Part 3: Impact of M-Commerce on E-Marketing

Have you ever wondered when the consumer world becomes that much closer to that of what we see in modern sci-fi movies? The day we are able to send a small data transmission from our mobile phones to the local pizza restaurant requesting a thin-based pepperoni, cheese and pineapple pizza after a long night drinking could just be around the corner. Have you been in the situation where after waking up on a cold Saturday morning and putting the jug on to make a nice hot cup of tea, to your horror there is only a drizzle of milk left in the bottom of the bottle, or even worse the milk has a pungent aroma suggesting it is off. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send a message from your personal data assistant, to your local dairy requesting a three-litre bottle of milk, which then would be delivered to your front door in a matter of minutes. The next generation of e-commerce is right here at our doorsteps, m-commerce enables users to access the Internet without needing to find a place to plug in, and access endless amounts of information with the click of a button, or touch of a screen.

Sometime in the very near future a new network IP protocol called “IP Version 6” will have to be implemented, as the number of IP numbers available today are becoming extremely strained. “IP Version 4” is what is currently in place and supports around 4.6 billion different IP addresses. IP V.6 will have 4 Billion times 4 Billion times 4 Billion the amount of addresses space as IP V.4.

“This is an extremely large address space. In a theoretical sense this is approximately 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth (assuming the earth surface is 511,263,971,197,990 square meters).”

http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/INET-IPng-Paper.html

By having so many available IP addresses for devices to connect to the Internet, IP V.6 will be a major revolution in data communication between nearly every digital device on the market. It wont be long before your whole house will be connected to the internet. Everything from your fridge having an LCD screen on the front door displaying specials at your local supermarket, reminding you that the milk is almost off or the cat needs feeding, to being able to turn on the garden watering system from your PDA. The possibilities are endless and are becoming a very real reality as we head into a mobile communications era.

Its not like m-commerce has already started to happen without the introduction of IP V.6 take WAP mobile phone for example. For the past 3-5 years you have been able to connect to the Internet via your mobile phone and view WAP web pages. WAP web pages are specially designed web pages that WAP enabled phones are able to view text-based information. Within the last year or so, mobile phones have become so advanced that you are able to virtually do whatever your personal computer can do on the internet like; view web pages, send and receive email, internet banking and even play games like chess or checkers. Technology is even emerging in Europe and Asia where your mobile phone can connect to a drink or food vending machine via blue tooth and charge it directly to your mobile phone account, no cash transaction required.

As content delivery over wireless devices becomes faster, more secure, and scalable, there is wide speculation that m-commerce will surpass wire line e-commerce as the method of choice for digital commerce transactions. The main reason for this is you are not limited to sitting at a stationary computer or carrying around clunky laptops. It means that consumers will be able to make digital transactions from virtually any location in the country. You could be on holiday at your favourite local getaway and remember you had to organise someone to mow your lawns while you are away. You could connect to the Internet via your mobile phone and arrange for this to be done. It just seems so much more appealing to consumers to be able to accesses virtually all information on the internet anywhere at anytime.

The industries most affected by m-commerce are financial services, Telecommunications and Information services. Financial services include mobile banking where customers use their handheld devices to access their accounts and pay their bills. Telecommunications services will be greatly affected, in which service changes, bill payment and account reviews can all be conducted from the same handheld device. Consumers will be given the ability to place and pay for orders ‘on-the-fly’, or even check out the competitions prices to get the best deal in the retail industry. Information services will also be very much affected, which include the delivery of financial news, sports figures and traffic updates to a single mobile device, seem very appealing to the average consumer.

One problem with the introduction with these m-commerce technologies is the security factor. What could stop someone, somehow snooping in on your transaction and getting your personal details for fraudulent activities? It could also lead to hackers not hacking into your computer but rather your house and acting like a phantom ghost, opening the dishwasher and flooding the kitchen, turning on and off lights or even setting off the alarm in the middle of the night. All these security issues need to be closely looked at and taken into consideration, in the design and implementation of these digital mobile communication technologies. It is a very real and abundant problem with technology because with all technology it isn’t 100% safe proof.

As m-commerce starts grow, there will be a huge new industry based on the development and extension of old e-commerce models to support the mobile environment. Web sites will have to be developed or changed to be more mobile friendly, wireless server nodes installed and a good deal more. I don’t think that this will have a major negative affect to the e-commerce infrastructure as most of the new m-commerce technology can be built over top of it.

M-commerce could also be a leading influence in the move towards a cashless society where cold hard cash will simply not exist. Buy pushing consumers to use there mobile phones or PDA’s to make transactions with incentives, could mean a much more economic model of the way we deal with cash flows. This may not necessarily be a good thing as the privacy factor comes into play, as someone could be recording exactly what you are buying every week and could make consumers feel violated. I don’t believe that this will be happening anytime soon, or within the next one hundred years or so. What we will start seeing soon though will be a big replacement of the old fashion leather wallet, with a PDA. PDA stands for a Personal Data Assistant. This is a much like a down scaled computer, and can do and store a lot more than your average leather wallet.

M-Commerce is very much a reality, and for those technophobia people out there, you better start seeing a shrink because this new and exciting age is fast approaching.