Preface


Today, various m-commerce applications are increasingly enhancing enterprises ' abilities to offer mobile services that are easily accessed by a mobile device anytime and anywhere . With the unique advantages of emerging mobile communications and wireless technologies, m-commerce applications are generally used to fulfill some tasks that are not suitable for Web-enabled e-commerce applications, such as mobile inventory tracking and dispatching, mobile transactions and payments, mobile messaging, mobile gaming, mobile health care, mobile portal, global positioning, mobile ticketing, etc.

The crucial challenge or success factor to modern organizations is whether they are able to provide enough useful m-commerce applications that consumers can access and are willing to use. However, constructing mobile applications has some inherent complexities and architectural issues as m-commerce embraces many emerging technologies.

This book addresses and explores the critical architectural issues in constructing m-commerce applications and in applying mobile technologies in different areas, including methodologies, enabling technologies, models, paradigms , architectures, standards, and innovations.

It is not feasible for one author to cover many architectural issues with a required degree of quality, depth, and width. Therefore, we adopted another approach. We identified key topics and invited a wide range of professionals across the globe to each contribute a chapter in the area of their expertise. We also gave adequate time for completing the project, spending months of preparation and consultation with the publishers, authors, and reviewers, in order to yield qualified outcomes .

Experts in various related disciplines from different parts of the world responded to this project enthusiastically. The success of this book is largely due to the collective efforts of the wonderful team, which not only includes experts from information and communications technology (ICT) areas like faculty of computer science, information systems, telecommunication networks, software engineering, and information technology, but also includes professionals from business and management fields such as college of business administration, faculty of management, graduate school of management, and other kinds of business schools . Some chapters are outcomes of joined forces, with both ICT and business experts presenting cross perspectives.

The inclusion of the authors in the blind review process improved the quality of the book and also served as an incentive to each author to strengthen his or her write-up . Although we initially received many proposals and manuscripts, the stringent quality control measures taken permitted us ultimately to include only 14 chapters, contributed by 29 authors from different parts: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

READERSHIP

The primary readers of this book are professionals, researchers, executives, m-commerce application architects /designers, and graduate and postgraduate students in information and communications technology (ICT) and business areas who have strong interest in mobile commerce.

Readers will find this book is a rich, informative introduction for understanding architectural issues and solutions regarding mobile business applications and services. This is mainly because this book consists of qualified study outcomes from multiple disciplines. The rich findings, methodologies, architectures, recommendations, arguments, and references presented by these authors will assist readers to pursue further studies in many particular aspects.

Readers may refer to Wireless Communications and Mobile Commerce , another book published by Idea Group, to understand unique characteristics of wireless communications and m-commerce.




Mobile Commerce Applications
Mobile Commerce Applications
ISBN: 159140293X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 154

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