A Hong Kong-based company, I-Engine.com, has launched a wireless site development tool, I-WAP, that automatically builds and updates WAP sites.

It is the latest company seeking to cash in on the booming demand for authoring software for WAP and other wireless Internet protocols. Irish company Wapprofit has also launched a new wireless content software package, Cellulize. There are now more than 300,000 registered WAP developers, 17 WAP phone models and 4.4 million WAP/WML Web pages on the Internet. Last month, Adobe and Nokia released a WAP development tool based on Adobe GoLive 5.0 that enables authors to preview content as they go. Nokia estimates the total market volume of Internet capable mobile terminals -- including WAP phones -- will exceed the market volume of laptop computers in the year 2000, with more than 30 million units sold world-wide. I-WAP generates an entire WAP site according to its directory/file tree structure. It is available in English, Chinese and Japanese and its users already include FedEx, ChinaTravelOne.com, the MingPao newspaper group, Miclub.com and sctrade.com (South China Group). The package enables users to generate the whole WAP site according to a files/directories structure built up with Windows Explorer. It can also be used to define links to external URLs and to enable the transmission of e-mail from a WAP phone.