What's So Wild About Wireless?

Microsoft, which can throw as many engineers at a problem as it wants to, is concentrating mostly on email services for wireless-Internet users and hasn't yet introduced a Web-shopping option for its MSN service. "We probably will do it at some point," says Sarah Lefko, 31, a Microsoft product manager. "But it needs to be secure and private. We need to make sure that it works. And we need merchants to support it. We don't want to introduce something way ahead of its time."

Also unresolved for Microsoft's team is whether there's any way to get meaningful advertising revenue from the wireless Web. In the desktop world, Microsoft is able to attract millions of dollars a year from stockbrokers, retailers, and others who want to reach users of the company's MSN service. But Lefko admits that it's difficult to imagine where an ad could fit on a cell-phone screen without disrupting a user's ability to do what brought him or her online in the first place.

Yahoo!, in fact, is stalling some of its advertisers that want to put their messages on cell-phone and PDA displays. Ordinarily, the Santa Clara, California-based company is happy to cash its advertisers' checks, and it has done spectacularly well selling ads that will reach desktop-Internet users. But, says Mohan Vishwanath, 33, a Yahoo! vice president in charge of wireless initiatives, "Our issue is whether users will accept it or whether they will get annoyed."

Vishwanath's job has global responsibility, and Yahoo!'s wireless-Internet crew is active in 23 countries, ranging from Japan and Singapore to Germany and Sweden. That gives him a unique perspective on what's similar -- as well as what's different -- about worldwide adoption patterns. Gradually, he says, he's come to believe that international habits won't all blend into one standard pattern.

According to Vishwanath, Japanese users look at an Internet-enabled cell-phone as a source of entertainment -- especially on train commutes. Americans drive to work and are more likely to talk on their cell-phones than to surf the Web. In the United States, he says, top uses for wireless-Internet connections are to check email messages, stock prices, or sports scores. "I've been telling people for a while that these are very personal devices, and they're going to be used in different ways around the world."

One crucial test of wireless-Internet acceptance will come from the financial-services industry. Merely using PDAs or cell-phones to send more email will likely generate a lot of traffic but won't likely mean much revenue -- except for the makers of specialized devices such as the BlackBerry wireless-email transmitter and receiver. By contrast, banking and stock trading have the potential to be big moneymakers if someone can migrate users to the wireless Web.

Aether Systems Inc., based in Owings Mills, Maryland, has been trying as hard as anyone to attract such users. Aether provides real-time wireless data to about 10,000 financial-services customers at brokerages such as Charles Schwab. Many brokers merely get news alerts and up-to-the-minute stock quotes, says Bill Hannon, 46, head of Aether's financial-services team. But a few of them trade as often as twice a day from a PDA or a BlackBerry device.

Aether is starting to make its services available via Web-enabled cell-phones too, but Hannon has limited hopes for that service until keyboards and screen sizes get bigger. "There are a lot of trade-offs involved," he says. "Inputting information using your fingers is tough. I think that this area is going to change rapidly, and eventually you'll have good speech recognition." But Aether's initial experiments with Web-enabled cell-phones are meant more as a learning exercise than as a belief that the right products already have come to market.

An especially wry view comes from Richard Jones, chief technology officer of Countrywide Credit Industries Inc., a leading mortgage company based in Calabasas, California. In the past year, Countrywide has developed technology that enables people to use a Web-enabled cell-phone or a PDA to look up the current market value of a home -- or even to get preliminary approval of a loan. Jones, 48, knows that countless real-estate brokers carry cell-phones everywhere they go, and he would love to be able to make those services halfway navigable on a cell-phone. But "they just aren't quick and easy now," he says. "They're slow and hard." The PDA version is more manageable, but few brokers carry such devices with them.

"The right solution would be something between a cell-phone and a PDA," he says. "You need a screen the size of a Palm's, and you need to collapse it. They're both just barely missing it right now."

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor based in Silicon Valley.