Indian Wells, Riverside County Feb. 8, 2000
Gedaliah Gurfein, TeleVend's vice president for marketing (www.televend.com) stood in front of a soda machine with ``No cash needed'' emblazoned on its front. He whipped out his cellular phone and dialed the number printed on the front of the machine. An automated voice welcomed him to the ``TeleDrink''' system, said his purchase would be automatically billed to his cell phone and asked him to press 1 for a cola, 2 for a diet cola, 3 for an orange drink or 4 for a soda water. He pressed 1 and a cold can of soda popped out.
Gurfein was on stage at Demo 2000, a two-day conference known as a launch pad for new tech products, ideas and companies. Gurfein founded and is a partner in TeleVend, an Israeli company that wants to convert wireless phones into ``super credit cards.'' He envisions a future where users can do everything from feeding their parking meters to ordering a pizza to pumping gas just by dialing the appropriate phone number from their mobile phones.

Historians researching the birth of mobile commerce may well point to the moment during the DEMO 2000, but will the technology transform into revenue for the number of organsations investing time and money in the Wireless world ? Let us explore Mcommerce in more detail.

In the United States, at least, the m-commerce buzz is supported largely by the fact that foreign countries lead in wireless and mobile phone adoption. Finland is the leader, with current cell phone infiltration at about 65 percent of the population, followed closely by Japan, where mobile phone subscribers outnumber fixed phone line subscribers 56.8 million to 55.4 million. Indeed, the mobile service provider NTT DoCoMo is Japan's largest ISP, with 26 million subscribers.

It is believed that the earliest the United States could reach m-commerce parity with Europe would be sometime in 2007, a projection that should alarm corporate board members. Yet if the snail's pace that most consumers adopted in accepting ecommerce is any measure, the hard work has already been done. Consumers will warm up to m-commerce much more quickly because they are now comfortable making purchases online.

What’s in store for us???
When we consider the options for India, we have to view the situation from 2 angles. The first, being the advantages mobile commerce will render and secondly what are the opportunities we have for software development.

Advantages of Mcommerce for India. India might be a net exporter of software, but the penetration of PCs is very low. This is one of the main reasons for the mushrooming of Cyber cafes in the country in the last few years. It can be generally assumed that the usage of the Internet at a Cyber Café is more for finding information on the web than for Online purchases. In order to use the Internet for Online Purchases the Internet has to be practically be available round the clock.
The reverse is true with a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant – namely Mobile, Palm PC etc..) The PDA is used more for immediate information ( Availability of Tickets, train / bus schedules) and online purchases than for gathering information.
So there is an all out possibility that Indians like the Japs and Europeans will find the PDA more handful than the PC for online purchases.

Opportunities for Software Development The next 3-4 years will see a lot of wireless development in the US as it tries to reach Mcommerce parity with Europe. As over half of India’s software exports are to the US, India can get a huge share of this pie. The technologies to look out for are HTML, WAP, WML, HDML, Bluetooth, along with server side technologies such as Servlets, ASP, PSP etc..

Mcommerce categories.
Commonly it is assumed that Mcommerce is Ecommerce in the Mobile environment. But this is partly true. A lot of Mcommerce revenue is and would be generated in a mode which is bereft of the Internet. Eg. A trans action between a Vending Machine and a Mobile telephone. Such a transaction can be directly added to the telephone bill or to the credit card. The internet is not part of the transaction.
The second and the more common is where existing ecommerce application is accessed via a PDA. Eg let us take an example of a bank which allows online banking for the customers. After successful implementation of the Ecommerce application the bank might want to provide partial facilities for PDAs. Such applications will require that sites have to be redesigned and re developed for the WAP environment.

The article has been written by Sandeep Tapaswi, Director Fands Infotrainers and can be reached at  sandeep@fandsindia.com