HOT NEWS IN THIS REPORT:

1. Trend: Get ready for mobile e-commerce
2. Cool tool: Octopus.com
3. Strategy: Web-based productivity software debuts

Executive Technology Briefing (ETB)
Editor/Publisher: Jordan Ayan
Contributing Editor: Chuck Frey

Please feel free to forward this issue to others who may be interested in learning about these new technology developments!

Questions? Feedback? Suggestions for future topics? Please contact us at: etb@create-it.com ---------------------

--TREND: GET READY FOR MOBILE E-COMMERCE-

http://www.nokia.com
http://www.sprintpcs.com
http://www.wapforum.com
http://www.bluetooth.com

What has been heralded as the coming "wired world," where you can have fingertip access to a wealth of information no matter where you are, will soon be here. But it looks like a significant part of tomorrow's "wired world" will actually be wireless, thanks to recent advances in handheld PCs, cellular devices and wireless communications standards.

Strategic opportunities - act now! For business people, the advent of wireless Internet access - any time, anywhere - offers some potentially huge strategic opportunities. At the most fundamental level, those companies that are easiest to do business with will be the winners in the networked digital economy. And wireless communication is a key enabling technology that can give your customers a powerful new channel to communicate with you, as well as to help your employees respond faster to customer needs.

For example, you could use this technology to provide your customers with wireless access to their account information, allow them to place product orders, check on the status of existing orders, request service on your products and order replacement parts on enhanced digital cellular telephones, handheld PCs and other types of wireless devices. Other applications now being developed will allow you to use wireless communications to remotely monitor, track and diagnose machines at customer locations.

For your salespeople, wireless Internet access will allow them to access your sales management or "customer relationship management" (CRM) database on demand, without having to find a phone jack to connect their laptops to the Internet. Hard-wired local area PC networks may soon give way to wireless networks, which will enable you to carry your personal digital assistant (mini-laptop or other handheld wireless information appliance) throughout the office, but still be connected to e-mail and work files.

Taking Web content wireless Europe and Japan are already ahead of the U.S. in adopting wireless Web technology, and testify to its awesome potential. Japanese people are already using a new digital cellular system launched by a division of NTT to check news and horoscopes, order customized music CDs and send e-mail. In Finland, home of cellular hardware giant Nokia, residents already have access to over 200 wireless data services, including text messaging, personal banking, ordering gifts and searching for apartments. Thirsty Finns can even use a cell phone instead of cash to activate and make purchases from soda machines.

Standards, alliances will drive innovation, applications A new Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was recently ratified by a consortium of cellular hardware manufacturers and wireless service providers. This development creates a standard for delivering scaled-down Web content to screens on digital cellular phones and handheld computing devices. WAP is already being incorporated into new digital cellular phones in Europe. WAP incorporates a Web content tagging standard called XHTML, that will extend e-commerce to these new portable devices. And a high-speed wireless communication standard called Bluetooth will soon allow PCs, wireless devices and enhanced cell phones to share data with each other.

In addition, the major suppliers of hardware (digital cellular phones, handheld computers and paging devices), communications infrastructure (Sprint PCS, Nextel and other wireless network providers), software companies (Microsoft, Siebel Systems) and Web portal developers (Excite, Yahoo!, MSN) have recently announced a flurry of alliances and partnerships, to help them quickly develop value-added wireless solutions for consumers and businesses.

These two developments - emerging communications standards and content alliances -should drive a myriad of innovations and improvements in wireless devices and networks. This, in turn, will create some exciting new business applications, many of which we can't even envision today.

We project that mobile web browsing will take off in a major way. Not immediately, but the next generation of technology is likely to be broadly accepted and deployed. This will happen when the standards are firmly established. Remember the days when people said that mobile phones were only for the rich, and they had a very limited application because of their sound quality?

New wireless devices, business applications emerging During the past few months, cellular phone suppliers have started to introduce a new generation of Internet-enabled phones based on the WAP communications standard. At this early stage, the wireless Web services being offered are text based and tend to be focused on consumer needs, such as ordering books from online catalogs, checking movie schedules, stock prices and news headlines, and sending wireless text messages to friends and family members.

Business applications of these cell-phone, text-based "mini-browsers" should follow close behind, and are likely to include:

- Making travel arrangements and checking airline schedules
- Making stock trades and other simple transactions
- Location-based services, such as finding hotels and restaurants
- Filling out expense reports
- Looking up customer account information
- Interacting with basic project management tools

One of the most valuable applications is likely to be one of the simplest: checking e-mail without having to deal with connectivity problems that mobile executives now experience when traveling with laptops - including poor quality phone lines in hotels, a lack of easily accessible phone jacks in airports, convention centers and when visiting customer or client offices, and the vagaries of dealing with dial-up networking. As companies like Nokia, Charles Schwab and Amazon.com have discovered, if you can design online services that are simple, inexpensive and user-friendly, customer usage of them will skyrocket.

