This chapter examines the enabling technologies of mobile commerce. The emphasis is on providing a coherent overview of the mobile commerce technology landscape and on suggesting where the service developer can best exercise choice.

The dominance of Internet technologies in software development has restricted developers' choices in such matters as presentation layer styles and system modalities. In other words, developers have become habituated to developing user applications that use HTML for the user interface–perhaps with some Flash animations for extra interest–and that take the user through single-routed, step-by-step procedures. The result has been a massive increase in developer productivity and an accompanying reduction in development risk. The Web has brought computing to the mainstream masses, but it has also narrowed our sense of what computing can be. Although plug-in technologies such as Flash and Java applets allow Web pages to become interactive, most Web experiences (and certainly the majority of e-commerce experiences) remain exercises in form filling.

The mobile commerce technology landscape is a good deal less stable, uniform, and predictable than Web development territory. Though WAP was hailed as an Internet-equivalent development and delivery environment, doubts persist as to whether WAP (in its present form) will survive as mainstream technology on the phone platform or acquire a significant role on the nonphone platform. The client devices engaged in the growth of mobile commerce show little of the conformity evident in the PC-dominated deskbound world.

This chapter describes a number of live issues affecting the successful development of mobile commerce. These include distinctions between what is technically possible and consumers' desires and motivations, issues around security, trust, and privacy, and concerns relating to health. We also consider the impact of unequal access to the benefits of mobile commerce, the implications of the blurring of the dividing line between work and private life, the re-emergence of geography as a key factor in electronic commerce, and the problems associated with obsolescence in networks, devices, and systems. Lastly we look at the cost burdens on would-be dominant players in an often high-stakes game.

The Possible and the Probable

Technology-based visions of societal change often stretch the bounds of credulity. In extrapolating from today's technical possibilities technologists run the risk of imagineering a future with an inflated role for their current pet gizmos and a bias toward wholesale behavioural adaptations that have no precedent outside the somewhat peculiar habits of technologists themselves. The generic future according to e-commerce is, unsurprisingly, a twenty-four-hour society fuelled by intense competition, instant gratification, and home-delivered pizza. Mobile commerce is sometimes painted as an artist's impression of an accelerated Silicon Valley lifestyle, with distressingly few points of contact with a recognisable mainstream world outside of that subcul–ture or –God forbid–on a foreign shore. We have deliberately avoided citing the twin clichs of mobile commerce in this book so far–but here goes.

This chapter surveys the leading types of mobile commerce services that currently exist or are currently being developed to serve consumer and business user roles. This is not an exhaustive survey. The services chosen for this chapter command the greatest attention amongst users and service providers alike. Each service includes a range of potential associated and follow-on services: indeed, each service could be regarded as an industry in its own right.

We purposely avoid labelling the services as applications. The term “application” implies a demarcated set of functionality designed for a known or ideal user group. Applications are traditionally installed on machines and packaged to fit into the prevailing desktop user interface model. The move towards application service providers (ASPs) in the business world is undermining this traditional concept. An ASP provides the functionality of a software application, such as a human resources application, on a remote usage basis. The customer no longer installs and runs an HR package, dealing with its upgrades and backups. He simply buys the ongoing servicing of his human resources administration needs over a network. An ASP takes on a role similar to that of a large corporation's computing department in the days of time-sharing computers and dumb terminals. The ASP aggregates a number of customers into a virtual organisation and supplies a centralised computing service targeted at common business needs. The ASP movement signals a shift in emphasis from software ownership towards contracted relationships encapsulating service benefits.

This appendix lists a number of mobile commerce services running or announced at the time of writing. Each entry contains a brief description and a URL where further information can be found on the Web.

This is not an exhaustive guide to mobile commerce services, but a selection of leading service providers and useful demonstrations. Some of the resources listed in the directory are themselves directories, and these give wider coverage of the growing population of available services.

The directory is regularly updated on this book&s Web site at http://www.verista.com/mobile/

Service Directories and Search Engines

Awooga http://www.awooga.com/

Directory of rated WAP sites, also email and bookmark services

Gixom http://www.gixom.com/

Catalogue of WAP sites

Mopilot http://www.mopilot.com/

Searchable directory of wap sites; company also offers WinWAP, a WAP microbrowser for Windows; Web site also shows statistics of the mobile browser types being used to access the site

Orktopas http://www.orktopas.com

Search engine for WAP sites

VoiceXMLCentral http://www.voicexmlcentral.com

VoiceXML search engine and community

wapaw.com http://www.wapaw.com/

WAP site directory

Mobile Portals and Community Services

CNN http://www.cnn.com/mobile/demo/

Web-based demonstration of CNN Mobile with a mobile phone

Genie http://www.genie.co.uk/

Mobile portal for U.K. digital cell phones. Web site includes free text messaging to any U.K. phone.

Rubber glvs, throwt, take tel off hook. … So began a list found stored in the personal organiser device of a bereaved London man, subsequently convicted in July 2000 of murdering his wife the previous December. The man's care in disguising the murder as a bungled robbery was destroyed by the small matter of the blood on his clothing, and the telltale list – which ended, “ring mobile just befor yo leave”.

Meanwhile, young vacationers partying on the island of Ibiza – the summer centre of the European dance craze–could get free entry to the most popular clubs by responding to text messages received on their cell phones. Almost one quarter of British citizens use text messaging services as a matter of course, and over one third of them have sent a declaration of love via the medium. Lovers of music, books, and clothes purchase items from their cell phones or wireless organisers. Day traders on the beach execute trades with thumb presses, and night birds reserve theatre tickets by pecking at a hand-held screen.

