Services of Mobile Commerce

Introduction

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. After that many researches have been conducted to make telephone portable and available anytime, anywhere. The first such research was initiated way back in 1900, on December 23 on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.; an inventor named Reginald Fessenden accomplished a remarkable work: He made the first wireless telephone call. He was the first to transmit the human voice via radio waves, sending a signal from one radio tower to another. In 1947, an engineer named William Rae Young, who used to work with AT&T, proposed that radio towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern could support a telephone network. Young’s design allowed for low-power transmitters to carry calls across the network. AT&T offered few customers to use radio phones; phones were very basic and work more like a walky-talky. In year 1973, Martin Cooper, who was associated with Motorola, one of AT&T’s competitors designed the first practical cell phone. It was called the Motorola DynaTAC.

A mobile phone (also known as a cellular phone/cell phone) is a phone that can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link while moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile phone operator, allowing access to the public telephone network. In the era of Information Technology it is hard to find people without this magical gadget called Cell/ mobile phone. The cell phone is a tool of the smart-working elite, a way to squeeze more value-added time into long commutes, to check with clients, or to verify stock prices, weather forecasting, closest eating joints, malls, movie halls, hotels, cabs etc. This is a wireless communication. Here wireless stands for the data being communicated without physical attachments such as microwave, infrared and radio wave. It is a convenient alternative to network cable connections and it is gaining huge popularity because of its flexibility and the freedom technology offers.

Commerce is a division of trade or production which deals with the exchange of goods and services from producer to final consumer. In short, commerce means buying and selling of goods and services. Mobile as the name suggests Moveable, Portable etc. M-commerce as said by Timelabs (2000) is “selling and purchasing” of good and services using mobile communication devices” such as mobile phones, PDA’s etc. M-Commerce is a subset of ecommerce that deals with electronic transactions using mobile communication equipment’s for conducting businesses and transactions using wireless media. According to Durlacher (1998) M-Commerce can be described as “any transaction with a monetary value conducted via a mobile telecommunications network”. As per Lehman Brothers (1995) M-commerce incorporates the use of mobile hand-held devices to communicate, inform, transact and entertain using text and data via connection to public and private networks. Mobile commerce is different from electronic commerce in at least one aspect: its unique feature is “user mobility”, which makes M-Commerce dynamically dependent on the location in which the mobile user operates (Schneiderman, 2000).