Earning m-oney - a situation based approach for mobile business models

Current mobile business models for mobile commerce do not seem promising with regard to substantial revenue streams for mobile network operators as well as mobile service providers. Today’s settings require customers to “invest” into data transmission before being able to enter a mobile service, i.e. they are forced to pay for all data transmitted regardless whether this data is valuable content or just unwanted marketing messages. In this paper we propose a new business model, which allows mobile service providers to use information about the customer by situation based profiling in order to identify high value customers and sponsor their data transmission costs. It is shown, that by applying this approach revenue streams can be increased significantly for all parties involved, contributing to a more positive perspective for future developments in the mobile market.