Challenges of Mobile Commerce Essay

Currently, there are a number of mobile commerce applications that can be used by consumers with suitable handsets. For example, now customers in some countries like Japan and UK shop via their mobile handsets exactly similar to shopping in malls. The applications include mobile banking (financial services), advertising, product location and shopping, auction and reverse auction, and entertainment, to name a few (Varshney and Vetter, 2001). Table 1 shows summary of mobile e-commerce that is now available in market. The table also explains the relevant questions for each mobile commerce applications. Among twelve issues in mobile commerce, this paper only considers three of them; they are security issues of mobile commerce, development of complex application in limited speed of mobile processor, and human-handhelds interface through the development of attractive graphical user interface in mobile devices (Tarasewich, Nickerson, and Warkentin, Merrill, 2002). Amidst the increasing number of consumers that shop online via mobile devices, there is a potential threat that could prevent the fast adoption of mobile commerce; the threat is security. It is known that electronic commerce including e-commerce is potential to malware that contains viruses, adwares, or hijackers that collect our credit card information and sending it into a remote host for further criminal actions. In order to eliminate this threat, mobile application developers provide high-level threat into personal and corporation confidential information such as password and personal identification number (PIN). Since computer technology has gone mobile, the applications and computer program also follow. Therefore, it is also common to find many applications that tailored to work on mobile devices such as wireless e-mail and Microsoft Office for mobile handsets. However, mobile devices have some drawbacks such as limited bandwidth allocation that restricts the use of several mobile applications such as video conferencing over the phone, high-speed internet, bus on demand and may others. In addition, mobile handhelds are also limited in processor speeds in which highest processor speed for typical PDAs is about 400 MHz while desktop computers have achieved more than 2 GHz. The question is what type of interface that between the messaging services. Fortunately, to simplify and enable customers to use mobile devices, currently, there is new module called a hyperbolic tree that allows users to view and present their information on an easy-to-use, interactive, multi-dimensional tree, with additional visual navigation features. By definition, hyperbolic trees are dynamic visualizations, just like tree map, fisheye view, cone trees, cam trees, and perspective wall that based on interactive manipulation of the structure of the information (Ovaska, 2004). The interesting part in the development of visualization in mobile handhelds is that fact that such devices such as smart phone and PDA have small screen than desktop computer. This fact underlies the way information presented in the devices. Mobile commerce is the next step of online commerce. Therefore, the opportunity for mobile commerce lies on the number of mobile service penetration rates. According to ITU (2005), UK records 62% of mobile penetration rates. This considerably high penetration rate has put mobile subscribers in the U. K. to surpass those in fixed phone lines and imply that mobile commerce will be easily adoptable by U. K. consumers. Table 2 shows U. S. internet penetration rate compared to other countries in the world.