Context-Awareness in Mobile Commerce

Abstract

Advances in wireless network and multimedia technologies enable mobile commerce (m-commerce) information service providers to know the location and surroundings of mobile consumers through GPS-enabled and camera-embedded cell phones. Context awareness has great potential for creating new service modes and improving service quality in m-commerce. To develop and implement successful context-aware applications in m-commerce, it is critical to understand the concept of the “context” of mobile consumers and how to access and utilize contextual information in an appropriate way. This article dissects the context construct along both the behavioral and physical dimensions from the perspective of mobile consumers, developing a classification scheme for various types of consumer contexts. Based on this classification scheme, it discusses three types of context-aware applications—noninteractive mode, interactive mode and community mode—and describes newly proposed applications as examples of each.