Finland: Where the Wireless Are

Two young businesswomen stand on the corner of Mannerheimvagen and Bulevardi in this city_s Center district, shoulders hunched against the cold, focused on their mobile phones. One is checking the times of a movie playing that night, while the other scrolls through text messages from a colleague in Germany. This sight is becoming increasingly common in Finland, a nation that is the home of the booming wireless company, Nokia (NOK) , and of a blooming field of startups working to capture their own piece of the Internet revolution: wireless applications. The example of Nokia has led many investors to take an interest in Finnish startups. The wireless giant_s stock has almost tripled this year, and its market cap of $203 billion comfortably bypasses BP Amoco_s $189 billion. In December, Nokia predicted that its sales might rise as much as 40 percent next year. In a population of 5 million, nearly 70 percent of all Finns have a mobile phone, and they are becoming accustomed to using those phones for everything from weather reports to banking. While the rest of the world is waiting on the evolution of the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, to roll out these services, many Finnish companies are offering mobile information services based on existing protocols. The WAP effort, led by Nokia, Motorola (MOT) and Swedish manufacturer Ericsson, is an industry venture to develop a common standard for delivering Web-like content to mobile phones. Nokia introduced the first WAP-compatible phones late last year, but widespread adoption in most of the world has yet to occur. In Finland, however, a horde of young companies has already begun developing WAP services.