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TD Waterhouse Tackles the Pocket PC: Internet Explorer's Little Brothers

TD Waterhouse bucks the industry trend by offering wireless brokerage apps on the Pocket PC.

When TD Waterhouse Group launched a wireless brokerage application for the Microsoft Windows Pocket PC in April, the financial service firm bucked the industry trend. Brokerage houses typically launch on the Palm Pilot and the RIM pager first which are the most popular devices in the U.S., says Isabella Fonseca, wireless analyst with Boston-based Celent Communications. But TD Waterhouse-which is actively working on wireless access via Palm and RIM pager-liked the idea that it was the only financial service firm on the Pocket PC device.

Another key reason was the work that Microsoft had done to make it a secure browser that looked very similar to Internet Explorer on the desktop.

"The training component goes down to zero when you look at the Pocket Browser and you look at IE Internet Explorer on the desktop, they're effectively the same browser,'' says Bob Cantelmo, senior vice president of TD Waterhouse, responsible for electronic channel product and service development for the United States. "So once you know how to turn on the device, you're just ready to go," he adds.

But how challenging was it to develop the application for the micro-sized screen?

Since the TD Waterhouse application is mainly used to trade, get quotes and look at balances, as well as receive news and research, Cantelmo contends that "it was really simple and straight forward to fit the data on the screen. TD Waterhouse receives news and research for its Web site from Wall Street on Demand, a Bridge company, which worked with the firm to recast the data for the handheld.

"The biggest piece of work was really in the ergonomics knowing that you're not on a seven-inch monitor and making sure that what you design was pleasing to the eye and there wasn't a lot of scrolling left or right, or up or down," says Cantelmo.

But according to Plural, the e-business consulting and development firm hired by TD Waterhouse to work on the information architecture and the page development, there were some challenges.

While a Web page used for standard browsing has minimum aspect ratio of 640 pixels to 480 pixels, "with the Pocket PC you're trapped into 240 by 320 aspect ratio," says Chris Yellen creative lead on the TD Waterhouse initiative referring to the screen size. Aspect is the horizontal vs. vertical size of video images. If the navigation extends beyond the 240-pixel width, "you're going to have multiple-tier navigation," he says. Not wanting to confuse people by having two lines of navigation, Plural had to fit it on the same line and the same row.

Another hurdle was that the content itself was not conducive to the 240 by 320 ratio. Yellen says he had "to segment the content if it was long, modify it to some respect and really allow the content to live within a reduced bandwidth." While TD Waterhouse's corporate portal site offers a lot of information upfront, Yellen says that with a handheld, "you want to minimize that where you're instantly presented with the market summary and navigation."

Chuck Macomber, Plural's mobile computing strategist, says "The fundamental challenge of mobile computing is how to take the applications that have existed forever and getting to the point where you can manage the information on these limited aspects. "It is not so much redesigning the application as designing the way information is managed," emphasizes Macomber, adding: "That seems to be 75-80 percent of the work in getting a mobile device out.

As TD Waterhouse works on adapting the application to Palm and RIM, it can use existing back-end infrastructure and just relay out the information architecture, says Macomber.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio

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