Horizontal Application Index

While most of the success with mobile computing has, so far, been in the vertical industries, there are now a number of horizontal mobile computing applications that have become very popular among end users, and within all enterprises, large and small, across various vertical industries. Proliferation of the Internet and increasing reliance on the e-mail as the preferred method of communication has made wireless e-mail as a killer application. In fact, there is more activity in the internet-based horizontal application market now than ever before. We shall list these applications here:

Evans Data Study - Feb 2001 - Specific types of Mobile Applications Being Developed 

This question posed in a Feb 2001 survey) provides a good measure of the course we can expect the availability of wireless applications to take. In general, this table shows that the applications getting the most attention are the ones that best take advantage of the mobility of wireless Internet devices, and which suffer least from the limitations of wireless platforms. This table shows, for example, that e-mail is the application the largest group of respondents, 45.1%, spent time on, followed very closely by consumer e-commerce, at 44.5%, and instant messaging at 37.4%.

It's not surprising that e-mail is a top priority. E-mail has already demonstrated itself as the killer app of the fixed-line Internet, and many predict that it will attain the same status in the wireless Internet. E-mail is, in many ways, the perfect application for wireless devices, since technological constraints of small screen size and limited bandwidth don't limit e-mail as much as they do other applications. With the prospect that mobile devices may become the de facto standard for purchases, mobile e-commerce is big business, and, as we might expect, it's another one of the top priorities for application developers. Finally, location-based services-for instance, providing users with information about restaurants they are close to-is one of the most obvious advantages of the wireless Internet. Wireless service providers, who already maintain a continuous register of subscriber location in order to direct incoming calls, can leverage that to their advantage by providing location-specific information, and, as these numbers show, they plan on doing just that.