No card, no commerce
Fecha Martes, enero 22 @ 10:26:07
Tema Telecomunicaciones :: Smartphone
| The question today for most speculators is not if mobile commerce will happen, but when.
Declan Taylor argues that the SIM card and other complimentary ingredients are critical players in making mobile commerce a global success.
Mobile commerce in the mass market requires the mobile to become a trusted personal consumer device - the mobile is already established as a personal device as operators have spent the last decade getting consumers to speak to one another. The next few years will see us transacting securely with one another through our ‘trusted and personal devices.’
In such a noisy and often hyped market place, there have been sporadic outbursts from players claiming the arrival of mobile commerce. These proprietary and often niche market applications have never quite caught the consumer’s imagination. Whilst it may be technically innovative, I don’t accept that being able to buy flowers, check a bank balance or recharge a prepaid account to be terribly exciting stuff. If mobile commerce doesn’t deliver something big and exciting to the market in the near future then perhaps we are already asking too much from it.
So what are the ‘missing links’ in the evolution of mobile commerce that will catapult it directly into the consumers’ pocket and pave the way for mass-market excitement and acceptance?
The SIM will be at the very heart of enabling secure mobile commerce in the future. The SIM is based on secure microprocessor smart card technology and uses on-board processing capability and data management functions to execute the GSM application. Since being introduced in GSM nearly a decade ago it has continued to benefit from the numerous advances made in the silicon chips and smart card technologies. As an intelligent, functional, secure and robust platform it is ideally suited to supporting new and improved forms of service delivery, such as mobile commerce. The SIM started its life as the key that could access the GSM world.
SIM Toolkit
Within GSM, SIM Toolkit is a set of standardised commands that provide SIM application developers with a toolbox that allows them to create and support mobile commerce applications. SIM Toolkit allows remote bi-directional access to the network and beyond, allowing the SIM to interact securely and dynamically with remote servers. The SIM supports standardised over-the-air commands, which means post issuance management and scheme operators can implement service-provisioning strategies. The technical and commercial benefits and capabilities of the SIM make a compelling argument for their role as a key enabler of mobile commerce.
If you examine how consumers transact on fixed line systems, it is clear that none of these mass-market solutions can match the security model that mobile commerce provides for an end-to-end transaction. Consumers in the fixed line world are quite prepared to use legacy systems on a daily basis without realising the lack of comparative security they may be exposed to. The wireless world will use the proven capability and robustness of the SIM model to deliver the security that is needed to make a mobile commerce world more widely accepted.
Today we can see the SIM security model being adapted to support secure access to advanced data services. The mono-functional SIM once used in early GSM has now evolved into a multi-application platform that can be used in the 3G future. The next generation of SIM platforms use 32-bit machines, offer 64Kbyte EEPROM of free space and provide support for cryptographic and PKI functions. Moving from a mature 2G market to an immature 3G world brings new challenges, especially in predicting how mobile commerce will work. The mobile commerce model is still unproven in the 2G world, as the infrastructure in place today is designed for voice-to-voice communication and not for people to carry out transactions between one another.
Flexibility
There are two other important changes that we will see in how applications are managed as we migrate to 2.5G and 3G mobile commerce services. Firstly, customers will be given more flexibility to customise their applications and personalise the services they receive, without compromising security. Making the mobile a personal trusted device is a key enabler of mobile commerce. Secondly, operators will be able to use over the air capability to manage applications in the field. The changing tastes of a dynamic market and requests from customers for changes to their service bundles can be implemented more easily.
Mobile commerce still needs to move away from being a niche perception to a mass-market reality. It needs safe and secure payment procedures, user-friendly interfaces and above all demonstrable benefits to encourage users to adopt services. Today the market is still flush with anticipation, hype and technology demonstrations. There are some genuine services out there but not any that capture the consumer’s imagination and create the required momentum for adopting them in the mass market.
If shopping is supposed to be the opium of the people then when can I get a fix through my mobile? When can I get excited about mobile commerce and the lifestyle shaping benefits it brings? All the predictions say that mobile commerce is going to be massive and I agree. Every month various statistics from industry analysts blow away those they made previously.
Today for mobile commerce we have STK security, improving WAP capability, open platforms, and better terminals to launch innovative mobile commerce services more quickly. There will always be a learning curve to go through on how consumers will transact and what sort of services will really provide benefit and convenience. While the GSM world has been waiting for mobile commerce to start in ernest, Japan has seen massive revenues from mass-market entertainment and information services through i-mode. This begs the question, how important is mobile commerce to the mass market and would they prefer to have fun entertainment services rather than boring old commerce? Looking at individual service sectors in isolation is perhaps not practical as consumers will use a suite of services that meet a range of needs. They also need the flexibility to personalise and bundle their services accordingly.
Today, mobile commerce services are rapidly improving, and will shake off their lacklustre image when customers see the real benefits and convenience they offer. The use of micro payment capability and e-purse functions for small value transactions will remove the need to link payment functions to more cumbersome credit card-based solutions. Mobile commerce solutions will become commonplace only after they have captured the imagination of the consumer. Put simply, what mobile commerce needs to hook its customers with is a series of services that become ‘must have, can’t live without.’
Declan Taylor is from Bluefish Technologies, a SIM solutions provider founded in 2000 and the only smart card supplier to focus entirely on the wireless telecommunications industry. http://www.bluefish-tech.com
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