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Wireless_Web_Whats_the_Impact_on_Your_E Business
| Wireless Web: Whats the Impact on Your E-Business?
All phones are created equal, but some are more equal than
others. From Canada and California to Japan and Korea,
Internet-enabled mobile phones are rapidly ushering in the next
generation of online commerce: "m-commerce" or Mobile-commerce.
"The wireless world is a parallel universe almost as large as
the Net -- and the two are beginning a fascinating convergence,.
are according to Swapnil Shah, Director of international
operations at Inktomi. Three sets of devices are Emerging as
wireless Internet platforms: cell phones, PDAs (personal digital
assistants like Palm Pilot) other dedicated devices (such as
digital cameras and Walkman radios). Mobile e-commerce services
-- "me-services" -- have slightly different attributes than the
Internet services we think of today, says Hewlett-Packard CEO
Carly Fiorina. They must enable customers to conduct "burst
transactions" -- that is, short-session, information-driven
transactions that can be completed very quickly, while people
are on the go and in motion. Market Forecasts According to
market forecasts from Jupiter, Forrester and IDC, between 50 to
70 per cent of Internet users worldwide will be accessing the
Net via mobile devices in the year 2003; the number of Internet-
enabled devices then would range from 150 to 350 million units.
Ads in the form of text links, micro banners and audio jingles
on WMI (wireless mobile Internet) networks are expected to cross
the $1 billion mark within two years. Reports from Ericsson
suggest that the sale of mobile phones worldwide will in a few
years exceed the PC market by four times. 50 per cent of
Europeans are expected to have mobiles by year 2003. And by
2002, third-generation networks known as UMTS (Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System) will offer richer online experiences.
Companies have been toying around the idea of a wireless
Internet for quite some time, but the wireless revolution, as we
know it today started to really pick up steam in 1997. Disparate
standards movements and "microbrowser" Companies like Phone.com
collectively mobilized implementations, who, along with Nokia,
Motorola and Ericsson, formed the WAP (Wireless Access Protocol,
sometimes jokingly referred to as "Why Another Protocol?") Forum
to develop an independent standard for the wireless Internet,
based on WML (Wireless Markup Language). Around the same time,
NTT DoComo in Japan released a similar technology based on
compact HTML called i-Mode. The last several years has seen a
rapid proliferation of wireless content, mostly throughout
Europe and Asia, but also in the U.S. and Latin America. The
numbers for WAP, however, are not as thrilling, mainly due to
the fact that application developers need to redesign their
content using WML. In the pre-WAP era, SMS (Simple Messaging
Service) clearly was the most popular trend by enabling two-way
messaging and mobile e-mail. SMS text messages now represent
about 8 percent of total mobile revenues in Europe
(Approximately $10 billion) and that figure is growing
exponentially. But it is 2000 and 2001, which will belong to the
mobile Internet, according to infotech services company Infosys,
whose offerings now include wireless content solutions. Europe
with its focus on standards has achieved 100% ubiquity with the
adoption of GSM, whereas North America has traded innovation and
diversity for ubiquity with a slew of cellular technologies like
AMPS, TDMA, CDMA, GSM, IDEN, thus making it slower for mobile
Internet services to take off. In most markets, much WMI usage
is among trendy teenagers, but it will become more and more
"professional" and mainstream, predicted Bertrand Bidaud,
telecom research analyst at global research firm Gartner Group,
in an interview for this publication. "M-Commerce will
eventually overtake traditional PC-based B2C commerce," predicts
Infosys wireless consultant Shashi Vempathi. The cellular phone
will fast transform from a voice device to be the key enabler of
secure mobile commerce in the 21st century, and by its mobile
nature it will become the instrument for conducting every day
sundry transactions -- something that is difficult for PC-based
B2C e-commerce to achieve, he says. Market Potential and User
Behaviour Applications well suited for the WMI domain include
B2B services (mobile Intranet access, roaming email services),
travel information (for buses and Airlines), finance
(time-critical banking and stock trades), e- commerce (betting,
auctions), and community (chat, e-postcards, cartoons),
according to Johan Montelius, wireless Internet specialist at
