Search On Wap? They're Still Working On That
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday April 6, 2000
No Internet search engines can yet scour the emerging wireless Web but several companies are hard at work on it.
Online content aimed at wireless Internet users is beginning to proliferate.
By 2001 wireless communications are expected to overtake fixed line telephony but the wireless data market will extend far beyond mobile phones, into businesses and homes, according to Australian telecommunications researcher Mr Paul Budde.
So-called third generation (3G) technologies which will first appear in Japan as early as next year will enable rich broadband content to be quickly downloaded over wireless networks.
An early 3G technology, known as univeral mobile telecommunications system (see www.umts-forum.org), will allow any device fixed or mobile to be permanently connected to the Internet at speeds up to 40 times faster than a standard desktop modem and more than 200 times faster than current data-enabled mobile phones.
Yet the major existing major search engines can not yet search the ordinary low-speed wireless Web. Several, including Lycos, Alta Vista and Pinpoint, are working on it, but they must first work out how to cope with wireless language.
As ordinary Web pages are not compatible with Internet-accessible mobile phones and wireless hand-held computers, they need to be written in a new language, wireless mark-up language, or WML.
Two Americans, Mr Taylor Brockman and Mr Jud Bowman, the 18-year-old co-founders of Pinpoint.com, reckon their site can already index 150,000 pages on the wireless Web.
Pinpoint enables Internet users to limit searches to specific parts of the Internet such as sites that are accessible by mobile phones.
``It layered gracefully on top of the previous technology," said Mr Brockman.
Pinpoint has 24 workers, including some adults, among them the chief executive, Mr Jim Strathmeyer.
And last month the company got a cash infusion of $US5 million ($8.26 million).
This week Pinpoint is expected to launch the new technology at the Spring Internet World trade show in Los Angeles.
The company is also concentrating on its initial business of targeted searches, already being tried out by seven companies.
Six will begin paying in the next few weeks, said Mr Bowman, Pinpoint's president.
(Mr Brockman's title at Pinpoint is ``guru".)
Its customers are Web sites, desperate to become more sticky that is, to get consumers to frequent their sites and stay a while when they do.
Adding useful tools such as search engines is one way to do that.
Mr Bowman says he expects companies to pay between $US10,000 and ``six figures" annually for the customised search engines.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald
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