Mobile commerce: A new frontier

Electronic commerce continues to see phenomenal growth, but so far most e-commerce development involves wired infrastructures. The authors believe emerging wireless and mobile networks will provide new avenues for growth, creating new opportunities in mobile commerce. According to the Gartner Group, 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). 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. The authors provide a mobile commerce framework to illustrate potential applications such as mobile inventory management, product location and search, proactive service management, and mobile entertainment. They also describe the wireless user and networking infrastructure, emerging W3C standards, and the open and global WAP Specification.