WASP bridges ‘digital divide’ for Pinoy mobile phone users

An all-Filipino company is closing the gap between PC and mobile phone users by offering wireless e-mail services for millions of the country’s GSM users.

In a country where mobile phone deployment far outpaces Internet usage, Mobile Arts Inc. aims to bridge the "digital divide" by providing greater access and affordable wireless Internet access.

The newly launched wireless applications services provider (WASP) projects handling over 23.5 million messages by the end of the year.

Ramon Duremdes Jr., president and CEO of Mobile Arts, says that while other countries utilize PCs as the primary e-mail device, supplemented by the mobile phone, the reverse is happening locally. "For many local users, in fact, the mobile phone is their only e-mail device," he says.

With services revolving around wireless e-mail, Mobile Arts initially offers a wireless complement Web-based e-mail and a fully integrated address book. Clients such as Smart Communications Inc. and the Pilipino Telephone Co. (Piltel) have already branded their service as TextMail. Just five months after the product offering, TextMail subscribers now number over 340,000.

"Available technology today actually supports cross-media messaging wherein the sender can try to reach the message recipient using different media all at once, thus increasing the probability of receipt," Duremdes says. "The recipient is also empowered to choose by which media to receive the messages based on such criteria as the sender, the subject and the time."

In the Philippines, wireless data services remain a "pocket of excellence," says Duremdes, in spite of the economic difficulties. User growth is still high and the public is quickly receptive to such value-added services.

Figures from the National Telecommunications Commission peg the number of mobile phone users in the country at over six million at the beginning of this year. Industry observers project this to reach 15 to 20 million by 2005. By that time, Mobile Arts will be geared toward handling over a million subscribers, exchanging 11 to over 21 million messages a month.

"We thought of starting a company that develops, hosts and manages solutions that provide wireless access functions to applications, in the process developing middleware that manages the complexity arising from the combination of applications, networks and devices," says Elmar Gomez, COO of Mobile Arts.

He adds that the company initially marketed its services to wireless carriers, particularly digital cellular mobile telephone system (CMTS) providers. Mobile Arts intends to target other organizations requiring interactive messaging and value-added application services.

"Our platform allows us to provide progressively ‘deeper’ services to organizations, enabling them with an electronic messaging and marketing infrastructure," Gomez said.

The company’s investments, he says, went primarily to server and networking hardware and operating system and software application development costs.

"We expect to invest more than P90 million more in hardware and software over the next five years. Our servers use the latest Intel Pentium III 1 Ghz processors. We use Object Oriented Programming Language and industry standard SQL database. We are proud to say that most of the codes we use were proudly crafted by Filipino hands," Gomez says.

The Mobile Arts technology platform runs on the Open Source/Linux operating system because of its versatility and cost-effectiveness in handling the company’s growing number of applications. Its data operations center is located at the Madrigal Business Park in Muntinlupa City, while its offshore servers are maintained in the United States on a managed hosting basis.