Mobile commerce is the next big thing, and wireless application protocol (WAP), for now, is its primary enabler. This was the focus of a presentation by IT millionaire Mark Shuttleworth at a business breakfast held to launch ITWeb's new wireless technology section sponsored by the South African Certification Agency (SACA).
Shuttleworth, CEO of Cape-based digital certificate company Thawte Consulting, envisioned the primary theme in IT for the next three years as being the convergence of computing and mobile communications technologies.
"The biggest technology explosion today is the wireless rather than the Internet explosion. I'm speaking from the point of view of an Internet geek and I believe the Internet is driving the way the world changes, but the change is manifested in the wireless world. And this change will benefit Africa more than any other part of the world.
Wireless applications are just an extension of the Internet, Shuttleworth said, and in line with Moore's Law, the smaller the mobile handset gets, the more bandwidth and capabilities one has through it, and the cheaper it becomes.
However, predictions of mobile commerce (m-commerce) explosion are accompanied by hype, "Today, mobile commerce is slow and cumbersome much like the transactions conducted across the Internet a few years ago," Shuttleworth said.
The drivers of advancement in m-commerce, he observed, would include ubiquity, security, convenience, localisation and personalisation. He foresees that cellular phones and other mobile computing devices, which unlike PCs currently have 'always on' status, will lead to their users being 'always connected'.
"Once the South African telecommunications industry is deregulated, the technology will become more available, and the competitive market will drive prices down," he said.
Despite the expected increase in accessibility, Shuttleworth doesn't see SA as being a large enough market to widely take up the next generation of cellular technology, which utilises general packet radio services (GPRS) as its communication standard.
A speculative recipe for m-commerce success, Shuttleworth suggested, is founded on attracting the customer, rather than owning him or her, through personalisation, localisation, ubiquity and timeliness and convenience of services and content provided.
"Will WAP be it?" was Shuttleworth's concluding rhetoric question. "It's impossible to answer that. It is also uncertain which operating system will prevail - Palm, EPOC, Windows CE, or something else. But the wireless revolution is going to happen."
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