The entire Holland Village in Singapore, a retail district, is Asia's first wireless mobile village to be available to WAP phone users through http://www.themobilevillage.com, a WML website.
TheMobileVillage.com is owned and operated by The WebWap Company (Singapore) Pte Ltd, a local startup who operates Asia's first and only network independent portal http://www.thewebwap.com.
Information on 166 shops in Holland Village have been divided into three main categories on TheMobileVillage.com: Holland Village Art, Holland Village Food and Holland Village Products and Services. Each main category offers further sub-categories of shop listings providing the outlet's name, address, phone number and a brief description of the business.
Users will find a total of 31 shops listed under the Holland Village Art category: art galleries, art and craft, antiques and statutes, furniture and pottery and home décor shops. 46 shops have been listed under the Holland Village Food category: cafeterias, coffee houses, confectionaries, fast food, pubs and restaurants. 89 shops have been listed under Holland Village Products and Services categories offering: beauty services, books, magazines and stationery, fashion, gifts and flowers, hair salons, hardware and electronics, health, hobbies, photo developers and photography studios, shoes, supermarkets and tailors and textile shops.
Mr Eric Teng, Chief Executive Officer said, "We have suddenly enabled a whole generation of small and medium enterprises - from coffee shops to newspaper vendors - who have never even thought about the Internet, much less mobile commerce. This shows that m-commerce isn't only a reality for large corporations, it can be adopted by anyone even if you haven't got a website."
Each retailer has been given up to three free listings for their product/services and special offers to be advertised. To date, some 80 retailers have taken up this offer to be listed.
Restaurants can choose to offer online restaurant reservations through TheWebWap.com. This facility is available for a monthly fee and allows WAP phone users to make reservations online instead of phoning the restaurant. Reservations can be placed according to time, number of diners and even special menus on offer. All reservations are acknowledged with a unique reservation code and stored on the outlet's back-end system. To prevent overbooking, this system has the capacity to disallow further bookings when the restaurant is full. The Sichuan Douhua Restaurant in Plaza Hotel will be the first restaurant in Singapore to operate this in July.
Mr Teng said, "Holland Village will be our first wireless mobile retail village but we'll be looking this concept in other places. At this stage, we're considering Serangoon Gardens but we're keeping our minds open. We are looking at districts instead of shopping belts because TheMobileVillage is meant to drive pedestrian traffic to these areas."
Holland Village Wireless can now be accessed through WAP phones by pointing at 203.117.16.195/wml/hv or TheWebWap browser that can be downloaded from http://www.thewebwap.com.
To start using TheWebWap, users can register through their WAP phone for a free account or through the website http://www.thewebwap.com. After registering for an account, they can download TheWebWap browser to take full advantage of TheWebWap.com's offerings. TheWebWap.com offers users the latest international and local news, weather, stock, sports results and traffic information. Users can access international WML websites providing online games, job searches, a search engine facility, hotel information, IT News and investment news.
According to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), there are some 11,500 mobile data subscribers in Singapore (WAP phone users). The Gartner Group projects that there will be some 29.4 million WAP phones sold in Asia Pacific by the year 2001.
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