Exercise 25: M-commerce and the e-wallet: Innovation and mobile devices

Explore ONE of the problems associated with mobile technology or their suppliers, from 1 to 4 below:
1. What is meant by a location based service?
2. Visit an airline Web site and search for information on WAP or SMS access to booking airline services. Do the same for WAP or SMS services in banking. How do both industries compare?
3. Visit the W3C website and find the status of the VoiceXML project. When do you think it will affect business on the Web and what will its impact be?
4. According to Nokia:
The Nokia One Mobile Connectivity Service provides easy and secure access to email, calendar, directory and more from a mobile phone, PDA, PC or fixed-line phone - take your corporate applications mobile.
Why is a company like Nokia – http://www.nokia.com – described as having end-to-end expertise?

I select the problem: 1. What is meant by a location based service?
Location based service (LBS) is by knowledge of the location of the end user, to deliver relevant, timely and engaging content and information. LBS is an additional stream of revenue that can be generated from their investments in the fixed infrastructure for mobile network suppliers. The end user also advance in helping them to reduce confusion, improve the consumption experience and deliver high-quality service options (Rao & Minakakis, 2003).

The location of the user traditionally is difficult to pinpoint and use due to its inherent dynamism and unpredictability. Today the new technologies integrated into lightweight mobile devices and terminals, pinpointing location become quickly dominant. The quick-moving technologies like GPS, mobile cell phone identification techniques and network triangulation allow carriers to zoom in on customer activity in defined physical location. Because of these capabilities going on more accessible, accurate and real-time, different service like LBS become possible (Rao & Minakakis, 2003).

Different platforms such as PDAs and mobile phones integrated with the wireless network infrastructure, connect to different types of servers to back-end database with serveral technologies. LBS providers need to play attention on mixed solution in software, hardware, and wireless connectivity into a plan for serving LBS content (Rao & Minakakis, 2003).

Mobile network platforms for identification (Rao & Minakakis, 2003):


Deliver focused services using information about customer location is extremely appealing. LBS is full of risks and caveats (Rao & Minakakis, 2003):

• There has been much of infeasible and overstate advertising
• Limitations of the technologies and LBS is not widespread
• Potentially intrude privacy of the customer
• Not a proved effort in developing maintainable business models that sufficiently address and enhance the customer experience.

LBS provide a new source of revenue opportunity for multiple stakeholders in the mobile area. Under the existing technical limitations like device form factors and the speed of data access, and combined with human restriction like reduced consideration sets and the need for speed and convenience, LBS must deliver relevant, targeted, and timely information to consumers at right time and place of their choice. The competitive advantage between the providers will enhance the grow in LBS. They would focus on superior customer experiences, distinctive, secure and high quality service and their branding (Rao & Minakakis, 2003).

Reference

1. Rao, B. and Minakakis, L. (2003), Evolution of mobile location-based services, Communications of the ACM, 46, 61-65.