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Wireless Web: What';s 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 ......
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