The market growth and acceptance of wireless technologies, services, and solutions was recently celebrated at the annual CTIA Wireless 2000 show in New Orleans. Wireless 2000, the world's largest wireless show, is the meeting place for mobile phone manufacturers, wireless telecommunication companies, and wireless service providers. The show provided an opportunity to strategize and announce partnerships that affect the future of the wireless industry and its corporations. The incredible growth in the wireless market, driven by consumer adoption of mobile digital phones both in the U.S. and worldwide, has made this event worth attending. Keynotes speeches delivered by corporate leaders—Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Case of AOL, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and John D. Zeglis of AT&T Wireless—highlighted the importance of wireless technologies in a diverse range of applications today.

Wireless Technologies and Appliances
Wireless technologies are rapidly coalescing with information appliances. Smart phones, the morphing of mobile digital phones with handheld computers, are or will soon be the most common type of information appliance.

New features and services with built-in support for Internet content browsing, personal information management (PIM), and a variety of interactive and voice-activated technologies are at the forefront of appliance design. Furthermore, wireless communication plays an important, if not primary, role in linking information and people to the networked world around them.

Wireless Access Protocol
More than a few noteworthy technologies and trends were evident. Probably the most conspicuous technology on the show floor was the wide variety of software products designed to support wireless access protocol (WAP). Application support for WAP's incredible growth ranges from content delivery, wireless device management, mobile commerce (m-commerce), and secure transaction handling to service management, packet tracking, and billing.

The industry by and large supports WAP, a protocol constructed using wireless markup language (WML) designed to manage content delivery for lower bandwidth links to primitive display devices. WML is built on the extensible markup language (XML) adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an extension to HTML. WAP has spawned a number of new software and hardware products in the marketplace. A large number of vendors demonstrated solutions for implementing WAP servers with capabilities to condense, filter, and access Internet information to be viewed on smart phones and personal data assistants (PDAs).

Some examples of this software type can be found in:
WAP Gateways and Servers: Delivering Wireless Content.

WAP Appliances and PDAs
WAP content can be viewed on smart phones or PDAs. New dedicated WAP enabled client appliances, such as Ericsson's Companion—one of the more interesting PDAs on display at Wireless 2000—are built entirely around the concept of wireless Internet browsing.

Smart Phones
The evolution of the smart phone continues to lead the electronics industry. The most advanced, low-power, mobile devices and software technologies are being applied in the design of smart phones. All of the major suppliers and manufacturers of digital mobile phones announced their new product releases, product roadmaps for 2000, and plans for advancing third generation (G3) devices and networks on the near horizon.

More on smart phones at Wireless 2000 can be found in this week's product feature,
Smart Phones on the Forefront of the Appliance Revolution.

Wireless Email Delivery
While many of the WAP delivery servers and services are designed to bridge HTML Web content to wireless devices, a number of companies have focused solely on wireless email delivery.

Palm Computing, Research in Motion (RIM), and SkyTel have all been offering mobile email with accompanying client appliances for the past year. Now firms such as ZipLip.com and ThinAirApps are providing open email delivery software platforms for service providers, hoping to get a share of the wireless email market.

Notable are ZipLip's introduction of encryption and security to wireless email delivery, and ThinAirApps' release of a seamless bridge from Microsoft Exchange Servers and wireless devices. Both products are targeted toward service providers.

Wireless Mobile Commerce
One of the most promising technologies for the future is wireless mobile commerce (m-commerce). The technology infrastructure to transform wireless devices into electronic wallets is in the early stages of market deployment. As smart phones and PDAs reach a growing number of consumers, the adoption of m-commerce solutions will likely take hold. A few firms laying the groundwork for m-commerce can be found in Market Primed for Wireless E-Commerce.

Wireless Device Management
As corporations move to equip their sales forces and other critical support staff with mobile communications solutions, they need to manage workgroups, synchronize content, and replicate data to effectively communicate through the virtual mobile network in a secure environment. Some of the software companies working to make this happen can be found in Wireless Network Management: Keeping the Mobile Organization in Sync .

Wireless Service Management
Wireless services providers (WSPs) also need to have access to information pertaining to the accounts of thier user base. Billing, traffic tracking, transaction management, administrative notification, persistent account storage, and even push broadcasting are all of interest to the WSPs. The prevailing model for wireless network management is similar to that of email services. Devices may or may not be on online. Information sent to devices when they are not connected or when they are out of range is stored in a user account. The information is then reliably delivered the next time the device connects to the service. Refer to Wireless Services: Managing the Service for Firms Providing Management Applications.

Working Out the Bugs
Wireless is in, but it is still maturing. Wireless 2000 took place during Marti Gras, the busiest time of the year in New Orleans. With over 1,000,000 visitors pouring into the city by Saturday, attempts to communicate with colleagues by mobile phone were useless as the wireless network bandwidth was stressed by the influx of mobile subscribers, demonstrating the need for bandwidth management, planning, and technology improvements.

The success and innovation in the industry are self-evident. The timely collaboration and adoption of standards, such as WAP, are ensuring the success of the wireless industry and the growth of both mature and emerging companies that bring consumers the wireless devices and services they will come to rely on in the future.