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Sharma's advice comes from years of experience as a senior development project manager at Luminant Worldwide Corporation, a Dallas-based e-business services firm with clients ranging from AT&T and IBM to Dr. Pepper and United Airlines. "Don't assume your users are all upwardly mobile, tech-savvy Americans," Sharma warns about the global mobile phone market. "Nearly 90 percent of teenagers in Finland, for example, have wireless phones." Teenagers in Japan represent "the largest audience in the wireless arena" in their country. Sharma's advice: know your audience, not just your competition. Sharma predicts that most users access the same information from multiple devices, such as laptops, pagers and PDAs. However, it is the user preference and capability of the device that will determine what he calls the "user experience": "Usability and personalization are absolute keys to successful pervasive computing solutions. If a solution is not designed with the user in mind, it's bound to fail -- it's that simple."
Sharma's book is the wireless proposition for the business world. But technologists and architects won't be disappointed either. Sharma has something for almost everybody, from savvy technical staff (Chapters 1 and 2) to novices in the wireless Internet marketplace. The book guides you painlessly through a maze of technical concepts and terms, graphs, and figures, into the current wireless Internet industry.
Where he becomes visibly cautious is the future of unwired applications and services. He does not venture a new theory beyond Moore's Law or predict a dramatic turn in the developments of the wireless technologies. He outlines several areas of technology that will impact the wireless Internet significantly in the future, including biometrics, displays and devices, semiconductors, networks and wireless Internet as an interface to different technologies. He even seems to think that one area in particular, the Napster model, carries a tremendous potential for wireless applications: "Using Napster's architecture, I would be able to go to the Internet and fetch that document wirelessly from my home computer into my PDA or laptop computer. The document doesn't have to reside on a centralized server for it to be accessed. Using the Napster model, the Internet becomes a widely distributed server farm."
Sharma is not a visionary. He is a reporter. The strength of his books lies in his reporting ability -- finding out what's out there, understanding it, sorting it all out and presenting it to us in a clear and organized manner.
Sharma helps the reader visualize of technical concepts and the global Internet industry through graphs, illustrations, and photos. Yet Sharma is careful; he uses graphics to explain, not to entertain. A listing of web resources, numerous references, and a steady flow of clear and succinct definitions of technical and industry terms create a holistic picture of the rapidly growing new technology within a for-profit context.
Each of the book's 10 chapters is divided into sections and subsections. All illustrations are listed at the beginning of the book. All the acronyms used by the author are listed and defined in one of the two appendices at the end of the book. The other appendix features two listings of useful URLs. One listing includes the URLs of wireless equipment makers, magazines, newsletters, organizations, and mobile telephony. The other listing compiles the URLs of all of the companies mentioned throughout the 236-page book.
In the first two chapters, Sharma lays the foundation for understanding the basics of wireless Internet applications. In Chapters 3 and 4, he discusses the key market drivers and trends of the wireless Internet industry as well as various applications and services introduced in the wireless marketplace. Chapters 5 and 6 provide more technical in-depth information about the computing and communications industries. Planners of wireless Internet solutions will find Chapters 7 and 8 very helpful; Sharma evaluates vendors' solutions and shares some principles for successful implementation of the technology. And finally, Sharma looks into the future of wireless in his last chapter. To put the new technology in context, Sharma introduces you to the various network computing models in Chapter 1. He walks you through the three main stages of the evolution of network computing: client/server, Internet-centric and pervasive computing. At the conclusion of this chapter, the author dissects the term "wireless Internet enterprise applications" as his way of introducing us to the individual concepts.
Chapter 2, the "Wireless Primer," begins with the description of the basic wireless network architecture and progresses to the two main transmission technologies: packet-switched data and circuit-switched data. The final part of the chapter deals with a brief review of the evolution of wireless technologies, from analog to digital.
In Chapter 3 we get a glimpse of the market drivers that prompt theoretical wireless concepts to become "real-world applications" -- processing power, memory and power consumption -- followed by a review of some constraints imposed on mobile devices that were alleviated by technological innovations and general acceptance of standards in the computing and communications industries. Next follows a summary of each of the standards, including WAP, Bluetooth, XML, and SyncML. The chapter concludes with a discussion of trends and technology evolution of the Internet era.
In Chapter 4, Sharma evaluates business-to-consumer (B2C), enterprise (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) applications and services in different market sectors.
In Chapter 5, he reviews some computing and wireless technologies driving the emerging applications in the wireless Internet market. Computing technologies include transcoding and markup languages, WAP, speech recognition, Jini, Motion Picture Experts Groups 7 (MPEG7), IP-based technologies, biometrics and synchronization. Wireless technologies include Short Message Service (SMS), automatic identification and data capture, wireless LAN/PAN technologies, 2.5G and 3G wireless technologies and position location technologies.
Chapter 6 features a list of the wireless Internet industry players, including content providers, aggregators, middleware software providers, system developers and service providers, network operators and wireless service providers, device providers, infrastructure providers and consumers.
Based on the needs of a typical organization, Sharma evaluates in Chapter 7 some of the technologies introduced earlier in the book. He divides wireless Internet projects into three categories:
In Chapter 8, Sharma identifies and reviews the success factors and guiding principles required to succeed in developing wireless Internet projects. Some of these factors include having a clear strategy and goals, doing competitive analysis, ensuring usability and interoperability, aggregating content, and ensuring security.
Chapter 9, "Wireless Internet Tomorrow," is about the technologies and trends that are and will be affecting wireless Internet applications in the next five to 10 years. Sharma predicts that progress in such areas as semiconductors and display technologies will continue to have a large impact on the computing and communications industries. But, he says, "At the end of the day, it's the applications and services that win the hearts of consumers."
-- Barbara Lach-Smith (lachsmith@hotmail.com)