Mobile Commerce: A New Frontier

E lectronic commerce continues to see phenomenal growth, but so far most e-commerce development involves wired infrastructures. We believe emerging wireless and mobile networks will provide new avenues for growth, creating new opportunities in mobile commerce. The exponential growth of wireless and mobile networks has brought vast changes in mobile devices, middleware development, standards and network implementation, and user acceptance. More than 350 million mobile devices are in use worldwide, 80 million of them in the United States. 1 Analysts expect this number to rise to 1 billion in the next few years, exceeding the total number of computing devices by several fold. 2 According to the GartnerGroup, a market research firm, by 2004 at least 40 percent of consumer-to-business e-commerce will come from smart phones using the wireless application protocol (WAP). 3 Based on a study by the Wireless Data and Computing Service, a division of Strategy Analytics, the annual mobile commerce market may rise to $200 billion by 2004. 4 We believe the next phase of electronic business growth will be in wireless and mobile commerce. To help future applications and technologies handle this growth, we propose a framework for mobile commerce. Figure 1 shows our framework for mobile commerce, which lets companies strategize and create mobile commerce applications. The framework defines several functional layers, simplifying the design and development so that different parties—vendors, providers, designers, and so on—can address individual layers. By using this framework, a single entity is not forced to do everything to build mobile commerce systems, but can build on the functionalities provided by others. The framework includes a user plane with four levels: • Applications. Many new applications are becoming possible, and many existing e-commerce applications can be modified for a mobile environment. • User infrastructure. The design of new mobile commerce applications should consider the capabilities of the user infrastructure—the mobile devices. • Wireless middleware. With its ability to hide the underlying network's details from applications while providing a uniform and easy-to-use interface , middleware is extremely important for developing new mobile commerce applications. • Network infrastructure. In mobile commerce, service quality primarily depends on network resources and capabilities. The framework also provides a developer-provider plane, which addresses the different needs and views of application developers, content providers, and service providers. With an unlimited number of potential mobile commerce applications, the best way to understand them is to classify them, as in …