Planet of the Apps

In the near future, you will enter San Francisco International Airport and see a virtual red carpet leading to the departure gates, interlaced with plane departure times and weather reports. Virtual maps and signs will display shopping malls and train stations, even the constellations of the night sky. According to researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., computing will eventually advance to the point where electronic information is everywhere, and physical space is united with digital graphics and data.

"As global positioning, wireless communication and mobile display technologies continue to advance," writes Almaden researcher J.C. Spohrer, "our notion of place will change. Information objects — first geocoded signs, and later animated special effects — will begin to populate real physical space."

Even if Spohrer’s futuristic vision is never realized in quite the way he describes, many technologists believe that "pervasive computing" is inevitable: Microprocessors will continue to migrate from the desktop into other devices until they become ubiquitous. Researchers also believe that today’s wireless devices — GPS-enabled PDAs, cellular phones with media players and everything in between — represent the first iteration of such a futuristic scenario.

Sure enough, it seems like every day brings the announcement of another wireless gizmo, protocol or platform. Nokia is getting ready to launch the Nokia 9290 Communicator, a phone with a 4000-color screen and a RealPlayer for music and video downloads, which hits the United States next year. Streaming audio on wireless devices will be feasible by 2003, and streaming video within three years, according to Scott Gaines, manager of product launches for Nokia in Irving, Texas.

It’s a complex landscape, with hundreds of companies offering multiple solutions for the killer "converged" device, or the killer wireless application. The advent of third-generation (3G) wireless networks promises to make that landscape even more complex, as the range of possible mobile media services gets even wider to include everything from information services such as traffic reports, stock market data and the weather, to wireless gaming and entertainment downloads — even video messaging.

But industry analysts agree that the wireless streaming space is very different from the desktop equivalent. Wireless users are on the move, and that changes the kinds of services they want, and how they use them. Wireless devices are personal in a way that far surpasses the so-called "personal" computer — users carry them in their pockets, flaunt them as status symbols, and individualize them with their own applications, content or cosmetic designs. Wireless devices also feed consumer desire for immediacy: the ability to change plans at a moment’s notice, locate a restaurant on an impulse, or view the trailer for a recently released movie while driving past the theater. Now add geography to the mix: Offices look pretty much the same from Seoul to San Francisco, but step outside and the urban environments are different.

This high level of individualization requires a great deal of flexibility on the part of application and device developers. Given the enormous cost of entering the 3G marketplace — 3G license bids were in the billions of dollars — most are unwilling to rely on guesswork to define the scope of applications they will develop or support. To draw a more reliable map of the complex world of broadband mobile applications, companies are bringing sociology and past user behavior into play, and leaning toward open development platforms as a way of efficiently meeting localized and personalized needs.