Opportunities and Limitations in M-Commerce

Abstract

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) activity is growing exponentially, and it is revolutionizing the way that businesses are run. There is now an explosion of mobile wireless services accessible via mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) makes business mobility a reality. Mobile users can access the Internet at any time, from anywhere (even from their shirt pockets/purses) using ubiquitous inexpensive computing. It is estimated that the m-commerce market was worth US$3.5 billion in 2000 and will grow to over US$200 billion by 2005 (Abbott, 2002). M-commerce is generally considered to be an extension of e-commerce. In fact, m-commerce has unique characteristics and functionality. Hence, it creates a unique and new business opportunity. Tesco, the United Kingdom-based supermarket, rolled out their mobile service, but the U.S. bank, Wells Fargo, is planning to close down their mobile service later this year due to lack of interest. M-commerce has a number of inherent complexities, as it embraces many emerging technologies: mobile wireless systems, mobile handheld devices, software, wireless protocols, and security. These technologies have rapid product cycles and quick obsolescence. In this chapter, we will examine the opportunities and limitations of m-commerce and concentrate our discussion on mobile phone systems.

Humancentric applications of precise location based services

“…[29] Their article confirms that LBS will be an integral part of our future world. This opinion is supported by Raisinghani [30] and Lei et al, [27] who agree that it is only a matter of time before LBS become part of the way we live.…”

“…As a subset of mobile commerce (m-commerce), LBS are partially enabled by m-commerce protocols as they may use Internet technologies for service delivery. [27] Of these two protocols, Lei et al are of the opinion that i-mode will play a more dominant role in m-commerce applications and support this with a comparison of the two protocols. LBS will also need a common operating platform on which to run.…”

The Mobile Commerce Technologies: Generations, Standards and Protocols

“…credit card information, could potentially be misused. The new version WAP 2.0, which was introduced in 2001, takes care of this problem and the data are no more stored in decrypted form on the WAP Gateway [Lei et al, 2004]. WAP 2.0 also defines a new programming language "Extensible Hypertext …”

“…On the hardware front only a WAP Gateway is required. However the content must be made WML compatible so that it can be read by mobile devices [Lei et al, 2004]. Translating all relevant content into WML increases the temporal and monetary costs of WAP.…”

“…A WAP Gateway acts as interpreter between the mobile device and a web server which decodes and encodes the information in a way that the server and the mobile device can communicate with each other [Lei et al, 2004].…”