Hewlett-Packard Co, Oracle Corp and Toshiba Corp are among seven new members to throw their weight behind the Wireless Application Protocol Forum, an effort to build a standard for internet communications on wireless devices (CI No 3,538). The WAP Forum works closely with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the plan is eventually to fold WAP into the W3C’s next-generation hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP-NG. Telecommunications companies Bussan Systems Integration Co, Tokyo Digital Phone, Glenayre Technologies Inc and One 2 One also signed up for the WAP Forum at a meeting held in Kyoto, Japan. Membership now sits at 78 – significantly more than the two companies involved in WirelessKnowledge, a rival proposal put forward by Microsoft Corp and Qualcomm Inc. The next WAP Forum meeting will be held February 1-5 in Fort Worth, Texas. At it, the WAP roadmap for 1999 and beyond is to be unveiled.
