معاملات و مدل های کسب و کار در تجارت الکترونیکی تلفن همراه : الزامات و خصوصیات

Advances in wireless network technology and the continuously increasing number of users of hand-held terminals make the latter a possible channel for offering personalized services to mobile users and give pace to the rapid development of mobile electronic commerce (MEC). MEC operates partially in a different environment than Internet e-commerce due to the special characteristics and constraints of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. In this paper, we discuss the business models in MEC and transaction modeling issues pertinent for the business models and the environment.

Advances in wireless network technology and the continuously increasing number of users of hand-held terminals make the latter a new channel for offering personalized services to mobile users and give pace to the rapid development of e-commerce conducted with portable devices. The basic requirement for mobile e-commerce and personalized services is that the mobile wireless devices are either directly “Web-enabled” or at least “WAP-enabled” [11] or “I-mode-enabled”, i.e., “Internet-enabled”. Current estimates of the number of such wireless Internet-enabled devices range from 134 to 330 millions around the year 2003 [3]. Mobile electronic commerce (MEC) or mobile e-business refers to e-commerce (e-business) activities relying solely or partially on mobile e-commerce transactions. As a mobile e-commerce transaction we define any type of transaction of an economic value that is conducted through a mobile terminal that uses a wireless telecommunications network for communication with the e-commerce infrastructure. MEC operates partially in a different environment than e-commerce conducted in fixed Internet, due to the special characteristics and constraints of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. MEC has a number of business, technical and legal implications that are different from e-commerce in the fixed Internet setting. Most notably, location-based products and services is a completely new business, technical, and legal area that is typical only of MEC. MEC becomes interesting with the huge proliferation of the WWW-based business-to-consumer (b-to-c) e-commerce in Internet since 1995 and the simultaneous and huge proliferation of digital wireless telecom networks throughout the world. In this paper, we first present the special characteristics that differentiate MEC transactions from traditional e-commerce transactions, in particular the constraints of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. Then, we focus on how these characteristics affect MEC business models and the important role that mobile network operators (MNOs) can play in this context. We also present a formal model for MEC transactions and their properties. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we survey some of the issues that differentiate MEC from traditional electronic commerce. In Section 3, we present the business models and the main players in MEC. In Section 4, we focus on MEC transactions, their properties and how they relate to business models. Section 5 concludes the paper.

MEC is one of the key applications of today's mobile information society, due to the large number of opportunities it opens to all stakeholders: MNOs, service and content providers, finance industry and consumers. In this paper, we discussed business and transaction modeling issues pertinent to MEC. MEC operates partially in a different environment than e-commerce conducted on the fixed Internet, due to the special characteristics and constraints of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. We focused on how these characteristics affect MEC business models and the important role that MNOs can play in this context. We also presented a formal model for MEC transactions and their properties. Our work is still in progress and it aims to contribute in the development of a standard working framework for mobile e-commerce in order to cope with the current market fragmentation and to ensure interoperability in the global mobile electronic market.