Buying with Your Mobile Device
Russ Jones and I at Glenbrook were talking the other day about how some of the SMS-based banking services (like Chase Mobile) remind us of the early days of the Internet - pre-web browser days.
Back in those days, we had things called list servers that would respond to commands we'd email them. Send them an email with "help" in the body and you got back a list of things you could do with that particular list server.
This afternoon I was reading Evan Schuman's latest post on this StorefrontBacktalk blog titled "Mobile: How Do I Buy With Thee? Let Me Count The Ways". Evan makes some of those same points - recalling the days of the text-based Lynx "browser" - but then goes on to talk about the key issue with mobile commerce and mobile payments:
"That defining moment has yet to hit mobile commerce. Forget design and programming issues. There hasn't yet even been broad agreement on how m-commerce is supposed to work."
Great stuff - and oh so true.
Agreed. Most of the proposed solutions require a huge amount of upgraded physical and logical infrastructure (ie; POS terminals, payment cards, etc...)which seems like an oxymoron in the internet age, especially when the payback is questionable or fleeting at best. This reminds me of the smart card pilots back in the day. Once the internet came along, with the power and flexibility of what you could do at a server (ie; intelligent risk based security and authentication plus creative features, etc...) with incredible cost effectivness, smart cards really no longer made any sense. History might be repeating itself.
Posted by: Steve Klebe | September 17, 2007 at 08:31 AM