Moving Up the Mobile Commerce Value Chain: 3G Licenses, Customer Value and New Technology

Abstract

In the spring of 2002, a team within Digifone, in the Republic of Ireland, deliberated on how they would generate revenues from a Third Generation (3G) mobile license. Their plan was to facilitate third-party mobile commerce services, and receive a percentage of the resulting revenue. A key challenge would be differentiating the value of content based on transaction context. Mediation technology, based on open standards, was seen as the solution. The case describes Digifone’s evaluation of an XML vocabulary as the basis for a mediation and billing solution. The Digifone experience suggests that the key to exploiting 3G technology is inter-industry agreement on measurement standards to effectively manage the value of the associated services — a “bar code” for measuring value and distributing revenue amongst value Web participants.