Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of cellular subscribers worldwide are gaining access to new wireless data choices, including Web-enabled cell phones, handheld computers and PDAs. Combine these two facts, and you get an industry with an unbelievable potential called mobile commerce, or m-commerce. Or, you send your subscriber an alert on his Palm to let him know tickets have just gone on sale for one of his favorite performers, before the subscriber even knows the singer is coming to town. Within minutes, the customer selects the best seats in his price range and purchases tickets from you. Content and applications must still be developed in multiple mobile formats.
Security questions continue to dog the industry.
And evolving payment systems and networks are barely up to the task. In fact, the wide range of wireless networks, markup languages and devices has made developing mobile-commerce applications so complex that most organizations seeking to mobilize applications need help. The first big wireless applications, deployed in the early 1990s, were field service and dispatch. Both applications facilitate commerce but do not involve transactions. We focused on mobile-commerce applications that involve actual transactions, in which a user securely purchases or sells goods or services.