Migrating to a Mobile Architecture
By Minerva Tantoco Hobbs
Now that the Internet is nearing ubiquity with its massive stores of digitized content, and now that we're simultaneously seeing explosive growth in the use of mobile devices, it's a natural leap to consider the convergence of the two in the form of the wireless Web. Indeed, as mobile networks improve speed and data integrity, and lower costs, it makes sense to take advantage of the rich store of data on the Web and make it available to anyone with a mobile device.
Analysts have predicted this convergence—and the resulting business opportunities—for quite some time. The predictions vary, sometimes conflict, and are perhaps inflated, but all point to a steady rise in wireless usage over the next five years. In March, CIO.com reported that The Strategis Group expects U.S. mobile commerce revenues to jump from just less than $150 million in 2001 to more than $5 billion by 2004. It also predicted that there will be 91 million m-commerce users by 2007. Jupiter/Media Metrix predicts that U.S. consumers will be using more than 90 million WAP-enabled phones by that time, even though there were only 8 million such phones in use in the year 2000. And the ARC Group, a technology research group, recently published a study predicting that there will be 1.2 billion mobile-data users by 2005—a figure that exceeds the expected number of users obtaining data with personal computers—making mobile access the more common method for accessing Internet data and commerce.
Perhaps reflecting the lowered expectations of the stock market at the time of this writing, reports released in the first quarter of this year show a more sober picture, with longer technology development cycles (such as delays in 3G roll-outs), slower adoption, and therefore, slower market growth.
