All phones are created equal, but some are more equal than others. And in parts of the world like Japan, and particularly Europe, WAP-enabled mobile phones are rapidly ushering in the next generation of online commerce: "m-commerce" or mobile-commerce.
"The wireless world is a parallel universe almost as large as the Net, and the two are beginning a fascinating convergence," said Swapnil Shah, director of Inktomi Europe, a search engine and caching solutions company, at the recent Internet Shopping Summit in Amsterdam hosted by research group Jupiter Communications.
WAP brings Web content to handsets independent of the various network layers and device characteristics.
Three sets of devices are emerging as WAP platforms: mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants like PalmPilot), and other dedicated devices (such as digital cameras and Walkman radios).
With respect to devices and consumer behaviour, m-commerce is an entirely different paradigm, said Shah. The emphasis will be more on location-specific and activity-specific products and services.
Inktomi is offering "shopping dialtone" solutions via WAP directory and catalogue services for mobile phone users, so that online commerce is accessible irrespective of the platform used, Shah said.
According to various market forecasts, between 50 to 70 per cent of Internet users worldwide will be accessing the Net via mobile devices in the year 2003; the number of WAP-enabled devices would then range from 150 to 350 million units. Advertisements in the form of text links, microbanners and audio jingles on mobile networks are expected to cross the $1 billion mark within two years.
Europe, being more standards-focused, is poised to reap the benefits of m-commerce and will be the main market for WAP (as opposed to proprietary platforms), according to most analysts. Fifty per cent of Europeans are expected to have mobiles by 2003.
"M-commerce can spur impulse buying for items like music - you can buy an album almost as soon as you hear it on radio," said Chris Codington, vice president at online music seller Boxman.com.
News services such as Britain's Independent Television News (ITN) and Reuters were amongst the first to jump in to exploit the possibilities of WAP. The BBC is also providing news to mobile networks.
In Ireland, many of the existing news service vendors, including The Irish Times new media division, ireland.com, are to launch WAP services shortly. Both Eircom and ESAT have a number of services in place already.
Yahoo! UK & Ireland has announced a mobile Internet content service, with instant access to mail, finance, news and other information for mobile users. Yahoo! has also launched a directory of WAP resources which can be accessed via mobile devices. Hewlett-Packard has launched a Mobile Services Bazaar (http:// www.mobile-bazaar.com), targeted at service providers and developers for possible mobile-related initiatives.
The conference in Amsterdam was told that it was important that commerce companies recognise m-commerce as a completely unique service. "Cellphone users are more impatient than Internet users.
The paradigm here is not surfing; all services for the mass market have to be pitched at users in such a seamless way that they need not even be aware that they are accessing the Net," said Cindy Dahm, European director for Phone.com, a company which specialises in WAP gateways, microbrowsers, and WML (Wireless Markup Language) content tools.
Phone.com has already rolled out book and music ordering via WAP for Amazon in the US and UK.
"We are also learning that consumers can adopt these services in unexpected ways in different markets around the world. For instance, the most innovative users of our services in Japan are actually teenage girls, who use messaging services heavily," said Dahm.
Applications well suited for the WAP domain include B2B (business-to-business) services (mobile Intranet access, roaming e-mail services), travel information (for buses and airlines), finance (timecritical banking and stock trades), e-commerce (betting, auctions), and community (chat, e-postcards), according to Johan Montelius, WAP specialist at New York-based research firm Jupiter Communications.
Challenges remain in the limited size of handset screens, limited bandwidth, restricted cursor movement, smaller keypad options, incompatibility of many gateways, small battery life in handheld devices, difficulties in upgrading handsets to newer versions of WAP, high traffic latencies, and ensuring "fair play" by network operators who control WAP gateways. New sets of privacy issues also arise as mobile operators will have unprecedented access to user position information.
Still, many forecasters are enthusiastic about the performance of m-commerce since airtime fees are expected to drop further, more WAP gateways will become available, and content and commerce services from independent players will proliferate.
