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Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet
Reviews and press coverage
A first-rate guide to the wireless Internet
by Dominic Tonner, Information Age, March 2002
Many IT decision makers wonder which mobile applications, if any, their organisation should exploit now and in the future. Roam, the first-rate new guide to the wireless Internet, written by former New York Times technology journalist turned wireless guru Bruno Giussani, seeks to answer the questions that CIOs wondered about but were too afraid, too busy or too confused to ask.
While sensibly avoiding fatuous, overly enthusiastic market forecasts, Giussani says he is confident that the mobile web has truly far-reaching consequences for the enterprise, particularly in the areas of supply chain management, logistics and sales and marketing. "As with the web in the mid-1990s, so far marketers have tried to sell consumers a sexy lifestyle, which is easy to illustrate and encapsulate into a slogan," he writes. "Yet the mobile gold is buried in the warehouses and trucks and in imaginatively extending ERP, CRM and other unglamorous acronyms that contribute to the competitiveness of a company."
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The reader is told the past history, the present situation and the possible future applications of, among others, wireless application protocol (WAP), third-generation cellular networks (3G), short-message services (SMS), Bluetooth, general packet radio services (GPRS) and wireless local area networks (W-LANs). His explanations of the vagaries of mobile network technology are never dull, supported by illuminating interviews with industry executives and laden with colourful anecdotes drawn, presumably, from his days in the newsroom.
He recounts, for instance, the tale of the Danish trucker who registered with an addiction clinic because he could not stop sending SMS messages; of the Finnish content provider that delivers daily entries from 'Bridget Jones's Diary' to subscribers' handsets; and of the Indian fishermen at sea who use their mobile phones to call around nearby ports to find out where to secure the best price for their catch.
Yet the book, while excellent, is by no means flawless. It reads as it is: a piece of work written by a former journalist, even-handed rather than opinionated, and highly derivative. There are moments when the reader may wonder about Giussani's own views, so keen is he to turn the spotlight on others. And he borrows heavily from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and, most of all, the Industry Standard – unsurprising, perhaps, given that Giussani worked as the defunct magazine's European editor for a time.
Still, drawing on such references could be regarded as a strength as well as a weakness. Ultimately, the one thing to be said about Roam is that it is an outstanding and timely business book.
(Copyright Information Age 2002)
(An edited version of this review has been published in: Infoconomist Magazine, April 2002)
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