[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Cable & Wireless Optus has celebrated the first birthday of its WAP service with the release of a survey examining “what’s hot” on WAP.
E-mail has proven to be the most popular service on the Optus Networker, but news, financial information and lifestyle-oriented services were also highly sought, according to CWO’s Mobile Internet & Data manager Finola Thompson.
“The convenience of being able to read and send e-mail while you are out and about is obviously a big bonus for our customers,” she said. “Stocks are tops, with Optus Networker users regularly checking on their shares.
Optus said location-based services are also popular, with over 30 percent of Optus WAP users using them since the service was launched earlier this month.
According to Ms. Thompson, WAP is continuing to win Australians over and has come a long way since Optus launched it in November last year. “We have tripled sales of our WAP service in the last three months and we expect this to continue as even more WAP enabled handsets come onto the market,” she said.
“We have grown from having only nine content areas when we launched to now having over 52 categories and access to over two million external WAP sites world wide through our open gateway.”
Ms. Thompson said that Optus has also found that businesses are particularly keen to be part of the mobile data revolution by using WAP to gain access to their customers. “Over the last six months we have added some major names to our WAP portal including Westpac, Credit Swiss First Boston, HSBC InvestorDirect, TD Waterhouse, Sanford Securities, start.com.au, ninemsn, Yahoo!, Excite Australia, wishlist, dstore and Ticketek,” she said.
