From the ashes of the first generation of dotcoms is arising a new breed of players: more focused, more result-oriented, and more targeted on emerging technologies like the mobile Internet - the "m-dotcoms." And the largest and fastest growing markets in the world for the wireless Internet are right here in Asia, particularly east Asia.

"Asia is beating Europe and North America in pure wireless markets, and will lead in the wireless Internet as well," said Emmanuel Sauquet, Asia Director of wireless product solutions for Nortel Networks, at the recent Wireless Internet World Asia 2001 conference in Singapore.

Wireless communication standards and capabilities are evolving rapidly across the spectrum, from 1G (voice only) in 1979, 2G (GSM/TDMA, with speeds of 9.6 to 14.4 Kbps) in 1992, 2.5G (GPRS, with speeds capable of 115 Kbps) in 2001; EDGE, capable of 384 Kbps, in 2002, and 3G (WCDMA, 2 Mbps) this year. The wireless Internet industry is also moving rapidly beyond WAP.

"WAP has been one of the biggest failures in the industry. Wireless Internet has to be a real multimedia experience, not just a few lines of text," said Sauquet. "WAP is complex to set up and slow to use. It has discredited the industry."

The paradigm of the 3G world will be any device, any network, any content. "As for devices, we will see both a convergence and a divergence," he said. Dedicated devices will soon converge between the home and the office environment in a ‘Swiss Army knife’ fashion, as handheld computers double as cellphones and even digital cameras. At the same time, there is a divergence of devices according to functionality: communications (pagers, phones), computation (PDAs, PCs, palmtops, notebooks) and entertainment (cameras, games, MP3 players).New opportunities are opening up for startups and big operators along the wireless Internet value chain - interface devices (voice, stylus and earpieces), content, m-services, aggregation, and systems integration (especially in bridging networks, security, billing, and customer care systems). "There will be a marked difference in markets, needs, applications and devices," said Sauquet. The three trump cards which operators hold include location data of customers (for pitching location-based services, for selling this data to other service providers), billing relationship (one consolidated bill, transaction fees), and customer databases (demographics and usage). "The networks know who you are and where you are. This has enormous leverage potential," said Sauquet. Numerous opportunities will open up for alliances, and big Internet companies will soon start partnering with the big cellphone operators.The research firm Strategis Group predicts that the majority of Asia-Pacific inhabitants will first experience the Internet through wireless rather than traditional wired means.

Asia also has extremely high turnover in new models of cellphones. "In Japan, cellphones are changed by users every 3 to 6 months, as compared to an average of 9 months in Hong Kong," said David Almstrom, VP of Ericsson China.

China had 85 million cellphone users at the end of 2000, and will cross 100 million by the middle of this year. China also has an estimated 22 million Internet users today, and is expected to cross the 100 million user mark in 2004. A record-breaking 10 million SMS messages were sent out on Chinese New Year’s day earlier this year.

"But it is absolutely clear that for the wireless Internet services market to really take off in a country, there will have to be close cooperation between carriers, handset companies, content providers and m-service companies who will have to work together," advised M-Werks’ Greg Tarr. Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo, whose i-Mode wireless Internet service is the world’s leader, has got its business model perfectly right, according to Tarr - revenues are proportionately shared with the content providers. In other markets, operators even expect content providers to pay to get featured on their networks, he lamented.

WiLL Project is a cross-industry marketing initiative inaugurated in August 1999 and it focuses on four conceptual motifs of Relax, Emotion, Creative and Cool. The project currently offers 18 products under WiLL brand from seven participating companies which include Asahi Breweries, Kokuyo Co., Matsushita Electric, Kao Corporation Kinky Nippon Tourist Co. and Ezaki Glico beside Toyota. Under the WILL project, the participating companies share a mutual Website, conduct joint promotional campaigns and run cooperative advertising.

Breaking the monopoly of IBM in the business of recycling computers, Japan’s Fujitsu and Germany’s Siemens are about to set up a network in Europe to recycle personal computers, say reports.

Fujitsu is also to open an online market soon to sell recycled memories and other computer parts to semi-conductor traders with initial target of US $ 8.1 million in sales.

Fujitsu-Siemens plan is to use nearly 90% of the plastics and metals from collected computers and printers including those of other manufactures, and is in line with European Union’s move to require manufacturers to collect used products from around 2008.

To Bridge
Digital Divide

The Trust is a non-profit entity, founded in 1998 by Deshpande with two other private software engineers and a professor from Indian Institute of Science.