Transform your business with mobile technology
Madanmohan Rao

Going Wireless Author: Jaclyn Easton Publisher: HarperCollins, 2002

While “Web-enabling” may have been the clarion call of the Internet Age, “handsizing” seems to be the slogan of the Wireless Age, and Going Wireless by Jaclyn Easton is easily one of the most comprehensive books documenting the impact of mobile business applications on customer relationships, enterprise processes, and emerging markets.

Easton is a technology futurist, reporter for the Los Angeles Times and CBS News, and author of StrikingItRich.com. The 30 chapters in her latest book are packed with case studies and tips on how businesses have been leveraging wireless technologies for operational and strategic advantage over the decades.

“Wireless is a huge whale floating just beneath the surface. All people are seeing is the tail fluke. But one day it’s going to beach, and everyone is going to be surprised at the size of it,” remarked computer maven David Hughes, back in the 1970s! Clearly, unlike the mainstream Internet revolution of the 1990s, wireless has been around for quite some time—more than a century, actually.

“We are being distracted by the hype of wireless and mass consumers. The less obvious but more valuable nugget is the metamorphosis of business processes from which companies are saving astronomical sums and finding themselves ridiculously competitive,” Easton begins.

The “thousands of points of connectivity” such as wireless phones improve data flows and help bring everyone into the corporate loop, including those left out in the Internet Age because they did not have laptops. “Wireless is the growth hormone for e-commerce,” according to Gartner Group analyst Bob Egan.

The book abounds with examples and case studies. For instance, Amazon and eBay already have wireless auctions. The restaurant chain Johnny Rockets lets customers use their cellphones to place and tally meal orders for pickup. Domino’s Pizza has a similar wireless ordering service called PizzaCast. Sports stadiums like Madison Square Garden bring the game to the customer via sportsfeeds, just like wireless units bring the store to the customer.

Cellphone companies are new entrants into the payments systems value chain—and also have the ultimate leverage to guarantee swift payments: the threat of turning off a customer’s cellphone!

Wireless companies like SkyGo have reinvented marketing, via strategies like interactive branding (eg. Subway’s games and digital coupons), sales alerts (eg. ESPN’s alerts on basketball goods), coupons (eg. KFC’s mobile coupons for subsequent redemption), incentive ads (eg. CompUSA’s deal for a handheld plus free case), and audio ads (eg. links to recorded information).

“Customers are open to mobile advertising as long as the ads are opt-in, are precisely targeted, and include incentives or coupons,” Easton advises. The key is to leverage location and context, for example via integration of ads with applications for scheduling, e-mail reminding, and coupon clipping.

The book discusses a vast array of applications providers and device players active in m-commerce. Entertainment may be wireless’s most fun killer app, according to Easton. Swedish gaming company It’s Alive has developed a location-sensitive game called Botfighters. Atom Films makes short films available for downloading. Warner Bros. is teaming with PacketVideo to offer 30-second Looney Tunes clips; PacketVideo has over 45 content developers. Lovegety offers wireless matchmaking and dating services. “Entertainment has a history of pushing the perceived limits of technology,” says Easton.

Other opportunities are opening up too. While teens and youth may be the leading users of many mobile services, there will be a “trickle up” effect and it will catch the attention of parents as well.

Developments to watch for in future include the infrared Financial Messaging Protocol proposed by the Infrared Data Association. Challenges also arise in business etiquette (eg. avoiding cellphone usage in seminars), eavesdropping, privacy, security and viruses. Employees must ensure that corporate information on their PDAs is suitably encrypted.
“Wireless always converges with existing technology, liberating whatever it is matched with,” Easton concludes. In sum, wireless technologies have come a long, long way since wireless telegraphy was invented in the mid-1890s by Guglielmo Marconi.

Madanmohan Rao is the author of “The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook” and can be reached at madan@inomy.com. This review is published in association with Inomy.com

Source those cheap Net phone-calls
Frederick Noronha

Practical VoIP Using VOCAL Luan Dang, Cullen Jennings & David Kelly Publisher: O’ Reilly, 2002 Price: $44.95

From the cover, an angry-looking snipefish stares out at you. Across its five-hundred odd pages, a sea of technical data greets you. Practical VoIP Using VOCAL is a book for those wanting to build their own VoIP system. Voice over Internet Protocol software improvements (with better bandwidth and processing speed) have made Internet telephony a decent-enough option to consider.