The overorganised killer, the hedonist with an eye for a bargain, the tongue-tied lover: these are all players in a world in which mobile devices are common pieces of equipment, mediating our relationships and creating new ways for people to interact with their friends, employers, and co-workers and with a newly ubiquitous wireless business environment. The world is in everyone's pocket.

At the dawn of the new millennium, some 5 billion people inhabited the earth. In the year 2002, the estimated number of cell phones in use around the world will be 500 million. That is to say, roughly one-tenth of the total world population will soon be using cell phones. Of these devices, perhaps 20 percent (rapidly increasing) are fully equipped for all facets of mobile commerce, including purchase, sale, and trading actions. This gives mobile commerce a significant market.

Once a useful gadget for notorious chatterboxes, the cell phone has significantly reshaped some basic activities of our daily lives. Thanks to an increasingly “always-on” lifestyle, shopping, banking, and making reservations are now commonplace transactions “in your pocket.” Expert observers take it as gospel truth that the majority of working adults will use a mobile device for their major commerce activities by the middle of the decade. For the business world the mobile commerce area beckons with a variety of opportunities to rejoin customers and partners in a decentralized, service-rich environment.

Hardware and software manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon and heavily investing in the mobile commerce area. New technologies are designed to improve the bandwidth, speed, and performance of mobile devices, establishing them as serious competitors to fixed-line services once the desktop market is saturated.

The Internet's arrived. The Net has changed everything, and nothing. Business has migrated to the Net, time has speeded up, expectations have been reset. And now there's a fresh rumble sounding down the technology road. The noise is all about mobile commerce. Is it just the massed empty stomachs of the technology crowd, eager for a new feast? Or is it the next vehicle to a brighter business future?

This chapter treats mobile commerce as a vehicle aboard which businesses of all kinds need to jump. We look at why the world is turning mobile–how the change to the mobile era is already well advanced and picking up speed. We consider how businesses can design opportunities in this emerging space by recognising the distinctive features of the mobile channel and respecting its differences from traditional channels. We present a new generic business model for mobile commerce that uses concepts of location, time, and mission as its touchstones. Customer relationships, and how they are created and owned in the mobile channel, are examined. We finish our survey of the space with a look at mobile commerce's headline effects on existing enterprise system costs and on individual users' interaction styles.

WHY THE WORLD IS TURNING MOBILE

We start our exploration of the business opportunities offered by mobile commerce with a portrait of the emerging mobile lifestyle, introducing some scenarios of wireless life that have already takenhold in markets around the world.

The real driving factors behind the new economy are flexibility, agility, and time to market. Obviously, this means speeding the desired e-Applications to market in the first place. However, speed also involves how quickly your company can respond to market changes by rolling out new, iterative versions of e-Enterprise platforms. Sometimes emerging technology standards that enable exchange of information between partners and stakeholders drive these changes. Sometimes they are driven by shifts in the external business landscape such as new market opportunities. Still other times they result from concerted analysis and process engineering driven by internal corporate forces.

As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the key to enabling this perpetual business, application, and technology change is a reusable repository of operating models and infrastructure that embody the common functionality shared by multiple e-Applications. Therefore, this repository must store the high-level business services that provide cross-functional business/application functionality and the technology components that aid in producing the underlying technology infrastructure. These high-level business services are known as application or business components. The combination of business and technology components provides the backbone not only for the repository, but also for the iterative design and deployment methodology that is integral to the concept of the e-Enterprise.

Although the concept of technology components has been around for some time, the concept of business components is still in its infancy.

E-TRANSFORMATION

In Chapter 1, I discussed how the Net is bringing about a fundamental change in the way corporations do business. For established “bricks-and-mortar” corporations, the Web was initially an after thought, a place for posting static product information and accepting credit card numbers and shipping addresses to make purchases. We called this “e-Commerce.”

In its second iteration business on the Net became more complex and specialized. Corporations began to appreciate the value of doing businesses with other enterprises, and to implement specialty business-to-business (B-to-B) e-Applications such as Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) procurement to automate simple online processes. On the business-to-consumer (B-to-C) side, retailers recognized the value of personalized content and dynamic product information. Online marketplaces became more interactive and efficient. “Bricks and mortar” had become “point and click.” Because this stage was about more than simple transactions, we labeled it “e-Business.”

Most companies have embraced e-Commerce by now. Some have taken halting steps toward e-Business. However, I predicted that another stage was coming, where corporations would recognize the Net for its true value: not a new distribution channel or customer touch-point, but a strategic tool that touches every aspect of the enterprise—both on the Net and in the real world, through process engineering, improvement, and integration.

Let's say you've absorbed all there is to be learned about developing the next successful e-Enterprise. Perhaps you've already moved your learning into the marketplace, and the results have been the best you could have hoped for.

What you have won is the right to compete again.

If there's a bottom-line lesson to everything we know about e-Enterprise, it is this: if you haven't created business and technology architectures that enable you to win and win again—if they aren't robust and repeatable in terms of producing success—then you haven't arrived at e-Enterprise yet.

The right tools in this environment are the ones that allow business leaders to replicate—even automate—business and technology analysis and decision making, iteration after iteration. How else can you stay abreast of market opportunities and ahead of your competitors in today's relentlessly competitive environment? As Tom Trainer, CIO of Citigroup, said in the Foreword, you have to think about business and technology architecture as “a repository of reusable strategic assets that allow your e-Enterprise to evolve as rapidly and continuously as today's fluid markets.” Only that, meshed with an organizational culture and people endlessly motivated to learn more and push ahead, offers an unbeatable combination.

It should be abundantly clear that this book has not been about telling you how to be the next Amazon.com. In fact, we believe that the glory days of the Net-only business model may be coming to an end.