrude into the life of the recipient and, especially, the people around him. It gives us the means to communicate efficiently and still have control over when we choose to receive the message. This is very different from the telephone, which forces us to stop doing what we are doing to pick it up and talk with the caller.

Another emerging service called Unified Messaging Service will also help us reduce the need for voice communications further. With UMS, no matter how people try to reach us -- by voice, by fax, by e-mail, their message can reach us in written form, and WAP will be the vehicle.

Communication is not the only thing that WAP supports. You can subscribe to a plethora of other services. The classic example is that you can get the most up-to-date stock prices on your cellular phone. A more innovative service, for example, will enable you to locate the closest restaurant that still has its time-honored Ayam Pop available at nine in the evening.

Who started the WAP initiative? The three leaders in the cellular phone industry -- Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia -- got together with a company called Unwired Planet to start it all in June 1997. Then the WAP Forum was founded in December 1997. The objective was to enable the user of small handheld devices such as cellphones, pagers, PDAs and notebooks to take advantage of the World Wide Web and the Internet. Understandably the WAP Forum has also been working closely with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

It was by no means an easy task. First, the screens of wireless terminals are so tiny that they cannot use the ordinary graphical user interface that we have on PCs today. Besides, engineers have had to deal with a less powerful processor, less memory, narrower bandwidth and different types of input device (keypad, voice command, stylus, etc.). More challenging is the fact there are different network and cellular phones standards -- GSM and CDMA are just two of them. The standard should work across all existing network types.

Corporate WAP

As employees are getting more mobile than ever, being able to keep in touch with them is becoming a top priority. The UMS will enable anyone to send message to the field force, for example. WAP will be an ideal solution, as it also works with PDAs and even notebooks in addition to the cellphones.

Today, large companies have a choice of vendors that they feel comfortable working with as they build their WAP infrastructure. HP, for example, teamed up with Nokia and ISIS International in offering their WAP solution for enterprises as well as the companies that plan to provide WAP services.

The HP-Nokia-ISIS solution, which they presented during a seminar series in Jakarta last month, consists of an HP 9000 L- Class server or Netserver LPr that has already been optimized for WAP and therefore is called WAPserv. The operating system can be Windows NT or HP-UX. Nokia's contribution is WAP Server software. ISIS International provides the wireless solutions based on these HP-Nokia bundles.

WAP services can also be provided commercially by content providers, and the contents will be delivered using Wireless Markup Language, or WML. It is here that the business potential is tremendous.

While we may be surprised to learn that Nokia also develops software in addition to making cellphones, it is also a surprise to know that HP, the printer and PC maker, has also been active in WAP technology. In March, for example, the company completed the implementation of a direct stock trading system using WAP technology with the New Zealand Stock Exchange. The facility was said to be the first in the Asia Pacific. In addition, HP has also set up facilities for developing and testing new value-added applications based on wireless Internet technologies in China, Finland, Singapore and Thailand. They call these facilities Mobile E-services Bazaar.

HP, Nokia and ISIS are certainly not the only players in this emerging technology and the services that it enables. One thing is clear, though, WAP is coming. If you'd like to see a demo, here's a URL that my friend Ronnie Dumaguin from Pratesis recommended to me just last week: www.wap.com.sg.

Let's hope that, when WAP arrives, at least we can have fewer of those inconsiderate cellular phone users that have been rudely distracting us from the speaker's voice in seminars. (zatni@cbn.net.id)