14.7 M-Commerce

Mobile commerce is yet another new service area that has shown some promise for a while. However, no significant advances in terms of technology or acceptance by consumers have been seen in this area. M-commerce essentially includes doing business and financial transactions via the mobile network. Security is one of the major concerns of anything that deals with financial transactions. Wireless networks are essentially a broadcast medium and hence a cause for being concerned with security. Consumers in the wired world have a false sense of security simply by virtue of having a physical wire as opposed to data being transmitted over ether . Wireless networks have, however, developed sophisticated encryption and ciphering algorithms that will make it possible to carry out financial transactions over the mobile Internet.

M-commerce also includes the capability to make payments using the mobile device. The mobile device with its smart card can be considered as an extension of one's wallet. The use of the mobile phone as a payment instrument to make purchases in the physical world or online is another application of M-commerce. The mobile phone as a wallet is based on existing technologies such as ECML (Electronic Commerce Modeling Language). More information about ECML is at www.ecml.org.

Mobile commerce is still in its infancy, and many problems need to be dealt with, including user perception and technology, before revenues from M-commerce as a service can be expected.

The Mobey forum is a financial industry-driven forum whose mission is to encourage the use of mobile technology in financial services. The URL for the Mobey Forum is http://www.mobeyforum.org.

The Mobile Electronic Transaction (MET) initiative was also intiated by Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola with the aim of defining a framework for secure mobile transactions. The URL to the MET forum us http://www.mobiletransaction.org.