Eyeing the potentially vast number of users that could come onstream as wireless application protocol services roll out, Infowave Software Inc has become the latest company to join the WAP Forum. The Vancouver, Canada-based company has traditionally developed software that links handheld and PDA users with their corporate networks but has already cut it teeth in the handset space with its latest product for pagers and cellphones, code-named Kodiak.
The company is not yet ready to go public about the new products. However, the software is likely to be targeted much more at the handset and smartphone market than previous packages. VP of marketing at Infowave, Ron Jasper, said that the company would concentrate on enabling WAP devices to access data on corporate networks, noting that most WAP services offer users the same mixture of weather reports, news, sports and stock quotes. We’ll be developing stuff that drives a little more into the enterprise information access space, Jasper said. Kodiak has already allowed Infowave to dip its toe into the handset market. The desktop-based software acts as a conduit to enable pagers and cellphones to access enterprise data using short message service.
Various research firms have anticipated that there will be 30 to 50 million WAP-enabled phones available in US alone by 2003. Most of the major wireless carriers are planning to launch WAP services towards the end of this year or in 2000. This could be very bad news for handheld operating systems vendors such as Palm Computing and Microsoft Corp – which have both recently joined the forum – because developers could write applications to run on the browser rather than the operating system. The browser has the potential to do the phone what it didn’t manage to do the desktop, according to Jasper, who says that WAP could help to democratize handheld platforms. á
