Rumors of the "death" of WAP have, in the time-honored phrase, been exaggerated. WAP isn't dead by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it's getting more and more alive every day.

Membership of the WAP Forum itself, for example, has grown in the last year from 250 to over 600 members and the amount of content that's available to people who use WAP-enabled devices, which in the final analysis is all that matters, increased from only 25,000 pages at the beginning of the year 2000 to 8 million at the end. So it's perfectly clear that developers are out there. Indeed there are very large numbers of them developing applications for WAP. There are 10,000 applications listed on portal sites like OracleMobile and CellMania.

At the WAP Forum we think that WAP continues to be a very timely protocol. We also think that WAP is evolving over time and that it will continue to address all of the new technologies and devices that become available on the market.

Let me clear up one point. There's a widespread misapprehension that the WAP Forum was founded to evangelize and promote the technology. But it wasn't: the WAP Forum was formed as a technology organization, as a neutral meeting point, one that would allow companies from the vendor and carrier segments to come together to work on establishing rules for creating products and services that would work interoperably.

What seems to have happened over the course of the last year or so is that the WAP Forum has become a "lightning rod" for criticism about the Wireless Application Protocol itself. This was one of the reasons that I was brought in as CEO - to address those criticisms. And already I can report that, compared to the first half of 2000, the last half of 2000 and the first few months of 2001 have seen a distinct turnaround in the press perception of WAP. In fact, we have a contract with a company that measures that perception, and we see a very steady - slow, but very steady - increase in the level of positive perception on a global scale through the press with WAP.

The Near Future
So far as the WAP Forum's activities are concerned, in 2002 what developers will see is a continuation of the work that we're doing now to launch the WAP 2.0 specification.

With WAP 2.0 there have been additions to a lot of the behind-the-curtains technology that helps all this stuff work. When you boil it down, WAP, to a great extent, is merely the "plumbing" that delivers all of the content. From the technology standpoint, that's not what consumers are really interested in. They want to know what the technology can do for them. So moving forward through the rest of 2001, and the beginning of 2002, you'll see manufacturers and service providers capitalizing on the new capabilities that are built into the WAP 2.0 specifications.

These capabilities will be visible to the consumer in the form of support for color, graphics, animation, large file downloading, so that people can download MP3s, MPEGs, video clips, things of that nature. There will also be desktop synchronization with a personal information manager done wirelessly so that things are updated on the fly. If an assistant enters a new calendar event in your diary for you, it will be automatically updated when you access it from your WAP device.

We've got lots of things like pop-up and contact-sensitive menus, things that will make it a visibly richer experience for the user. Looking forward, I think you'll see an increase in the variety of devices and ser-vices that capitalize on those capabilities, using WAP.

Another WAP Myth Exploded
Let me see if I can clarify something here...because it might come as a surprise to a lot of people that the WAP Forum does not actively promote the name or the word WAP. In fact, in October 1999, the board of directors of the WAP Forum made a conscious decision not to promote WAP as a brand name.

What we have in the U.S. today, for example, is that Sprint calls it the "Wireless Web," Verizon calls it the "Mobile Internet," Motorola calls it the "Web Without Wires," but they're all going to be using WAP as the plumbing, the architecture to make it all work. So it's not the WAP Forum that went out and promoted the use of the term WAP. There are companies that chose to use the name of the technology to promote the technology itself, and that's a completely commercial decision on the part of each of those operators.

If Vodafone, or BT Cellnet, or Orange in the UK, or someone else throughout Europe chooses to use the word WAP to promote it, that's something that the WAP Forum doesn't have any say over, because each of those companies is in business for itself. We don't try to control, and in fact are legally obliged not to control, the way they market or sell their products.

This is because of the legal issues involved in antitrust. When you have a Forum with a number of different companies as members, you must be very careful by law not to provide any advantage to one company over another. Therefore, we still have to step back and let each one of these companies market the service on its own while we remain a technology organization that builds the blueprints for delivering the Internet to wireless devices.

We then let all the other contractors, such as the Motorolas, Nokias, Ericssons, and the like, come in and build the actual equipment. Then we let the service providers - what you might call the decorators and designers - come in and provide the service, the content, and so forth. So WAP Forum is really the architect behind the mobile Internet, but the promotional side, the commercial side, that's something that remains individual within each company.

WAP Forum in Day-to-Day Action
It's interesting to watch the way everyone within the Forum interacts. We have six face-to-face meetings every year, all over the world. Our last meeting was in London, the next one is in Washington, DC. We have one coming up in Singapore, one in Bangkok - they're all over the place.

Between 500 and 700 people come to these meetings and break up into 20 different working groups. Each one of these working groups focuses on a very discrete, very specialized area of that specification. So, as an example, we have a group that focuses exclusively on telematics. We have a group that focuses exclusively on SMS, a group on billing, one on e-commerce, all of these discrete areas. In between all of these meetings, and there are of course gaps of two months, we have an extremely active Web site. Our Members-Only portion of the Web site gets a million hits a month. We up- and download gigabytes of data every day in terms of documents that are needed, edited, and we have 65 different mailing lists that people can subscribe to within the WAP Forum so they can remain informed and contribute to the development of the specification.

SIDEBAR
Timeport

The PageWriter 2000X/Timeport P930/935 SDK enables developers to create wireless messaging applications for PageWriter 2000X/Timeport P930/935 family of devices. The device family is designed to enable users to communicate wirelessly with one- and two-way messaging devices, Internet e-mail addresses, fax machines and telephones. The SDK allows access to many device features:

• Send and receive wireless messages.
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• Utilize on-device data storage.
• Create graphical user interfaces.

• Figure 1
• Figure 2