Services & Applications

Brewing Up Revenues with Java to Go

If there is one critical technology that is allowing GSM operators to expand their business beyond voice and into data services, it's Java. The technology – in an incarnation called J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) – was invented by Sun Microsystems to provide a software development and deployment environment for wireless and mobile devices.

"Java is the 'smart' in smart phones," said Eric Chu, director J2ME business and marketing at Sun. "If you look at most mobile phones (without J2ME), they are relative dumb devices. They have no ability to do computation or to run applications, store data or interact with the network in a client/server manner."

For the consumer, the advantages are obvious, but for GSM mobile operators, J2ME also has some exciting features.

"J2ME hides the underlying operating system (on a device) and allows a Java program to work on any wireless handset whether it is Linux or Windows CE or a proprietary platform," said Sanjay Gupta, senior manager of global standards at Motorola. "It doesn't matter what it is, the user experience would be the same."

That means developers can write a program once and, with a few tweaks to accommodate OEM and operator nuances, deploy it on any J2ME-enabled device. This has some clear advantages.

"There are so many kinds of devices that the developer community can write applications for that it doesn't happen until there is a critical mass. If they can write to J2ME, they can target a much larger market than they otherwise could," said Gupta.

According to the Sun Microsystems-owned Java.com, there were about 94 million Java-enabled handsets on the worldwide market in 2003. They included more than 150 handset models, which are carried by 53 operators worldwide, a majority of which are GSM operators. Based on these numbers, it's clear that Java is the platform on which most data applications will be built in the GSM world.

In the U.S., the numbers are equally striking. According to Seamus McAteer, senior analyst at the Zelos Group, Java-enabled handset shipments are expected to reach 19 million in the U.S. in 2003, up from 8 million in 2002. Of those, 10.5 million are devices that operate on U.S. GSM networks.

McAteer said by 2004 there will be 22 million Java-enabled handsets on U.S.-based GSM networks. He forecasts growth to 45 million Java-enabled handsets on GSM networks by 2007.

The national statistics are from two reports published by Zelos. They are "U.S. Wireless Gaming Report" published in March 2003 and a February 2003 report called "Wireless Java Carrier and OEM Support Guarantees Ubiquity." The U.S. GSM statistics are unpublished said McAteer, but are culled from source data that were gathered for the reports.

This growth has helped attract more than three million Java programmers worldwide according to Java.com. Victor Brilon, Java application manager at Nokia, states that Java has been a runaway success in the developer community. "A lot of colleges are teaching Java as a first programming language," he explained. Its popularity can also be attributed to its simplicity. "It's a good language because it removes a lot of the nasty things programmers worry about in C++."

The key success in J2ME applications to date has been mobile games. "As a general rule, we're looking at the market for mobile games in the U.S. as a $400-500 million opportunity," said Zelos' McAteer. He recognizes that while most of that half billion dollars will go to game developers, a healthy piece of the revenue will also go to operators. However, operator revenue will leap upward when games become network-capable and support multi-users so that operators can bill for game-related network usage, accordingly to McAteer.

There are all kinds of non-gaming applications that will also harness GPRS networks and use client/server technology to boost revenues for operators.

"When you can add a wireless blog (web log) client to handset and perhaps upload of photos to web sites from your handset and do things like that – that's when Java's impact will really become evident," said McAteer.

"I can definitely conceive of a market opportunity where people will pay for subscriptions for network-capable applications. There will be an addressable market of 25 percent of Java-enabled subscribers that will add an incremental $5-10 to their monthly wireless phone bill to take advantage of this," he said.

One of the more interesting J2ME applications that Sun's Chu has seen – which lends itself to the future of J2ME capabilities – is a traffic-monitoring program. "A DoCoMo employee showed me this application that displayed a traffic map of Tokyo that had green and red areas (which reflected the traffic volumes on various routes). Every day he would run it to see what route was the quickest way home," he recalled.

Mobile-Mind of Watertown, Massachusetts, is also developing several innovative J2ME applications. The company has created a series of mobile learning applications in J2ME that allow students who are studying for their SAT or GRE exams to do practice tests on their mobile Java-enabled handsets.

Perry Spero, manager of applications development at Mobile-Mind, believes that consumer-purchased Java downloads can help reduce churn. "If I buy a phone and spend $5 here or there on downloaded applications, I am much less likely to drop my phone (service) and switch carriers because I am getting a plan from them for, say, $3 less," he said. "We're trying to develop applications to allow people to turn a phone into something really personal and get a lot out of it, aside from games."

As for the enterprise market, experts say there are many opportunities to develop Java applets to attract business users. However, this is an emerging opportunity and is less mature than the market for consumer J2ME applications. Still, there are several players getting into the J2ME enterprise market. One is Defywire, a company based in Reston, Virginia. Its Picomail Messaging System enables wireless access to enterprise email through J2ME-enabled devices. The application allows users to read and reply to email accessed from IMAP and POP3 servers as well as those that run Microsoft Exchange.

Ultimately, J2ME is the underlying platform on which applications and services can be built, which will drive data revenue in the coming years, especially for the GSM industry.

"Every handset vendor is looking to support Java," said Motorola's Sanjay Gupta," that's because operators are saying: 'we need Java'."