What can you do now? While it may be one to two years before practical business applications of mobile Web access emerge, the time is now to start thinking about how your company can utilize this technology. Here are some ideas to kick-start your wireless strategy planning process:

- Brainstorm ways in which you can use wireless technology to make your company easier to do business with. How can you give customers on-demand access to their accounts, orders or product support information utilizing wireless devices? Within your company, how can you use wireless technology to help your mobile executives stay more "connected" and respond faster to customer needs?

- Analyze your intranet, extranet and corporate Web site to determine what content you might want to be able to deliver to wireless devices. This content will need to be re-coded to make it accessible by text-based wireless devices.

- Make WAP and XHTML part of your firm's overall strategy for implementing XML, a standard for coding your company's Web content that will be the foundation of next-generation e-commerce.

- To help you implement wireless technology, you may want to consider hiring a WASP - a wireless applications service provider - a new breed of technology vendor with specialized expertise in wireless business applications.

- Set up some fast trials or pilot applications with a small number of salespeople and customers today. Start playing with the technology now, and use what you learn to develop tomorrow's profitable mobile commerce services for your company. Remember, speed is the currency of the Internet era.

--COOL TOOL: OCTOPUS.COM--

http://www.octopus.com

Octopus.com is a new, next-generation news portal site that enables you to create a customized news page that incorporates information from dozens of sources into one powerful, updateable view. We think Octopus.com can be a real time saver, because it enables you to scan news from a wider variety of sources than Yahoo!, Excite, NewsPage and other portals that allow you to create customized news pages. Octopus.com also makes it easy to share your news profile among work teams for applications such as competitive and market trend analyses.

After you register for this service, you select news categories and topics from a menu, and then drag and drop them into your customized page. Octopus.com then retrieves an ongoing stream of news stories from these sources, and summarizes them in your personalized "view." Click on a particular story, and you're taken to the Web site that originated the story via a second browser window.

Once you're satisfied with your customized view, you can save it to either a private or public folder or e-mail it to a colleague. Octopus.com is a free service, and makes money by users clicking through to its affiliated news sites. The service now contains business information, personal finance and news channels, but plans to add dozens more in the near future.

--STRATEGY: WEB-BASED PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE DEBUTS--

http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/
http://www.mywebos.com
http://www.nuomedia.com
http://www.personable.com

Since the advent of the Web, we have talked about a future wired world where you are able to access network-based software applications that can be used or rented on demand, instead of buying, installing and maintaining software on your computer. That vision is now coming closer to reality.

In recent months, a number of companies have announced or launched "virtual desktop" products, which provide Web-based versions of desktop productivity software, accessible via a Web browser. These tools include popular business applications such as:
- Word processors
- Spreadsheets
- Presentation tools
- Web-based e-mail services
- Expense reporting
- Calendar/scheduling

MyWebOS, NuoMedia, Personable.com and several other companies now offer Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, expense reporting and other tools, all within an integrated "virtual desktop" environment. Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Corel have also announced plans to offer Web-based versions of their popular office suites in the near future. Pricing of these systems vary. Some services charge monthly or per-use rental fees, while others provide basic services for free, and charge for higher-end business applications.

Advantages of these new tools include: - The ability to access your files and desktop applications anywhere in the world.
- Eliminating the expense and hassle of maintaining, upgrading and troubleshooting desktop software applications.
- The ability for older PCs to use current versions of popular productivity software.

The main disadvantage of these services is that they don't operate as fast as desktop software. But that limitation should disappear as high-bandwidth Internet connections become more widespread in the next few years.

Like the wireless applications we talked about earlier in this issue of ETB, virtual office tools are in their infancy, and are a bit rough around the edges. But we expect that the second and third generation versions will deliver improved functionality and performance at a low cost per user. These tools will really pay off when Web kiosks become more widespread, which will truly give you on-demand access to your files and resources via a universal desktop interface. Then, maybe you can leave your laptop back at the office instead of lugging it on every business trip.

For now, we recommend that you learn more about these tools and their potential benefits. Before you consider pitching the boxed versions of your office productivity software, you should conduct a rigorous evaluation of these online tools. Try setting up a pilot application with several employees, and then ask them for structured feedback on the pros and cons of these tools.

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That's all for now! I welcome your comments and feedback on the Executive Technology Briefing, which will help me to focus it even more closely on your needs.

Jordan Ayan
President
Create-it!