The WAP forum, representing 500 companies, developed the Wireless Application Protocol—the technology that essentially describes the display interface for myriad hand-held devices. Scott Goldman, a 25-year veteran of the wireless industry, has started wireless companies and conducted training in wireless worldwide. He is the author of Ask the Wireless Wizard. 

Q: Why does WAP matter?

A: WAP makes it easier for all kinds of wireless devices to grab content from and deliver content to the Internet wirelessly.

Q: How do businesses figure out whether to go wireless?

A: Easy: If they're on the Web, they should be mobile too. Web site owners should make at least a portion of their sites available to wireless devices.

Q: Europe and Asia are ahead of us wirelessly. Why?

A: It's complicated. For starters, there's the infrastructure issue. If you look at Japan and Europe, each carrier covers an area the size of one U.S. state. In addition, the markets and applications are quite different. About 40 percent of Japan's iMode revenue comes from entertainment—games, horoscopes, cartoon downloading—real moneymakers. In China and Hong Kong, gaming and gambling are big. In Europe, people are interested in banking and personal finance. In the U.S., we expect lots of corporate apps to become popular—e-mail, database and inventory checking, things like that.

Q: So the infrastructure in the U.S. is holding back the wireless Web here?

A: Yes, for two main reasons. First, fragmented networking standards in the U.S. make it difficult to develop equipment and reduce costs with economies of scale. Second, local neighborhoods resist having tower sites installed; everybody wants coverage in their front yard, but nobody wants a cellular tower in their back yard.

Q: How about wireless information for employees?

A: Wireless is a natural for almost any business with a field sales force or the like. WAP's not for everything; nobody expects people to research their Ph.D.s on a WAP phone. But you can get some kinds of information a lot faster than you can waiting for a laptop to boot up, connecting to a phone jack (if you can find one), and then trying to get into the corporate intranet.

Q: What about all these different wireless data transmission networks—GSM, CDMA, and so on? Will 3G networks allow us to leapfrog these issues?

A: These standards are not as important anymore, because today's phones are smart enough that the network part is made relatively transparent to people. We are slowly moving toward worldwide standards like 3G, but that's several years away. Lots of carriers have spent billions putting up the systems that we have now. They want to squeeze some revenue out of that.

Q: Should companies wait for standards to shake out before developing applications for mobile devices?

A: No. This is like any new technology. Companies need to think about how they viewed getting their first fax machines or putting themselves on the Web. If they want a competitive advantage, they should make the jump to mobile commerce soon.

Q: Big picture: Where do you see all of this headed in two or three years, both in the U.S. and worldwide?

A: You'll see things develop and congeal rapidly in the next year or two. Wireless devices will become so pervasive that they will serve not only as communications devices but as mobile wallets. Even today, you can do lots of things with mobile phones in other parts of the world—like charging items to your phone bill. A great application I just saw in Hong Kong lets you buy a movie ticket right over the WAP phone; it charges the purchase to your phone bill and creates a bar code on your phone that a scanner at the theater can read, which then opens the turnstile and lets you in. Why would you have to carry other devices or multiple credit cards? You can have things charged to your phone bill or your credit card right through your phone.