Portable Internet
In the Ericsson booth, I ran into Michael Flom, CEO of Portable Internet (at http://www.portableinternet.com). Portable Internet offers business travel information via their Port@ble Guide ASP.

If you ever fly to a new city for a business meeting and need a handheld map, restaurant recommendation, or hotel information, Portable Internet will provide it, either nationally or on a city-by-city basis. While applications like this have been around for a while, wireless connectivity allows for immediate access to information. This can be quite useful if your meeting plans suddenly change and you find yourself in Chicago instead of Los Angeles.

If you're not wireless just yet, you can download city information and store it on your device. Considering that there are far more non-wireless devices being used today, Portable Internet is in a good position to reach out to those of us still waiting to switch to a wireless device. Best of all, you can try the service for free when you rent a car and mobile phone from Hertz (at http://www.hertz.com). Hyatt Gold Passport members can download a free trial of the service at http://www.goldpassport.com.

go2online
Also riding high on the pervasive computing bandwagon is go2online (at http://www.go2online.com), which won the Best of Show award for Marketing and Customer Service with their l-commerce application (yes, I did say "l" commerce). What's l-commerce? It's localized commerce. By combining the ability to make purchases through mobile wireless devices with the ability to locate the consumer's device and the nearest merchant, go2online can take orders on WAP devices for pickup at participating merchants.

The scenario goes like this: You're leaving work late and want to pick up dinner from a fast food restaurant on the way home. You use your wireless device to launch the Web page for your favorite restaurant chain and order from the menu. The system knows your approximate location and tells the fry-chef when to have dinner ready. You drive through, pick-up your food, and the transaction is billed to your account. Pretty nifty!

Neomedia Technologies
Neomedia Technologies (at http://www.neom.com), whom I worked for a while back, won a Best of Show award for Commerce with their PaperClick services. With PaperClick, you can enter common UPC codes into a mobile device (Palm devices, WAP devices, etc) and retrieve specific product information or make a purchase. They were exhibiting a competitive shopping application from Qode (at http://www.qode.com).

Conclusion
All in all, the show emphasized the applications people will be using in a wireless world over the nuts and bolts of infrastructure. It's good to see that the wireless marketplace has matured to the point where real-world concerns are driving new product development. Given time and a relatively stable economy, we can hope to see these types of services hit the mainstream relatively soon.

Theodore Durst is an Associate Technical Editor for ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing, a freelance writer, analyst, and product marketing wonk. He can be reached at theo_durst@zatz.com.