This book describes how the system is actually built. You can acquire the source code, install it onto a system, connect phones and make calls.

Co-author Dang is co-founder of Vovida Networks. VOCAL (the Vovida Open Communication Library) is an open-source software project. It provides call control, routing, media, policy, billing information and provisioning.

Your system can scale from a single box to multihost carrier grade. VOCAL is freely available from the Cisco-sponsored Vovida.org site. VOCAL is open-source. You can see not just how the system works, but also how common problems are being worked out in the development environment.

This book promises to “show how to implement, program and administer VoIP systems using open-source tools.” As co-author Jennings argues: “Along with other VoIP applications, VOCAL is actively inverting the way telephony is deployed by allowing an Internet-style anarchy that was never possible in the traditional PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). It has been a fun area to work in.”

True. For us in India, since Fool’s Day 2002, the area of Internet telephony has become a reality. Who doesn’t want inexpensive telephone calls over the Internet, limiting long-distance charges to the nominal cost of
e-mail?

But the price of this US-published book (almost US$45), for us here, is still an issue. Hopefully the Indian edition at more affordable rates won’t be too long in coming. All in all, a good book for those interested in this field. And, this is a field more should definitely get interested, if we’re to enable the world’s second-largest populated country to have more affordable access to communicating globally.

The nuts and bolts of website architecture
Prashant L Rao

The Art and Technology of Software Engineering (A mosaic of models and methods) Author: R Ramaswamy (Editor) Contributors: R Ganesan, A S Mondal, S V Nagaraj, U Nerurkar, and S Sengupta Publisher: Tata McGraw-Hill Price: Rs 295

The Art and Technology of Software Engineering is a collection of essays on building Web-based applications. The book is the result of an ongoing research program at the Software Concept Laboratory of at Infosys Technologies. Web development, as the book stresses, is very different from client-server and other application models where you are essentially writing apps for a controlled environment and you know very clearly who the likely users are. On the Web, you know very little and have to provide a user interface (UI) that can cater to all comers as well as prioritise server responses for paying customers.

The first chapter (there are seven in this rather thin volume) finds S V Nagaraj taking the example of an auction site and quickly going over what his colleagues will be covering.

The chapter on Functional Requirements Specification (FRS) offers the reader a chance to take a crack at a hypothetical requirement spec for a library system. The rest of the chapter looks at various techniques that can be used in FRS, starting with Entity Relationship diagrams. Then it goes on to demolish a bunch of myths regarding FRS including “FRS is about business, design is about the software” and “You first gather, then analyse, and then specify”. Then there’s a case study that looks at re-engineering a legacy system to a client/server setup with a Web-enabled component. This is an actual project that Infy worked on and the advantages of an object model are clarified through it.

The chapter on the design of usable websites was of particular interest to me since UI design is a very controversial subject with designers having diametrically opposite views on almost everything. Some Web designers tend to go with the ‘more is better’ philosophy which essentially involves using all the latest tricks that look great but result in a website that is almost impossible to access over a dialup connection. The writer starts off by listing common errors in Web design and then compares WUI (Web UI) with traditional GUI. Web design methods, from defining the mission and vision for a site, to building and testing it, are discussed.

Component-based development (CBD) looks in some detail at Sun’s Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). There is a quick comparison between EJB, Microsoft COM+ and the OMG’s CCM models for CBD, followed by a discussion of technology and methodology issues. The authors find that analysis for CBD, unlike that in object-oriented programming, is driven more by using published collections of software patterns rather than by prescription. A five-step methodology called O2BC (Objects to Business Components) is outlined.

The chapter on Security Analysis and Design defines security from three angles—victim, attacker and threat. Several existing security models are discussed. A model is derived and an example given where the said model is applied to a fictitious financial application.

In Performance Models, prioritising users at the application-level, methods of queuing and scheduling are put under the microscope.

Load Balancing looks at the ways and means to handle bursty traffic at the application and the Web server level. At the end of the chapter three popular tools—Windows NT Load Balancing Service (WLBS), Cisco LocalDirector and Eddie—are discussed. This bit could have been very interesting but the writer skims the topic.

Overall, this book has a lot going for it. It combines theory with practical examples to give a good idea of what’s involved in developing Web applications that work. It’s not meant for the average reader, this one is developers/architects only. Even Web designers will find little of interest here since the book looks more at the nuts and bolts of website architecture rather than aesthetics.