Telia Mobile, a leading wireless operator in Sweden, is working with Oracle Corp. on a prototype utility, Panama, designed to transfer Internet content to any mobile device.
“The Panama project improves on the wireless application protocol (WAP) standard,” said Roland Svensson, product director at Oracle. “WAP has some inherent limitations that we have worked around. WAP cannot manage security at this stage and also suffers from the fact that there is no WAP content available, only HTML sites. Project Panama deals with these limitations and lets the user access all the value adding services available on the Web.”
Panama will be a standard Oracle product. All its development is done in Sweden, where Oracle recently stared a new business unit. Telia is a partner in the development of applications.
“The real beauty is the unlimited flexibility it brings,” said Lars Persoon, executive vice president of Telia Mobile. “We can create services based on any Internet site, including even secure SLL sites. To demonstrate this, we have developed real time flight reservations, Internet banking services and personal account services.”
The system will also be used to create user customized portals.
Telia Mobile is a unit within the Swedish state-owned telco and ISP Telia.
Several content companies in Sweden are working toward the same goal, to push content from the Internet through WAP based phones and Palm computers. Ericsson and daily newsmagazine Dagens Industri are testing the transfer of financial information to a mobile phone, including possibly trading stocks.
The oldest IDG magazine in Sweden, Mikrodatorn and television network TV4 are feeding their news to PalmPilots with the freeware program from Avanat Go.
And the grand old lady of news sites in Sweden, Aftonbladet will within a week or two launch a new service of news feed from its site to mobile phones.