Mobile commerce

The term mobile commerce was originally coined in 1997 by Kevin Duffey at the launch of the Global Mobile Commerce Forum, to mean 'the delivery of electronic commerce capabilities directly into the consumer’s hand, anywhere, via wireless technology.' Many choose to think of Mobile Commerce as meaning 'a retail outlet in your customer’s pocket.' Mobile commerce is worth US$800 billion, with Asia representing almost half of the market. The Global Mobile Commerce Forum, which came to include over 100 organisations, had its fully minuted launch in London on 10 November 1997. Kevin Duffey was elected as the Executive Chairman at the first meeting in November 1997. The meeting was opened by Dr. Mike Short, former chairman of the GSM Association, with the very first forecasts for mobile commerce from Kevin Duffey (Group Telecoms Director of Logica) and Tom Alexander (later CEO of Virgin Mobile and then of Orange). Over 100 companies joined the Forum within a year, many forming mobile commerce teams of their own, e.g. MasterCard and Motorola. Of these one hundred companies, the first two were Logica and Cellnet (which later became O2). Member organisations such as Nokia, Apple, Alcatel, and Vodafone began a series of trials and collaborations. Mobile commerce services were first delivered in 1997, when the first two mobile-phone enabled Coca-Cola vending machines were installed in the Helsinki area in Finland. The machines accepted payment via SMS text messages. This work evolved to several new mobile applications such as the first mobile phone-based banking service was launched in 1997 by Merita Bank of Finland, also using SMS. Finnair mobile check-in was also a major milestone, first introduced in 2001. The m-Commerce(tm) server developed in late 1997 by Kevin Duffey and Andrew Tobin at Logica won the 1998 Financial Times award for 'most innovative mobile product,' in a solution implemented with De La Rue, Motorola and Logica. The Financial Times commended the solution for 'turning mobile commerce into a reality.' The trademark for m-Commerce was filed on 7 April 2008. In 1998, the first sales of digital content as downloads to mobile phones were made possible when the first commercial downloadable ringtones were launched in Finland by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Oyj). Two major national commercial platforms for mobile commerce were launched in 1999: Smart Money in the Philippines, and NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode Internet service in Japan. i-Mode offered a revenue-sharing plan where NTT DoCoMo kept 9 percent of the fee users paid for content, and returned 91 percent to the content owner. Mobile-commerce-related services spread rapidly in early 2000. Norway launched mobile parking payments. Austria offered train ticketing via mobile device. Japan offered mobile purchases of airline tickets.