Editor's Note: David
Li has been a long time supporter of Enhydra. Back in 1999,
he observed that Enhydra XMLC and its DOM foundation were an
ideal combination for embracing WML and wireless development.
He then contributed the code that set the stage for extending
Enhydra XMLC to become the versatile presentation technology
that it is today. |
Wireless in Asia
David Li, Digitalsesame
Founder
It has been over a year since DigitalSesame brought WAP support
to Enhydra. It's a good time to review what has been going on with
WAP and wireless data access in general and Asia in particular.
WAP is the most hyped marketing word in 2000. Nokia, Ericssion,
Motorola and countless wireless telecom operators spend tens of
millions of marketing funds to prompt it. The marketing has reached
about just about everyone.
Since DigitalSesame is a "WAP" company, I had to face
the nightmare common to any techie. Mom asked me what's the WAP
thingie she has been hearing and seeing all over the place. So,
I took out the Nokia 7110 and showed her a couple sites we had built.
Well... After 10 minutes of demo, mom looked at me with all these
questions in her eye: "Is this what you do at work?"
This started making me wonder whether WAP was a "everyone
and their mom will rush out to grab" technology or just a high
powered marketing play by the telecom industry. What went wrong?
What was missing?
Looking at over a year of experience dealing with telecom operators,
WAP start ups and WAP content providers, I have discovered a thing
or two that I'd like to share with readers of this newsletter.
First, the culture clash between Internet and telecom. The flourish
of Internet business is about David vs Goliath. Everyone gets a
shot at the giant. That's why Internet has flourished to become
a defining moment in the history.
However, telecom operators have made WAP play more like the Highlander.
All the telecom operators are running arround getting an exclusive
deal with big content providers. Just like in the movie, "There
can be only one!" This telecom mentality really kills WAP.
The people who used to run your phone services now have the exclusive
power to dictate what you see on this little screen. Well, Internet
doesn't work that way and WAP won't flourish unless given the same
ground.
Secondly, there is the over-marketing and under-manufacturing
by the phone providers. In the beginning of this year, WAP stood
for "Where Are the Phones?" It was a big marketing campaign
started without the ability to back up the demand. In Asia, people
change phones every six to nine months and everyone is always looking
for the newest phone. The WAP phone supply met the demand by killing
the demand.
Plus, the first generation of WAP phones, Nokia 7110, Ericssion
R320, Motorola 2000i are big, ugly and clumpy. This was introduced
to the Asian market when everyone wants a lightweight phone from
Japan, some of them less than half a ounce.
Third, a technology barrier was created by WML. WML is an application
of XML and follows the XML standard. it creates a barrier of entry
for designers who who are only familiar with HTML.
On top of this, WML does not support pages in local encoding.
For example, we use Big5 encoding to represent Chinese in Taiwan
and that's what most people are familiar with when it comes to Chinese
computing. However, WML does not support Big5. WML is Unicode only.
Believe it or not, the most frequently asked question for us is
"How do you display Chinese on the phone?" Lots of time
and human resource are wasted just to deal with these basic issues
and not much more energy left remains for developing amazing service.
NTT DoCoMo's iMode, the most successful Internet on the phone
service, has grown from zero to twenty million subscribers in a
little more than a year. It uses compact HTML which is a small subset
of HTML and support locale encoding.
So, is wireless data on the phone doomed? Quite the contrary.
The telecoms have learned a thing or two in the past year about
the Internet and we have been seeing a lot of change in the way
they deal with WAP. NTT DoCoMo is bringing iMode service to the
world and are pushing big changes in the WAP standards. Now, WAP
2.0 will be based on XHTML which are is familiar to HTML designers.
We will be looking at the wireless data year in 2001. There are
a whole new set of challanges ahead but we will finally see the
potential of wireless data.
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