As consumers have grown familiar with the Net, their appetite for real time information, delivered in the most convenient and accessible way, has continued to increase voraciously. People want news, weather, the ability to order books or cars, to get a map, access a how-to site, or ring up a sale on an antique listed on eBay, all from their cell phone, Palm Pilot, Blackberry or even their watch.

To stay in business on the Net, you will need a wireless strategy. It's that simple. As venture capitalist, Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad, recently put it, "The years from 1995 to 2000 were about the Internet. From that year on the platform is being extended." If you want to keep up, you will have to figure out how to reach customers through the channels of their choice, through the web, wireless and by voice, using text-to-speech synthesis, to their cell phone or pager, to their wrist watch or any of a myriad of such web enabled devices which are beginning to crest on the market.

The rapid expansion of wireless has been a glint in the eye of cyber-moguls like Bill Gates for some time. But, as consumers have grown familiar with the Net, their appetite for real time information, delivered in the most convenient and accessible way, has continued to increase voraciously.

The kind of use we once hoped for is now here: You are dashing through an airport to catch your plane. Your cell phone beeps. You pick it up and read " Elaine, Your flight #132 has been cancelled. Reschedule? Yes? No?"

OR

You are driving from Houston to Los Angeles. You get a series of messages: "Bob, There is an accident and traffic pile up on I10 West. Take Loop 410 W to I10 to avoid delays." "You own 1,000 shares GM. Stock price has dropped 10%. Sell?" Or " Your daughter skinned her knee at school, but is back in class and fine. Message?"

These are the kind of alerts and messages which can grease the wheels of our normal every-day life and these are what consumers are demanding. People also want news, weather, the ability to order books or cars, to get a map, access a how-to site, or ring up a sale on an antique listed on eBay, all from their cell phone, Palm Pilot, Blackberry or even their watch.

The key to being able to broadcast this type of information from your website is to offer your web pages in the XTML format. The Extensible Telephony Markup Language (XTML) is "designed to provide a unified approach for the delivery of next-generation enhanced telecommunications services."

According to author Robin Cover, in The XML Cover Pages, "The telecommunication space provides a challenging problem to solve. Whereas the internet space has benefited from the standardization of a single subscriber interface -- the HTML-based browser, and a single communication protocol (HTTP) -- standardization at this level is not possible in the telecommunications arena. Telecommunications solutions must allow subscribers to communicate over an ever-expanding variety of physical and network interfaces (landline, cell phone, pager, browser, Palm Pilot, etc).These service delivery frameworks must be extensible, in order to support the increasing variety of networks and interfaces required... XTML is designed to solve this problem." XTML might be thought of as a bar code for content, allowing various devices to read it.

There are a number of companies which can convert a web site from HTML to XTML in as little as a week. And the sooner one makes this investment, the sooner one will be prepared for the inevitability of ubiquitous access,"the next big thing". Access to the Net anytime, anywhere on anything is really one facet of the personalilzation model and also an acid test for it. For users of the Net there is a moving bar of "interactivity".... more is better and more is expected as time goes by and Net use increases. Constantly increasing personalization of both the type of information a user receives and how he or she receives it is also a moving bar.

Speed is mentioned often as a critical factor on the Net. The ability to broadcast information to a cell phone or pager is critical in that it speeds transactions and allows you to reach a user before a competitor does. While driving down a freeway, a user can access information on a product, negotiate a transaction, and pay for it, with all the documentation sent to both purchaser and consumer , delivery under way and a follow up service channel opened, ready to follow up as needed.

To develop your wireless strategy you must leverage the technology on the Net to analyze and segment your market. With the data mining tools available, your site must utilize and leverage powerful personalization software, so you have the capability to deliver information about your product or service, according to the user's preference. Using XTML pages, you must then have a Broadcast engine to reach out and deliver a unique value proposition to your customer and a transaction engine to close the transaction.

The effect of this frictionless, permission based interaction is to deliver a one to one service, similar to what your grandparents might have enjoyed but with real time speed and tremendously enhanced knowledge of your user's preferences. Wireless and ubiquitous are the next wave; better catch it while the surf is up.