Exploring Technology Design Issues in Business Models for Mobile Web Services

As IP-based, 3G+ mobile networks are increasingly becoming available, attention in research is shifting towards middleware and service platform related issues (Killström et al., 2006; PopescuZeletina et al., 2003). At the same time, web services technology and underlying service oriented architecture have enhanced flexibility and interoperability in service development in the fixed Internet world. Therefore, a logical next step in making mobile services deployment easier, faster and more efficient would be applying web services technology to the mobile domain, i.e. mobile web services (MWS) (Pashtan, 2005). We see main opportunities for MWS in providing generic service elements like charging, authentication, authorization, accounting, context information, and billing. As such, the technology would compete with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a standard originating from the telecommunications domain. While IMS strengthens the current strategic position of operators, MWS can be offered by any business actor and may therefore be used by content and service providers to disrupt the current industry structure. The business model for MWS is not yet clear, as it is still immature technology. The present paper aims to contribute to business model development for MWS, by exploring critical design issues in the technology domain of these business models. In doing so, we extent on and specify earlier work on business models for mobile data services in general (De Reuver et al., 2006; Haaker et al., 2006). We propose that critical design issues in MWS business models include overcoming constraints and limitations of mobile devices and networks; using the SIM card model or web services based mechanisms for user authentication; management of user profiles; security; billing and charging; the technical architecture; the server-client model; and the role division regarding authentication, security, management of user profiles, and billing/charging provisioning. In a smallscale survey among 29 experts from academia and industry, we find support for most of these design issues.