In fact, some countries in Europe such as Spain and Italy are expected to largely leapfrog the PC-based e-commerce phase and directly get into m-commerce. Telefonica Italy is rolling out mobile phones with preconfigured Internet access.
Torbjorn Nilsson, senior vice-president of business development at Ericsson, says despite a slow start, the potential of m-commerce is huge. "It will be like pouring out of a ketchup bottle. Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing . . . and then all at once," he says.
Nilsson suggests that the sale of mobile phones worldwide will in a few years exceed the PC market by four times. And by 2002, third-generation networks known as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) will supercede WAP and offer richer online experiences.
While m-commerce technology players and alliances involving companies ranging from Microsoft to Psion are still falling into place in Europe, heated competition is well under way in the PC-based e-commerce world.
Leaders in e-commerce in Europe are the UK, Germany and Sweden.
The US currently leads Europe along most dimensions of e-commerce metrics, such as number of users, number of shoppers, amount of time spent online, overall transaction volume and value, and scalability of markets.
Though the US leads in PC-based e-commerce, Europe is expected to lead in the mobile and interactive TV markets. The number of overall Internet users in Europe is also expected to equal the US user base in a few years.
The percentage of overall population in Europe which will be online is expected to increase from 17 per cent in 1999 to 34 per cent in 2005. E-commerce revenues in Europe are expected to shoot up from 2.9 billion Euros last year to 64 billion Euros in 2005, according to Jupiter. Scandinavia will be the most wired and the most "hip," with over 60 per cent of the population online by 2005.
US Internet players in Europe generally tend to begin with the UK and German markets, and then move into Scandinavia, France and the rest of the continent.
Dotcoms have 51 per cent of the e-commerce market share in Europe - but, as in the US, traditional retailers are quickly catching up with improved integration of services.
Regional complexity and fragmentation has meant that some European e-commerce players have had a bit of breathing space before US competitors enter their turf; some European companies are also expanding rapidly to the US and other parts of the world.
Amazon and Bertelsmann are competing head to head in many European markets. Yahoo is among the top three portals in many European markets as well.
Some of the more recent dotcoms to emerge in Europe include Dressmart (clothing), Boxman (music), Ashford (luxury brands), LastMinute.com (last minute travel and entertainment), ChateauOnline (wine), ArtRepublic (art) and iCollector (antiques).
Certain industries like music - where purely digital solutions for recording and distribution exist - stand to be shaken to their foundations, said Clive Mayhew-Begg, vice president at music seller CDNow.com.
Companies like CDNow.com and Amazon.com are re-positioning themselves as "portailers", or retail portals for a wide range of consumer purchases and advertising messages across multiple channels.
Sectors like traditional recruitment and travel agencies are among the most threatened by new online players in Europe, according to Liesbeth Hops, director of European research group ProActive International.
More research is needed on consumer behaviour at content and retail sites, said Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, who has been conducting surveys of such behaviour on Internet users in the US and Europe.
Tricky issues still arise in clearly defining privacy and customer profile ownership issues when partnership agreements or tenancy deals are inked between portals and retailers.
European e-commerce sites, like many US ones, still take too long - sometimes almost as many as five days - to respond to user email, according to a Jupiter survey.
In terms of cyberlaw, the music industry desperately needs new global IPR (intellectual property rights) laws, according to music site Boxman.com's CEO Tony Salter, who previously assisted with the launch of the Virgin and EMI labels in India.
"In Europe - indeed, across the world - there are complex issues regarding consistency of laws for online privacy and database protection. E-tailers need to have an environment where they can put a foot in the market without putting the other foot in prison," said Bertelsmann's Ehrhart.
In addition to challenges in the B2C (business to comsumer) space, European companies are scrambling to step up their pace of B2B "mobiNet" operations via the "new integrated WWW" - WAN (Wide Area Network), Web and WAP, but that is another story.
madanr@microland.co.in