New York-based research firm Jupiter Communications. A recent
study that Hewlett-Packard conducted on mobile markets found
that the first generation of "me- services" falls into six
categories: Transactions (banking and travel reservations)
information (sports Scores, real-time news), Database search
(yellow pages and translation services), Entertainment (customer
ringers, games), Personal services (calendars, address books),
Communications (Group SMS, mail). M-commerce is great for
time-sensitive and location-sensitive sales. M-commerce can
easily spur impulse buying for items like music -- consumers can
buy an album almost as soon as they hear it on radio or see the
video on MTV. News and information services have been among the
first to jump in to exploit the possibilities of WMI, and dozens
of news feeds are now accessible via mobiles. Phone.com has
already rolled out book and music ordering via WAP for Amazon in
the U.S. and U.K. In the corporate environment, banking and
airline sectors are early adopters. But for a long time to come,
the "killer app" of WMI will still be Old-fashioned messaging
and related services, says Gartner's Bidaud. "B2B will come
later. It appears at a more mature stage, as in the wired world.
First will be B2C and then corporate application (Intranet)," he
observes. WMI in Action In Japan, one of the most profitable WMI
sites is Bandai, which "uploads" new cartoons everyday on the
phone. Tone rings download is also very popular. A large
proportion of stock trading in South Korea has shifted to the
Net and mobile phones. U.S.-based Inktomi is offering "shopping
dial tone" solutions via WAP directory and catalog services for
cell phone users, so that online commerce is accessible
irrespective of the platform used. Inktomi is working with
hundreds of merchants to offer sales of millions of products via
WAP; merchants use a branded interface, while Inktomi will
handle billing, data center, and shopping basket operations.
Yahoo's sites in many countries offer instant access to mail,
finance, news, WAP directories, and other information for mobile
users in many languages. Yahoo has tied up with four mobile
phone firms in Taiwan to carry its Chinese-language WAP portal,
which includes news, email and weather forecasts. In Australia,
early results have shown that on Telstra's WAP service,
financial news, horoscopes and sports results were some of the
most popular services, followed by movie listings, flight
information, and Yellow pages reference data. Hewlett-Packard
has launched a Mobile Services Bazaar, targeted at service
providers and developers for mobile-related initiatives.
Companies like ConsumerDesk.com, a comparison-shopping site,
already have WAP-enabled product spreadsheets for consumers.
"Soon, real-time discounting information will be made available
for cell phone users. And since cellphones are always on, this
can become a real killer-app for m-commerce," says Rene Jepma,
CEO and founder of ConsumerDesk. Pan-European auctioneer QXL.com
has announced a deal with mobile Internet portal iobox that will
enable users to track auctions and receive bid alerts from their
mobile phones. iobox, launched in 1998 in Finland, has half a
million users in Finland, Sweden, Germany and the U.K. A star
performer in WMI-space is Japanese Telco NTT's cellular arm
DoCoMo, whose one-year-old iMode service for mobile Net access
has already surpassed the six million-subscriber marks. More
than 800,000 new subscribers are now signing up for this service
each month. Over 12,000 i-mode sites are available in Japan for
mobile Internet access, offering banking, travel ticketing, news
and email services via a "portal tone." Next year NTT plans to
roll out 3G W-CDMA services with 2 Mbps bandwidth and broadband
content, as the number of users accessing the Net via mobiles
exceeds those accessing it via PCs. The pervasive, "always on"
nature of mobile Net access will undoubtedly continue to spin
off entirely new innovations in online services. Very
interesting concepts are emerging in Europe, such as Amadeus,
which provides a WAP based travel service, Webraska, which
provides a WAP, based navigation service, Paybox, which provides
a bill payment service, and NECS, which provides an e-mail
aggregation service. Companies provide internet-to-paging
gateways like Silicon Valley based Unimobile.com, which also
allow consumers to control the receipt and delivery of messages,
alarms and Internet content directly on their devices. The
service also lets users customize the look-and-feel of the
desktop product to match their offline wireless devices. Another
offers online contact information and diary management solutions
via mobile Internet Silicon Valley called company eCode.com.
