The competitive benefits from empowering its employees still makes this a compelling solution for Home Depot. The ultimate goal is that any associate anywhere in the store can help any customer do anything,'' says Chambers. To further this goal, Home Depot has also begun to add UPC scanners and label printers to its carts. So, if an associate on the floor needs to label an item, he or she can scan the product, get the label information and print it out without leaving the store floor. Home Depot may eventually add a credit card scanner to the cart, which would let employees handle overloads at the checkout lines in the stores.
Chambers points out.
That's why many new and established vendors alike are investing heavily in advancing wireless Internet technologies. The WAP Forum is particularly interested in making sure that Web apps work over all types of wireless networks, including Cellular Digital Packet Data, Code Division Multiple Access and Global System for Mobile Communications. However, the forum is not a standards body itself, which means that it must continue working with groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium, the Telecommunications Industry Association and the Internet Engineering Task Force to actually put its final technical specs in place. Wireless is hot right now,'' says Dataquest's Carney. But delivering legacy access to mobile devices requires more than just a wireless Internet connection.