We have shoppers coming to a mall 50 times a year, and I don't even know their names. By 2004 there will be 1 billion cell phones worldwide, according to IDC, and half of them will be Internet-enabled. In the travel world, Rosemont, Ill.-based Galileo, one of the four major reservation system companies, will be rolling out its mobile service to corporate travel departments and travel agents later this year. Users will be able to make and change flights reservation using their cell phones and book rental cars and hotel rooms. One industry analyst believes corporate agents will jump on the service as a way to keep track of changes made by its employees.
Travelers tend to be cowboys who change their trips while they are traveling.
Conn. In addition, tracking employee or department travel expenditures is helpful during budget negotiations, Rice said. SE Banken of Sweden expects to have 5 million customers online within three years, and Merita Bank, in Helsinki, Finland, is wrapping up a pilot with Tantau and expects 250,000 wireless banking customers by the end of the year. Brown points out that Bank of America supports 10,000 physical locations and Charles Schwab, with an increasingly productive e-commerce site, has only 400. According to analysts, this is a necessary step because these companies' target is a workforce of consumers displaying diminishing brand loyalty in order to access their business and personal data wherever they are. For traditional companies, maintaining existing customers rather than attracting new ones appears to be the greatest impetus for deploying a mobile solution.