Three industry heavyweights announced plans to create universal standards for mobile instant messaging and presence services, a move that further validates a small but growing segment of the wireless industry.
L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp. established last week the Wireless Village, which the companies said is an initiative to set specifications and create a community of supporters for IM and presence standards. The companies said the specifications will be built on already-established technology, including short messaging service, WAP and XML. The companies also said the standards would be open and available for any business to use and will be presented to other standards bodies, including the WAP Forum, the Third Generation Partnership Project and the Internet Engineering Task Force.
“We recognize the importance of creating a common mobile instant messaging and presence standard,” said Paul Chellgren, vice president of business development and product management for Nokia Mobile Phones. “There is great demand for an interoperable mobile solution for IMPS (instant messaging and presence services).”
Chellgren said the Wireless Village initiative isn’t the first push to create an IM and presence standard.
However, he said, “these efforts have had limited success. Realistically, there has been no concentrated effort to concentrate on the mobile environment. Most importantly, there has been a serious lack of focus on the ultimate goal: the all-encompassing, end-to-end, interoperable solution.”
The Wireless Village initiative is creating a lot of noise for an area that has seen little major interest. While there are several instant-messaging companies offering consumer and business services-such as Invertix Corp. and Bantu Inc.- significant wireless players have not yet embraced the technology that has taken the wired Internet by storm.
“It seems like IM is really starting to generate a lot of interest now,” said Cynthia Hswe, a senior analyst for The Strategis Group. “It’s going to be much more pervasive.”
Hswe said the Wireless Village standards initiative will have added clout because Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia are not currently involved in instant messaging. She said the companies’ main goal is to plan for the future so they don’t have to integrate five different IM standards into their handsets.
“They’re sort of like a neutral party in this whole thing,” she said.
The initiative is also a move to give wireless companies a voice in deciding instant messaging and presence technology before an already established IM company-most likely America Online-decides to make a major play into wireless.
Hswe said AOL-which offers the most popular wired IM program by far-has been notoriously resistant to opening its instant-messaging platform. This could negatively affect the company’s image-and could make AOL more willing to commit to an industry standards body like the Wireless Village initiative.
“I think that AOL is starting to realize they can’t be the Microsoft of IM,” Hswe said. “Or else they’ll be seen as the bad guys.”
Company executives involved in the initiative said the wireless industry is poised to accept an IM and presence standard. U.S. wireless users today are unable to send text messages between carriers.
“What the carriers have told us is they are most interested in an interoperable solution,” said Craig Peddie, general manager for Motorola’s Lexicus division. Motorola recently announced a plan to create an IM and presence offering through a deal with Personity Inc.
“It’s an opportunity window that we have to grab now,” said Frank Dawson, Nokia’s representative and chairman of the Wireless Village initiative.
And the opportunity the initiative is aimed at is much bigger than simply sending a text message to another wireless user in real time.
The Wireless Village initiative is looking toward future networks and technologies that will offer mobile users a range of messaging services. Many industry observers say presence, and not IM, will become the central part of this total messaging offering.
Presence capabilities will allow mobile users to let others know when they are available and-with the advent of location-based services-where they are. Important uses will likely include creating buddy lists with on- or off-line status; letting callers know that the user can only receive text messages because he is in a meeting; giving specific businesses location information; and even letting others know whether the user is in a good or bad mood.
Creating standards for presence technology will be difficult, Hswe said, but necessary for the initiative’s eventual success.
“Not resolving the presence issue will really deter this service,” she said.
And beyond instant messaging and presence services, the Wireless Village initiative also will consider group chat applications, multimedia instant messaging and shared content offerings. With shared content, users will be able to select pictures, images or videos from a shared server and send them along with messages.
Executives involved with the initiative agree that the undertaking is ambitious. The completed specifications, which are scheduled for release by the end of the year, will have to take into account already-established instant messaging and SMS services.
But without a set of specific standards, the wireless industry would be left with a “tower of babble,” Dawson said.
