M-Commerce Made Simple

When it comes to technology, where children lead -- adults follow. The big question currently is, can phone companies convince 'cool dude teenagers that WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is trendy? Sceptics may be reserved about mobile commerce, and a large part of the population probably still doesnt know what it is. But if you want to know the facts - ask a teenager. They follow this technology like an addiction. Today, teenagers can use WAP phones to access some internet services and carry out transactions. The facilities are currently limited but they are getting better every day and the under 16's cannot wait.

So, what do you need to know? For starters, don't call it the mobile internet. This only raises people's expectations to a level which cannot be matched. The big m-commerce success story that everyone in Europe and the US hopes to emulate is I-Mode, a device that every hip and trendy teenager in Japan has to have. I-Mode is big in Japan, largely because it is cheap, fast and offers access to about 600 official sites and thousands of unofficial sites. Users can send e-mails, transfer funds between bank accounts, book plane tickets, see what is on at the cinema, find the nearest hotel or restaurant, play interactive games, check their horoscope and download melodies which they can play on their phone, as if it were a digital walkman.

But will it be big here? Of course it will. Kids in the West want to lead the kids in the East, not follow them. We need to learn the lessons of the Japanese success and provide low cost high-speed mobile phone calls, to make WAP phone calls fast and friendly. Everything else is ready and waiting to be used. More and more sites will be WAP enabled as soon as the bandwidth is sorted out. Here, everyone is still waiting for the "killer application", which will convince the buying public that they need to have an internet-enabled phone. Once the novelty has worn off, you may not want to have to peer at a small screen to read your bank details. Dont worry, by then the mobile phone makers will have made bigger and better phones. Just look at the Nokia Communicator and Ericsson 380 for a taste of what is to come. Bigger and better should also mean more secure.

Teenagers may be going forward with this technology but it will be the businesses that feel the benefit of power and speed. WAP is the current mobile internet platform. It works currently on the GSM network, then there will be GPRS (general packet radio system), and then there will be UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). These three can be divided into slow, faster and really speedy. Anything else is technical detail for mobile phone companies to worry about. The screens on phones are getting larger; you can plug in external keyboards. We just need fast, always on, affordable bandwidth to be available.

In business everyone wants to know how he or she will get a slice of the m-commerce action. For those developing the technology affordability means profitability. If the phones are too expensive, if the telecom companies charge too much per minute, if the vendors price their goods and services too high for impulse and convenience buying, then we will never share in the Japanese success story.

But moving on from teenagers, the business benefits can be immense. One UK company doing its best to get mobile businesses on the move is Access Accounting Limited. Having launched the first packaged solution to link low cost web sites with back office accounts in 1999, they have now produced a standard WAP package that WAP enables an existing web site for just 500 and it installs in just five minutes.

Now that's m-commerce made simple.