Wireless Wave - Spring 2008 - (Page 22)

“A key consideration in moving NFC capabilities forward will be timing and participation of the carriers, infrastructure providers, and the retailers and banks that would make this possible.” Thad Langford, Sprint tolerance for a more expensive solution, and the existing financial industry is reluctant to either lower their prices for merchants or to share its revenues with carriers. So it’s a bit of a logjam.” Retailers will have to be convinced that m-commerce benefits them before they are likely to upgrade their terminals to accommodate it. “Some merchants are concerned that enabling contactless technology means that they will just drive up more expensive credit card transaction,” says White. “They want to know if there’s actually a payback on the investment.” The answer may be found in non-traditional players like Paypal, Obopay and Google, who are developing their own payment systems to compete with traditional credit card companies. “They are not as rigid in their approach to the market, and in certain cases they have a different business model that might allow them to sidestep some of the challenges with the current systems model ecosystem,” White adds. One area that should not pose a problem, however, is spectrum availability. “In terms of cellular bandwidth, it depends on what you’re doing,” says Scott Eggers, director of product management for Motorola. “To make a payment, for instance, you do not have to be connected to the network once you have provisioned the phone with the credentials of the user. All of the information is put on a highly secure, tamper-proof memory on the device. Once you’re done that, and transactions can happen, they clear through the payment network just like they do with a regular credit card. “Where you might use bandwidth is when you’re doing the provisioning or doing some updates, or delivering things like coupons. Those are not necessarily high bandwidth uses, but the richer the experience the more bandwidth they can consume,” he continues. Finally, there is concern among carriers that an m-commerce misstep could permanently turn customers off on the concept. “If customers have a bad experience—if the carrier allows a certain content provider to serve content to its subscribers and the content provider delivers a bad service—that could be a poor reflection on the operator,” says Scott Nichols, director of IPX at Ericsson. “So that is always prevalent in carriers’ thinking.” 22 The future of m-commerce None of these obstacles appear insurmountable to industry experts, however. “We could kill it by squabbling among ourselves, but if we don’t, I’d call it just about inevitable,” Chamberlain says. “I think the adoption of m-commerce will be gradual. We really feel that over the next 18 months to two years you’ll see a lot of growth in the adoption of these services,” says Richmond. “I think the more you can offer customers, the more options you can give them to use in a simple format, the faster you can see this adoption and this growth rate.” He predicts high penetration rates for m-commerce products in three to four years. “The one thing that seems most clear out of all of this is that consumers really do love this technology,” White says. “Everything we’ve seen, from the trials that we’ve done, from foreign market deployments and from third party researches, indicates that as consumers become aware of the capability they think it’s highly desirable and they intend to use it when it becomes available.” Barcode technology The use of barcode technology for m-commerce takes advantage of a feature found in most cellular phones—a built-in camera. Unlike traditional one-dimensional barcodes, which provide only price and inventory information, the two-dimensional barcodes read by cell phone cameras could serve as an interface to information and to purchasing opportunities. “For example, your device would be able to scan a two-dimensional barcode and automatically redirect you to a web page or automatically enter you into a contest,” says Brian Stankiewicz, director of corporate strategy for Alltel. People waiting to catch a bus could scan a barcode at the bus stop then read the schedule on the screen of a their mobile device. Product advertisements could feature barcodes that consumers could scan with phones to get more information about the product on their mobile screens. “In theory, with m-commerce applications linked to it, you could also make that purchase,” Stankiewicz says. With the applications available today, that would entail typing in credit card numbers and shipping addresses on the mobile phone, some- W ir e l e s s W a v e

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Wireless Wave - Spring 2008

Wireless Wave - Spring 2008 Contents A Letter from Our Chairman A Letter from Our President Pryor Approval The Promise of M-commerce Moving Targets Foreign Service Multiple Choice Legs, Regs, and Wireless Wireless News The Supplier’s Voice CTIA Welcomes New Members Index of Advertisers Roaming with….

Wireless Wave - Spring 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.