Eye on the Web: On the Road Again
Author Douglas Adams recently said that the people who lived during the Renaissance probably didn’t know that they were living during a period of enlightenment, while people today are pretty darn sure they’re living during a significant, exciting, and changing time. Appropriately enough, Adams made these comments while introducing a new wireless service, based around the Web site h2g2, designed to let people around the world share information on subjects as banal as which coffee shops are more likely to serve cold java and what the purple-haired fellow sitting across from you actually does for a living. A sort of hitchhiker’s guide to the real world. And what a crazy world it’s turning out to be.
Every time we turn around these days there is some new bit of technology transforming the way we live, and doing it with finesse and a healthy dose of gee-whiz. And right now wireless technology has a near monopoly on gee-whiz. Before the year is out, we may well be able to get instant directions from where we are standing to any other point in the world, watch movie trailers on our cell phones on the way to the theater, research the hippest restaurants in a new town as we approach it in Web-enabled taxis, and buy stock in a new food chain as we are waiting in line at the checkout. And that’s just this year.
Plugged Out
We may be tempted to laugh at all the technocrats talking into what appears to be thin air as they walk city streets these days, equipped with those special earphones that save them the painful cramps that can develop when holding a cell phone to your head for too long. But are these folks more, well, plugged-in to the future of technology than those of us who still must literally plug in to the Web? To paraphrase an old AT&T commercial, they will be. Since a phalanx of wireless technology bigwigs got together to develop the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML) a few years back, everyone and his (or her) brother (and sister) have been scrambling to bring their services to the wireless-device-toting set.
The research firm Strategy Analytics predicts there will be upwards of 525 million WAP-enabled cell phones in the hands of consumers by 2003. That means even more pressure to bring us all manner of goods and services accessible over a wireless network, and not just for cell phones: PDAs such as Palm handhelds and those running Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system are prime targets for wireless applications. Not that technology companies are resting on their laurels as it is.
No Escape
Discount brokerage firm Charles Schwab recently unveiled a system that alerts clients of changes in the stock market via their Palm handhelds, and online brokerages E-Trade and Ameritrade offer similar services. PricewaterhouseCoopers actually lets customers buy and sell stocks via a WAP-enabled device. Atom Films is releasing about twenty shorts for Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform. Amazon.com is distributing a WAP-compliant book ordering interface. Not to mention two things as ubiquitous to technology as rats and pigeons are to cities: porn and spam. Yes, now you can read dirty stories and receive text advertisements between bouts of book ordering and stock ticker checking. What will they think of next?
Well, quite a bit, actually. Though we Americans like to think of the U.S. as the bleeding edge of technology (besides Japan, that is), it turns out there are plenty of European countries that are a step or two ahead of us in the wireless game. Italians, long proponents of cell phones (due, I imagine, to poor wire-based telephone service) have been using them to send text-based messages to each other for a while now. And last week the New York Times reported that youngsters in Scandinavian countries are using their cell phones to download music, to buy things from vending machines, and even to track down potential mates (a Swedish dating service will let you know when a compatible individual passes nearby).
There’s More
And still the technology marches on: A company called PacketVideo is developing ways to stream video to your wireless device, and the purple Yahoo taxis many of us have seen roaming San Francisco streets offer free Internet access inside. KOA campgrounds recently outfitted 100 of its 500 locations with Web-enabled kiosks for busy campers. Although I suppose they use wires.
Phone.com, one of the companies behind the WAP Forum (along with big hitters Ericsson, Nokia, and others), advises software engineers on how to develop for WAP devices. The company’s wireless conference, Unwired Universe 2000, set for July 25-27 in San Francisco, has already sold out. Ironically, Phone.com used to be called Wireless Planet, which is what we had before the Web anyway.
But if we are doomed to be wireless once again, so be it. Though I still refuse to get a cell phone (Heck, I don’t even like instant messaging; it’s too instant.), there’s no denying that I may soon have to start singing a different tune. A tune I’ve downloaded onto my WAP-enabled cell phone while following GPS directions to a brokerage where I’ll sign up to receive stock quotes on my Palm, for instance.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on July 14, 2000
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
