Now that wireless phone providers have jumped on the Wireless Application Protocol bandwagon, it seems only fitting that the dedicated data network providers should follow suit.
And they are, with help from Neomar Inc., a start-up firm in San Francisco that has created a WAP microbrowser, gateway and portal site designed specifically for personal digital assistants and interactive two-way pagers running on packet data networks from BellSouth Wireless Data L.P. and Motient Inc.
“WAP guys were focused on the phones and the phone guys were focused on WAP,” said John Troyer-co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Neomar. “PDA guys kind of ignored WAP. They considered WAP for dumb devices, while PDAs were smart devices. We brought those two worlds together.”
This week, Motient (formerly American Mobile Satellite Corp.) will begin offering Neomar’s WAP browser for its eLink device, the RIM 850. The company will ship eLink devices with the browser included and has made a downloadable version of the software available on its eLink Web site.
Motient is the first company to go commercial with the WAP browser. Research In Motion Inc. has agreed to include the browser in its Blackberry wireless e-mail devices, which operate on BellSouth’s and Motient’s networks. The Blackberry WAP solution is in closed beta trials. In addition, Palm Inc. is in closed beta testing as well, with plans to extend the Neomar browser to its Palm III, V and VII devices in July.
Just like any WAP system, the client browser is only half of the solution. Neomar also has a WAP gateway, which it outsources to carriers. Both the browser and the gateway are WAP 1.1 complaint, using Wireless Markup Language technology.
In effect, Neomar acts as an application service provider, which means packet data carriers do not need to implement WAP servers in their network. Their systems already have Internet gateways installed to access corporate e-mail accounts. They can use this gateway to connect users to Neomar’s WAP gateway, and thereby offer access to any WAP application or Web site.
Neomar also built a portal aggregating several types of data, which RIM and Palm users can access. The portal exists to give users a central place to access WAP content, some written specifically for PDAs. To support the portal, Neomar has signed several agreements with content providers, such as with weather.com from The Weather Channel, InfoSpace, Total Sports.com and most recently with Go2 Systems, a wireless location-based directory service that directs users to the closest retail location of their choice.
The business user
However, Neomar is more focused on the enterprise application environment than on consumer information services. In fact, the company’s whole PDA focus is a result of Neomar’s belief that PDAs-with their larger screens, interfaces, greater memory and support for graphics-make them better devices to receive business content and enterprise applications.
The company soon hopes to release a version of the WAP gateway for corporate customers to install behind their firewalls, allowing them to extend database information and applications to their mobile work force armed with WAP-enabled PDAs.
Neomar also has a strategic relationship with vVault for its wirelessly accessible file management and document delivery platform.
In addition, Troyer said the company is looking to extend support for ReFLEX-based paging systems as well.
“We’re definitely considering those networks,” he said “We’re focusing on smart devices. Wherever they go, we’ll go.”
