The Oxford Knowledge Company

Have you ever found yourself walking down a street in Central London and wondered where on earth you are and how far you need to walk to the nearest tube station?  Wouldn't it be great to be able to switch on your mobile device and have it bring up a little map?

 

The truth is that whilst wireless Internet access sounds terrifically exciting and promises much, most European residents have yet to be able to make use of most of the really groovy tools and applications, because the 'standards' have yet to be agreed upon.

In practical terms it means that you have to be very keen and try rather hard to get yourself a piece of wireless equipment (most likely a WAP phone at the moment) to access the Internet at the dullard speed of 9600kbps - the equivalent of an ante-diluvian modem. 

But if you could, or if you live in the USA and have access to Palm VII technology (wireless) and its ilk, what could you do about searching for information?

WAP and mobile Internet access has been about knowing which URL to type in.  In this way, it is like the olden days of the Web - you tend to browse via special wireless directory sites (portals)., There are, however a growing number of intriguing new search technologies focused on the WAP market.

WAP, I should stress, calls for a substantial different design of Web page. Graphics are wasteful and therefore not encouraged, text needs to be formatted to allow very small chunks to be read at a time.  So being able to use Google to search its large collection of random Web pages is not necessarily what you a WAP user is looking for, because the chances are that most of those pages will be practically unviewable.

(Diehard Google fans, however, may be pleased to know that you can search with Google from your wireless device - see http://wap.google.com and clever software even allows for correction of misspellings - essential when you are limited to entering a search term from a mobile phone number pad!)

For this reason, most of the WAP-based searching concentrates on WML pages, which are best suited to viewing on the technology.  Some examples of such searchable collections of WAP web pages are: FAST WAP Search (http://mobile.alltheweb.com/), WAPLY (http://www.waply.com/), 2ThumbsWAP (http://www.2thumbswap.com/), WAPAW (http://www.wappaw.com).

Accessing the wireless Web through one of these portals is reminiscent of the old days of Yahoo - not many pages, not much choice!

Still, if you are an information junkie stuck on a train and you just have to browse, there's plenty to keep you occupied and the advent of special version of regular newsletters for wireless users means that there is plenty of current, useful content available.

Wireless searching acquires real meaning when it becomes location-based.  If you are relying on a mobile phone or wireless PDA to access the Internet, the chances are that you are travelling.  And people who are travelling need to know very specific kinds of information: where you are, how to get to where you are going, when the train leaves, phone numbers, what you can buy or eat on the way and what is the latest score of your football team. (Okay, maybe not everyone needs the last bit.)

The principle behind this technology is as follows: your wireless device can have some idea of where in the world you are because of GPS (Global Positioning Satellite).  When you turn on your device it can 'tune in' to information that is presented only to devices in that geographical location. 

New services such as Lasoo (http://www.lasoo.com, http://wap.lasoo.com) allow you to search for keywords and present results ONLY for areas that you have 'lasooed'. For example, try entering 'Boca Raton' whilst searching on coffee as a keyword, and you'll be given a picture of a map with the locations of all the coffee bars listed in Lasoo.  This is location-based searching that doesn't need to know where you are, but 'fakes it' by having a huge directory of map-based information.

Other companies such as Webraska (http://www.webraska.com) and GeoDiscovery (http://www.geodiscovery.com) are developing location-based searching technologies that make use of GPS functionality.

There's no doubt that there will be demand for these services when the technology all comes together.  Ahead of the game in the mobile phone industry, Europeans have ironically fallen behind the USA when it comes to wireless device functionality.  Wireless handhelds such as the Palm VII can be used only in the USA, use cell phone radio frequencies that are not available elsewhere. 

The promised arrival of devices based on 3G should change all of that.  Assuming that is, that anyone can afford the charges the telecoms will somehow have to charge for such access, given the huge fees paid to the UK government for the broadband licences!