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Mobile service is one of the most commonly used communication technologies for individuals and the business world nowadays (Raisnghani, 2002; Robins, 2003). In recent years, we have seen various business sectors using mobile service as a channel to promote and delivery their products and services to their clients. For example, from a marketing perspective, we see shopping malls delivering e-coupons to their shoppers via text messages once they arrive at the malls, which are a very effective way to enhance shoppers’ intention to purchase (Tsang et al., 2004). From an e-business perspective, we see Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce vendors using mobile auctions to auction their goods and services (Tang & Forster, 2007) to their customers. Mobile service also has an impact on education as educational institutions now use mobile devices to support their distance learning programs (Varshney & Vetter, 2002) and to supplement their traditional teaching programs (Ho & Ho, 2011).
Mobile devices, such as third generation (3G) cell phones, smart phones, and personal data assistants (PDAs), are useful handheld devices for our daily lives. These devices enable us to perform various daily tasks while mobile, ranging from mobile banking (m-banking), multimedia web-surfing, to mobile commerce (m-commerce), via 3G high-speed data transfer capacity (Balasubramanian et al., 2000; Tang & Forster, 2007). The two commonly used 3G mobile service standards, UMTS and CDMA2000, support a higher data transmission rate and offer an increased bandwidth capacity compared with the earlier versions of mobile service standards, i.e., 2G or 2.5G, which used either the TDMA-based standard or the CDMA standard. Software developers make use of the increase in bandwidth of 3G mobile service standards to develop new applications for these 3G handheld devices, such as multimedia services and Internet applications. These 3G handheld devices can provide both supreme services to their users and can provide numerous commercial opportunities for different facets of business organizations, which range from software development, marketing, to manufacturing industries (Varshney & Vetter, 2002).
Since the launch of 3G mobile service, information systems (IS) researchers have been attracted by its high-speed data transfer capacity which would enable m-business and m-commerce. For example, Nohria and Leestma (2001) opined that m-commerce would provide huge opportunities for companies if they could develop suitable applications for their customers. Plus, m-commerce presented huge challenges to the software developers and marketers. Frolick and Chen (2004) examined business opportunities created by the mobile networks. They listed out some important characteristics, which mobile service providers should consider when they implement m-commerce programs. In particular, they suggested that the service providers think carefully whether they would like to be the “first-mover” in providing m-commerce programs in the market, to identify suitable mobile applications before their selection of the mobile devices, and to choose the technology that fitted their mobile operation. Last but not least, they reminded m-commerce operators to design their rollout strategy based on analyses grounded on the technology acceptance model, TAM (Venkatesh et al., 2003) and innovation diffusion theory, IDT (Rogers, 1995).