Right Here, Right Now—Consumer Expectations (3)

On the other hand, the Palm and Pocket PC operating systems have succeeded in producing a very different gaming experience. Figure 2.2 illustrates a screen shot from a popular golf game on the Pocket PC operating
system from Microsoft.

As you can see, the graphics are pretty impressive for a handheld device. iGolf is an example of a peer-to-peer (P2P) networked game, meaning that you can connect directly to another Pocket PC device and play someone online. You can also play while in disconnected mode, so a wireless connection is not required. Read the rest of this entry »

Right Here, Right Now—Consumer Expectations (2)

Another area that has shown an increasing amount of popularity is mobile phone ring tones. Mobile phones today generally come equipped with a standard set of ring tones that users can choose from. Device manufacturers realized quickly with the growth of phone usage that distinguishing between ring tones was becoming increasingly more difficult. How many times can you recall strolling through a public place listening to any number of cell phones jingle to the same tone and seeing everyone in your vicinity checking their phones at the same time? Service providers and device manufacturers realized an additional need not only for the personalization of ring tones, but also for a distinction among other common rings. New Web sites are developed almost daily that allow customers to purchase and download ring tones for their phones, ranging from popular rock/pop songs to hit movie themes. Read the rest of this entry »

Right Here, Right Now—Consumer Expectations

Customer lifestyles, careers, families, and expectations as a whole are drastically changing the way enterprise players are viewing the marketplace for goods and services. The “speed of change” is not just asking, but demanding, that producers of goods and services react to consumers’ demand for anywhere, anytime services. Our customers are working longer hours, traveling more (for business and pleasure), needing to meet tighter deadlines, and basically not taking “no” for an answer. Mobility is certainly not the answer to all those customer needs and wants. But, it is offering solutions to problems and questions that could not be answered some years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The Quest for Convenient Communication (2)

• The Customer Experience. We, as consumers, have very high expectations for new technologies. Mobility requires us to frame our experience in a completely different way than we’ve been accustomed to. The average screens size for most mobile devices is merely an inch or two in width. That leaves little room for error for content designers. If our experience on the wireless Web does not meet our expectations, it’s just as easy for us to switch back to our wired desktops. It’s easy for Web designers to make the same mistakes that early Internet providers made by focusing on the Read the rest of this entry »

The Quest for Convenient Communication

An interesting statistic from a recent Forrester research study predicts that by the year 2004 B2C sales in the United States will reach a staggering 3.2 trillion dollars! (see Table 2.1).

There’s no doubt that online shopping has hit big and is only expected to g row dramatically over the next few years. Those same services are extending into the realm of mobility, as consumers are demanding and obtaining quicker and easier ways of accessing the Internet. As Table 2.2 indicates, the demand for the wireless Internet is also growing exponentially. Read the rest of this entry »

Consumer Drivers

Imagine yourself driving to work on a normal workday minding your own business and doing your best to get to work on time. You decide that you’d like to catch the latest stock market news along with an update on your financial portfolio. While driving, you speak into your voice-activated Telematics monitor and ask for the “latest financial market news.” The system responds back with “Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 52 points, Nasdaq is up 23 points, and S&P is up 3 points. Total portfolio value up 3 percent, would you like Read the rest of this entry »

The Driving Forces of Mobile’s Growth (2)

• Business-to-business (B2B). Still another common method of leveraging the Internet for commerce is the business-to-business (B2B) relationship. Regardless of the type of product a company sells, they must attain their goods to be sold from a supplier or make it themselves. In the B2B example, the buyer (retailer) usually buys the product from a supplier (wholesaler). If we go back to the Amazon.com example, we know that Amazon is simply the middleman and buys their products to be sold from wholesalers with whom they’ve established relationships. The supplier of Amazon’s goods manages the supply side of the B2B equation. Ultimately, the goods end up in the consumer’s hands, through, for example, the purchase of the DVD or CD. Read the rest of this entry »

The Driving Forces of Mobile’s Growth

Introduction
Now that we’ve defined the similarities and differences between mobility and wireless, it’s important to understand how to apply them to a real business application. Clients today generally come in two categories: consumers (retail customers like you and me and the business customer (corporations, sole proprietor, and so on). In the world of e-business, we’re accustomed to thinking about the customer through a relationship-based approach. The most common relationships are the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Proactive Push

One of the characteristics of mobility (notice that we said mobility and not just wireless technology) is that we now are holding a device that can accept information anytime and anywhere. Thus, our business partners
now have the ability to send us e-mail, instant messages, alerts, and other data. This is called pushing the messages or data to the device as opposed to the device requesting the information. Proactive pushing works quite well in location-based services applications because it’s a messaging-based service. Pushing messages to our customers is one of the earliest innovations in mobility. Small message services (SMS) have Read the rest of this entry »

Personalization

As people, we are all unique beings who like and dislike different things. I like to listen to blues and rock music, whereas the next person may like jazz. I like to eat Italian food, whereas the next person may like Greek. It’s an ever-changing and evolving world we live in that constantly gives us new things to enjoy and new places to go. The world of the Internet also strives to provide an adaptable experience that makes us want to come back. Read the rest of this entry »