Intel worked with Macromedia during the launch of the Macromedia Central product to build an asynchronous hot-spot finder. Here is an example of information that truly needs to be available in an offline context; although there are numerous hotspot finders available online, including one provided by Intel, we typically are not connected at the moment we're in need of a hotspot!

The productivity revolution of the 1980s democratized information by providing the capability for users to have their reports change on demand, rather than when they could get a COBOL programmer to change it. The new productivity revolution will provides information on demand, rather than when users can get access to a network. The next generation of the Web is an MSI-enabled, use-it-anywhere modality, and services that do not support this new functionality are going to seem outmoded quickly.

The opportunity for wireless ISVs has arrived
Just as the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s spelled opportunity for software vendors, the new generation of mobilized applications is an emerging sphere of opportunity for the next several years. Information and services are now widely available via the Internet, but the means people are using to access that information is changing because of the widespread adoption of wireless client devices.

Thus, mobilized software is the most important new value proposition for the software industry to embrace, enable, and benefit from. There are really two manifestations of this new paradigm: mobilized documents and mobilized applications.

• Mobilized documents allow for paperless workflow, using electronic replicas of paper-based forms. This will allow users to fill out an electronic, offline form and to submit it directly into the workflow as an XML document, rather than as a database record. The significance of this shift is easily seen in the context of a business department that wants to send out forms for its clients to request more information about a product or service.
  
  In the old database model, that department would need to have IT build them a back-end system to host the information, along with appropriate reporting and related mechanisms to make use of the information once it was received. In the case of mobilized documents, on the other hand, information coded in XML is embedded into the documents making it possible for any number of applications to utilize, route or store the information.
  
  Microsoft InfoPath, which is available as an add-on to Office 2003, addresses this need by providing a dynamic, programmatic elements to everything from Word documents to Excel spreadsheets. Adobe has released similar technology for PDFs making it possible to put a 'Submit' button right into downloaded documents. Both are use XML and asynchronous Web services standards to communicate. A few early adopters have begun using this technology, although we are for the most part still in the development phase. As the first proofs of concept become successful, we should expect to see more commercial platforms emerge in 2004.
  
• Mobilized applications innovate around the concept of users logging in so they can see data. In the past, interfaces to back-end systems generally consisted of a portal put up by the enterprise that acted as a gateway, allowing browsers to display information in a non-native format. The underlying information might be in a database, an XML document, or a word-processing document, which the portal converts to HTML.
  
  In so doing, the portal changes the format of the data and strips out some information, such as database fields or the XML schema, which might be useful. In addition, users are forced to go out and find this information when they need it, which requires connectivity and also the time investment to look for the information, possibly from many different sources.
  
  The innovations that are being engendered by software mobilization reach beyond the ability to use them offline. By making more communications occur on an asynchronous basis, human-to-machine communications are replaced by machine-to-machine communications, which are superior in terms of both efficiency and quality.
  
  Some of the newer mobilized applications can provide an automated engine that subscribes to the data it needs asynchronously, and the fact that the communication is machine-to-machine instead of human-to-machine means that it does not need to be rendered in a human-readable form, with the corresponding loss of context described above. Thus, a personal-finance application, for instance, can keep stock-price data fresh in the background, without user interaction, and the most-complete data set possible can be processed by local applications.

These innovations will create new hours in the week for workforces, providing a clear competitive advantage both to the enterprises that adopt these technologies and for the ISVs that innovate the first and most effective manifestations of it.

Conclusion and call to action
A primary obstacle to this sphere of innovation will be the potential for migration to proprietary, rather than standards-based architectures. Intel supports the rapid advancement of standards-based mobilized architectures through initiatives like the Early Access Program for Mobility, as well as silicon support and tools for mobilization challenges like power management. Expertise is also available to the industry through such organizations as Intel Solution Services.