Roadmaps and Guidelines Before embarking on their own WMI
services, it is key that commerce companies recognise m-commerce
as a completely unique service. "Cellphone users are more
impatient than Internet users. The paradigm here is not surfing;
all services for the mass market have to be pitched at users in
such a seamless way that they need not even be aware that they
are accessing the Net," according to Cindy Dahm, international
director for Phone.com. "Businesses first need to understand
their customers to identify where they can provide the greatest
value in a mobile environment. This could range from pushing
promotional rewards to facilitating impulsive shopping over
mobile phones. Having figured out the mobile commerce strategy,
businesses would have to m-enable their e- commerce and CRM
systems," according to Infosys' wireless consultant Vempathi.
The cost of m-enabling primarily would be that of re-writing the
existing applications to make them MI- compatible. There could
be additional costs, which the businesses would have to bear if
they want to leverage cellular networks for providing value,
added services based on location information, says Vempathi. For
B2B (corporate application, Intranet), the main cost will be
education. "It is about a new way to interact with employees,
and that requires dedicated effort," says Gartner's Bidaud. The
most versatile language to choose by designers and application
developers would be XML (extensible Markup Language). Sites
should be designed using XML for organizing the content and
adapting it appropriately to HTML, CHMTL or WML based on the
channel of delivery - Web or WMI. "But it is also important in
design to bear in mind that a user would access a service over
wireless for performing highly prioritized operations which are
time and location sensitive -- unlike a user accessing the
service over the Internet who usually has time and flexibility
on his side," cautions Vempathi. So the wireless version of the
service should be designed to enable high priority "Here and
Now" operations while keeping the wired version loaded with all
possible options. "Wireless interaction requires short dialog
today since content is not as rich as on the Web. Design should
really focus on key applications, and make them easily reachable
to mobile users. Simplicity is key. Local content is also more
important than in the wired world," says Gartner's Bidaud. Many
companies embarking on m-commerce tend to stumble on some key
misconceptions, such as assuming that the mobile Internet is
merely WWW on the cellular phone, or that it is just a matter of
code conversion, or that all phones have the same and look and
feel for WMI content. Privacy and security are also a matter of
concern, given the unprecedented precision that mobile operators
have for gathering user and location data. The Road Ahead To sum
it up, we can compare the early excitement generated over WMI to
the release of the Mosaic Web browser in the early 1990s. "Just
as Mosaic slowly matured into Netscape Navigator, WMI will also
be capable of handling text and multimedia over both low and
high bandwidth networks," says Shishir Gundavaram, CTO of
lifeguru.com, a wireless portal. "A me-service has to eventually
become second nature -- it must naturally weave itself into the
fabric of our daily lives -- like buying train tickets or
checking flight schedules," according to HP CEO Carly Fiorina.
In conclusion, consensus seems to be emerging that the
performance of m-commerce will improve since airtime fees are
expected to drop further, more WMI gateways will become
available, and content and commerce services from independent
players will proliferate. Torbjorn Nilsson, senior
vice-president of business development at Ericsson, predicts
that despite a slow start, the potential of m-commerce is huge.
"It will be like pouring out of a ketchup bottle. Nothing
...nothing... nothing ... and then all at once," he says.
About the author:
Dr. Madanmohan Rao is an Internet consultant and writer based in
Bangalore, India. He is the co-author of the handbook "The
Internet Economy of India, 2001" and the forthcoming "Asia
Pacific Internet Handbook" (McGraw Hill). Madan was formerly the
communications director at the United Nations Inter Press
Service bureau in New York, and vice president at IndiaWorld
Communications in Bombay.
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