World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
Mobile operators, together with vendors, banks and merchants, have joined forces to launch a slew of services that will transform the mobile phone into a kind of combination electronic wallet and personal organizer.
Around the world, companies are building and testing solutions that will allow consumers to buy what they want when they want it by using their mobile devices. Says Lydia Aldejohann, a manager at Giesecke & Dervient, a Munich-based leader in smart card technology: ''There will be no need for money as we know it, because the transaction between the merchant and the bank takes place in the network. All your plastic cards - and that includes credit cards, ID cards and loyalty cards, are one card - the card in the smart card in your mobile device. What you buy can be charged to your mobile phone bill.''
With 309 million phone users worldwide at the end of 1998 and 132 million users worldwide for the same period, chances are the global boom in mobile commerce will probably ignore the PC in favor of mobile devices, says Nigel Deighton, research director, Wireless Communications Technology at Gartner Group in France.
Europe is positioned to take the lead in mobile commerce - rather than follow in the footsteps of the rest of the world. Mr. Deighton says: ''While mobile penetration in Western Europe stands at 23.8 percent at the end of 1998, compared with 25.2 percent in North America, some countries, such as Finland, have a penetration rate of over 60 percent.'' He estimates that 30 percent to 50 percent of business-to-consumer e-commerce transactions will be carried out via a mobile device by 2004 and performed outside North America. ''Europe is where the Internet is mobile,'' he adds.
It is also where pioneers such as Nokia are busy developing services for a new generation of customers on the go. Nokia, a driving force behind Wireless Applications Protocol (WAP), a new open-industry standard for mobile Internet, is convinced mobile phones are going to be the channel of choice for customers who want to buy goods and services on-line. It has just begun shipping the world's first WAP phones and is working on an ambitious project to provide customers with services that will allow them to make travel arrangements from the road.
Together with IBM and Sabre Inc., a leader in on-line travel, Nokia is working on a real-time interactive service that will allow travelers to initiate flight changes and even receive real-time updates on the status of their travel plans from airlines anywhere, anytime.
''This venture has offered Sabre the opportunity to bring the most powerful reservations system in the world and place it in the hands of our business travelers,'' says Peter Stevens, Sabre's vice president of product and business development. ''We're seeing a new category of business traveler - the connected traveler - a person who travels two to three days per week and needs knowledge and information on demand. When these travelers are empowered with information based on the corporate travel policy, they're able to make an informed decision much faster.''
The Sabre WAP service will deliver a mixture of pull and push content to the user's mobile phone, including flight information (pull), flight notification for delays or cancellations (push) and flight itinerary (pull), notes Martti Granberg, principal consultant for Nokia Wireless Solutions. ''Increasingly sophisticated content and transaction capabilities will become the norm as the service develops, such as full itinerary planning, including car and hotel as well as content relating to destination weather, driving information and mapping.''
All of this is already available today through Sabre Business Travel Solutions (BTS), the company's on-line corporate travel purchasing system, to customers on the desktop and laptop, but the WAP service brings these services to corporate road warriors, where and when they need it.
Nokia expects flight rebooking to be one of the service's most popular features. The service will reference the traveler's corporate travel policy and travel preferences and the ticket's restrictions and fare information. A filtered list of flight options will be generated and transmitted back to the device, allowing the traveler to book the preferred flight and receive confirmation.
The service will be demonstrated at the Telecom 99 show in Geneva, providing a first glimpse of its capabilities and the coming world of wireless travel solutions.
The pilot will be tested in the United States during the fourth quarter of 1999.
Peggy Salz-Trautman