6533b7d1fe1ef96bd125d506

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Invariant aspects in M-commerce environments

subject

description

Mobile phones and other small and powerful portable devices have revolutionized personal communication and affected the lifestyles of the people in the industrialized world. Following credible estimates, in a few years there will over two - billions of such portable devices in use. An emerging trend is the electronic commerce performed using mobile terminals over wireless networks, often called mobile commerce or M-commerce. Mobile commerce environments are characterized by high complexity, including myriads of technical and organizational aspects. This property makes it difficult to distinguish the more fundamental issues, structures, and concepts in mobile commerce from the hype. To capture the fundamental aspects and objects of mobile commerce environments, we have developed a model. It covers fundamental structures and persistent entities of the M-commerce environment, as well as their relationships. Rather than providing technical details of M-commerce environments, our aim is to model invariant properties that will evidently persist for years to come. Making use of the abstraction capabilities provided by the object-oriented approach, the model is represented by OO structure diagrams.Structurally, we distinguish four spheres of concern: Regulatory Frameworks, Business Models, Enabling Technologies, and the Global Infrastructure. These are dependent on each other, but have a relative independence and development logic that is different in each sphere of concern. In addition, the development logic is different in different regions of the world. The leading Regulatory Areas are currently Far-East (Japan, South Korea), Europe (European Union), and USA. These are analyzed in the light of a few examples.The material on which the keynote is mainly based has been published in [1] and [2].