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The Wireless Village initiative, led by Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia, could bring the message of peace and harmonious interoperability where no messaging system has gone before.
Adam Stone
February 14, 2002
This spring, wireless-device makers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia got together to form the Wireless Village initiative - a cooperative effort to develop universal standards for Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS). Why are standards needed, when messaging is already a hit in Europe and Asia? Where is messaging headed -- and is there any money to be made?
We asked Carsten Brinkschultes, who as CEO of German software maker Weblicon Technologies AG recently opted to sign on to the Wireless Village initiative.
Q: Messaging is already thriving. Why push for universality now?
A: Messaging in Europe is thriving due to a uniform standard for exchanging simple text messages -- SMS. [Without SMS standards], phones from different manufacturers wouldn't be able to exchange messages.
MMS [multi-media systems] is the next cross-vendor standard poised to take SMS to the next level -- exchanging picture messages and other multi-media content. MMS will be a killer app, because people will be able to take pictures with their camera-equipped mobile phones and send each other picture postcards. It's going to be easy and it's going to be fun. IMPS builds on top of MMS, building a universal interface for instant messaging and presence services.
Q: Define "presence services…"
A: It integrates multi-media-messaging with location-based services, allowing end users to specify a "mood" such as "busy" - something urgently required by end users getting spammed with SMS while in a meeting.
Q: How has the lack of an IMPS standard impacted your firm? What changes will you be able to make as messaging becomes more standardized?
A: The lack of uniform standards has had a huge impact on the development of Weblicon applications. For example, Weblicon would love to integrate location-based services with [its] calendar and address book to build an intelligent "agent." This service would be able to detect the location of the user, and check with the user's agenda, sending reminder messages if the user is about to miss his or her next meeting. So far, we were unable to realize this vision due to a lack of universal standards and a lack of cross-operator interfaces in the area of location-based services.
Another example is multi-media-messaging. Weblicon would like to provide users of our existing email and SMS messaging application with a way to send pictures or even movies stored on their PCs to mobile phones and receive pictures sent from those devices. So far, we did not move forward, because the only available "standards" have been vendor-specific, limited to specific devices.
MMS and Wireless Village with IMPS is changing all that. Finally, Weblicon will have a universal standard for accessing location-based services to detect the location of the user and send multi-media-messages using a cross-vendor standard backed by all major players in the mobile phone industry.
Q: Suppose you could do that. What would be the mobile-commerce implications of such a development?
A: Wireless Village and the IMPS standard are going to have an impact on m-commerce. For example, ring tones and logos are a huge hit (especially commercially) in Europe. As a very primitive and vendor-specific form, ring tones and logos are the first success stories for m-commerce.
Multi-media messaging and Wireless Village will provide a cross-vendor platform, which will widen the market for pictures and ring-tones sold to masses of mobile end-users equipped with IMPS-compatible phones.
Since all of the big guys in the handset industry, mainly Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, are the driving factors behind Wireless Village, we will have a broad base for m-commerce based on this standard.
Q: Let's look beyond ring tones. Where else do you see a multi-media messaging standard taking the industry?
A: The same vendors that now offer very expensive logos and ring tones for Nokia phones will be able to deliver multi-media logos, including animated cartoons or small movies to end users. The "coolness" factor will drive adoption of IMPS phones, and the exchange platforms for pictures, cartoons and movies (can you spell porn?) are going to be a huge hit.
Q: What kind of timeline do you envision?
A: After the definition of the standard it will take 12 months for the mobile industry to introduce the first terminals. So we expect the introduction of first terminals by February 2003 and the widespread adoption in the third quarter of 2003.
Adam Stone writes on business and technology from Annapolis, Md.
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