"It's been difficult to create interoperable applications," Lambert said. As a result, "adoption has been inadequate," he said.

Alliance chief Figueroa acknowledged that devices sometimes advertise themselves even though they aren't really available to the user. With the new specifications the Alliance is working on, users will see only resources they can use, he said.

Better mechanisms for service definition and service discovery could open the door to more mobile developers creating applications that can use Wi-Fi Direct, Lambert said. He hopes to see apps that use Wi-Fi Direct to complement location technologies such as GPS and tell users about friends nearby. Lambert belongs to another group within the Alliance, the Neighbor Awareness Networking task group, that is studying this technology.

The IDG News Service