Mounting brick walls between businesses remain obstacles in an economy that integrates by the day. But XMLSolutions Global aims to turn barriers into networks by bringing its expertise into the flawed territory of WAP.
Extensible Markup Language, often exalted as the meta-language for third-generation m-commerce, is perceived by some industry watchers as the right technology that will match the mass migration to the Internet from wireless phones and PDAs, which L.M. Ericsson predicts may rise to as high as 600 million people by 2004.
XMLSolutions thinks it can enhance the profile and benefits of WAP with XML technology to ease business-to-business solutions and, consequently, justify the huge expense, time and energy already invested in the technology by about 300 companies, including major vendors and carriers.
“It frees up data and transforms content to wireless devices,” said John Evdemon, chief architect at XMLSolutions.
He said the beauty of XML is that it is simple, easy-to-learn, human and machine readable and lives up to the meaning of the word mobile.
“You don’t have to get to the office to access your message,” he said, explaining that XML transcends platforms with a higher-level business-to-business integration that reduces risk and cost and interoperates and simplifies commerce.
“So, with your WAP phone, you can respond everywhere.”
He said XML recognizes the weaknesses of WAP, which is menaced daily by other technologies like i-mode and Bluetooth and the potential gravitation of subscribers to those offerings, especially in the United States.
WAP has been riddled by narrow bandwidth, limited memory, lack of color, sluggishness, a rash of error messages, poor marketing and its lack of patent flexibility.
This means without the help of XML, WAP will stumble along with specialized data exchange formats, custom connections for multiple applications and data security issues, Evdemon said.
XML compresses large documents so they can use narrow WAP gateways. Evdemon said XML enables documents to be conveyed and translated via Wireless Markup Language into mobile devices.
“All applications will have to support it down the road, especially some of the large companies,” said Evdemon.
He said WAP has had bad press because it does not ‘have real estate on the screen,’ and its ‘usability resembles the Web in its early days.’
He said the best approach is to keep it simple and serve up the minimum data for the screen. This creates sporadic messages and requires customers to dial back in.
The next generation of WAP is expected to include XHTML with backward compatibility to WML, TCP support, color graphics, animation, large file downloading, location-smart devices, streaming media and data synchronization with the desktop. The two technologies will work in rhythm with the network and handheld evolution.
This, XMLSolutions believes, will increase the value of XML.
