Wireless Firms Setting Sights on Net Explosion in Europe

I had just arrived in Madrid for a welcome cocktail party after a long day in Stockholm--a board meeting and a speech, followed by a long flight. And I had spent the night before in a plane from New York to Stockholm.

So when Jorge Mata, chief executive of MyAlert.com, offered to do a demo of his wireless portal, my heart sank. You know the drill: Find a quiet place, a power source, open the laptop and power up. The whole thing takes half an hour and can put you to sleep when you’re wide awake, let alone when you’re about to keel over.

But before I could register any lack of enthusiasm, Mata had pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and was well into the demo. “You want to know who’s winning the Grand Prix?” he asked, misreading my expression entirely. It turned out to be someone I had never heard of, but Mata was already buying me a T-shirt with the driver’s name on it. A couple of clicks is all it took.

Then we went on to more familiar territory--high-tech stock quotes. Online trading isn’t available quite yet, but just wait! The demo illustrated the compelling nature of wireless applications and the reason Europe’s Internet use--and e-commerce in particular--is likely to explode this year. Wireless is so much easier to use; it’s local, it’s ubiquitous, and millions of people are already comfortable with the devices.

In Spain, for example, 2 million people got cell phones in the last quarter of 1999, for a total base of 16 million; that compares with 10 million PCs and about 3.5 million Internet users.

Mata got started as a telecom engineer for AT&T; Bell Laboratories, and then ran McKinsey & Co.’s multimedia and telecom consultancy in Madrid. From there he moved on to manage an Internet banking project at Banco Santander, Spain’s most innovative bank on the Net.

Most recently, he was vice president of services in Europe for BroadVision, a supplier of e-business application tools. But, he says, “I thought personalization should go a step beyond (PC and Web site tools) to the most popular device in Europe, the cell phone.

“We created MyAlert.com in May ‘99--with BroadVision founder Pehong Chen as an angel investor. The idea was to push the wireless and the personalization. . . . Anything that works with e-commerce you should be able to do on wireless.”

The applications include everything from local restaurant and entertainment suggestions to traffic advice or notifications that you’d better leave for your flight because the plane takes off in 90 minutes and you are 45 minutes away. (Alternatively and perhaps more likely, it can tell you to relax if your flight is running late.)

You can get an alert that your favorite singer will be in town and you can buy a ticket to the show online, or you can get an alert that the CD you were looking for is available at a price that might interest you.

MyAlert.com now has about 120,000 direct users in Spain, France, Italy and Germany, who receive alerts via the Short Message Service, much cheaper than a regular cell-phone call. Besides, service is typically free for the user--sponsored by advertisers and other businesses.

This is all exciting, of course, and I want mine in the U.S. too. But it raises some interesting questions, in addition to privacy issues. First, there’s more to the Internet than e-commerce and transactions. Wireless access lacks something--namely, rich data. The kinds of navigation and visualization tools that make the Web easy to navigate can’t do their stuff; users are likely to get a single limited answer to any query rather than a sense of all the possibilities.

Will wireless reduce the richness of the Net and turn it into a sterile place where only transactions, actions and alerts count? Are the pundits right, that the Net limits the richness of communication and turns us into a series of transactions rather than subtly textured human beings?

Probably that’s a tendency, and one that people will fight the way they always do--by using other, richer media as well, and by using their cell phones for real-time voice-to-voice conversations even as they are driving, walking or riding toward those rich, nuanced physical encounters with other people that they have arranged with short, wireless messages.

But wireless poses another social and political issue in Europe: Just as cable operators in the United States might have undue control over Internet access for many millions of customers, so do the wireless operators in Europe threaten to limit people’s access to any but their own services. Imagine Minitel--the French state monopoly that had a lock on e-commerce until recently--in the hands of private business.

When users get a single answer to a question, who chooses the specific answers they get? Is it the cell-phone company? An advertiser (the highest bidder)? Users--and regulators--should make sure they know the answer.

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Distributed by New York Times Special Features

Esther Dyson edits the technology newsletter Release 1.0 and is the author of the bestseller “Release 2.0.” She is also chairwoman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers. Send comments to edyson@edventure.com.