IT's major task today is sorting through the mobile e-commerce mumbo-jumbo and making sense of emerging - and often conflicting - standards, technology and cultural issues. That's followed by deciding what applications are best suited for m-commerce and getting a handle on the development requirements and costs.
Making an existing e-commerce application viewable in any wireless device's screen, a process known as transcoding, is among the biggest technical challenges. That's because the types of wireless devices vary so greatly - Wireless Application Protocol phones, Palm handhelds, Windows CE clients and Research in Motion's BlackBerry pagers, to name a few - and are evolving so rapidly.
Because transcoding requires a rare, specialized skill set, most early movers turn to outsourcers for m-commerce development - wireless ASPs (WASP) such as 724 Solutions, Aether Systems, Air2Web or OracleMobile. WASPs can take simple e-commerce applications and wireless-enable them within two weeks. More complicated transactional applications that require custom development can take several months to create.
Outsourcers get the cumbersome transcoding task - that is, they have to translate data and applications written in standard Web languages such as HTML and XML into formats, such as Wireless Markup Language or XHTML, readable on wireless devices. The onerous nature of this work led the 4-year-old Food.com, a dining portal in San Francisco, to a WASP when it decided to wireless-enable its online ordering application. Food.com earlier had transcoded Web content for use on interactive TV devices, so it knew what a bear transcoding would be for many wireless devices.
"Obviously our burden is in online ordering," says Adam Dubov, vice president of content and product management for Food.com. "We can't keep up with every new device and feature set. Certainly in the short term, it pays to find a reliable technology partner that can keep up with that stuff as well as transcode and host the solution,"
Plus, WASPs take care of the integration with the wireless net and the back-end corporate systems.
You'll want to make sure the WASP you chose supports a full range of standards, especially for device compatibility, security, page tags and data synchronization. And be sure the hosting firm offers the functionality you need, be it personalization, location-based services, alerts or voice support.
OracleMobile hosts m-commerce applications on Oracle8i database and Oracle9i Application Server Wireless Edition. The iAS server transcodes the data, adapting content into XML and then into the markup language used by the wireless device. Applications can be configured to give device users more control: They can opt-in to location-based services. OracleMobile further offers a development tool called Online Studio, which lets companies build the m-commerce application but host it with OracleMobile. Pricing is charged on a per-user, per-month basis, says Jacob Christfort, CTO and vice president of product development at OracleMobile.
Of course, if you're up to the task, you can take on the transcoding yourself. IBM offers WebSphere Transcoding Publisher Version 3.5, which costs $30,000 per processor. You take care of the front-end connectivity and back-end integration. WebSphere Everyplace Suite gets you the transcoding service plus connectivity, synchronization and management components. It is priced on a sliding volume tier scale. At 50 users, the software license carries a one-time charge of $500 per subscriber; at 1 million users, it costs $18 per subscriber.
Among its customers, IBM claims Sanwa Bank for a securities trading application via a variety of cellphones.
Contact Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz at bschultz@nww.com.
