Found this article as well, which just adds more fuel to the fire. What was it one analyst indicated? "a dollar per month for every cell phone connected to the web for Infospace"? Works for me!!<g> Jack
"The Hottest New
Buzzword:
'M-Commerce'
By Jim Seymour
Special to TheStreet.com
3/5/00 12:05 AM ET
Editor's Note: The column below first appeared on
TSC on Feb. 28.
Feb. 28, 2000 -- I spend a lot of time talking with
technology-company execs. I speak with them on
the phone almost every day, plus for a half-day or
so on Fridays, my "phone day." I meet with, on
average, two or three companies a week in my
office or over coffee somewhere. Plus, I take
frequent trips to Silicon Valley, Boston's Route-128
area and Seattle, for "go-sees" -- to look, touch and
play with the new stuff before (sometimes long
before) it's released.
I'm not especially proud that I spend that much time
on these talks, and I hate the travel. But I don't
know any other way to keep up with such rapidly
changing industries as are today swept under the
rubric of "technology."
After 20 years of these meetings,
one of the things I've learned to
listen for are new buzzwords --
terms that I start hearing from
several sources, usually in several
parts of the country, at about the
same time. Terms that aren't in print or on TV yet,
but, it's clear, soon will be.
This business loves to pursue The Next Thing, and
while a slavish pursuit of that chimera by writers
and investors can produce more noise than signal,
more heat than light, watching for the early
emergence of these new buzzwords can produce
invaluable inside intelligence. Run that intelligence
through a reality filter, then an experience filter --
and you get a sense of what's likely to be hot in the
near- to mid-term future.
For several months now, the hottest of the hot of
these new terms arising in talks with technology
leaders has been "m-commerce." Forget about
e-commerce, they say, m-commerce is where it's
going to be. And where they want to be.
By m-commerce they mean "mobile commerce," as
in e-commerce conducted over a mobile device.
And they (and I) all agree that the mobile device is,
overwhelmingly, going to be a smart cell phone, not
a PDA or a handheld computer.
Why a smart phone instead of something sexier,
like a Palm or Handspring PDA? Or one of those
cool hand-held PCs, like the new generation of
Pocket PC devices running Microsoft's
(MSFT:Nasdaq - news - boards) former Windows
CE?
It's the communications, stupid.
No offense, but I couldn't resist stealing the line.
Because communications lie at the heart of what is
really useful about a pocketable device, and adding
other functions to a cell phone turns out to make a
lot more sense than grafting communications onto a
PDA.
The Palm VII is a good example: It's clever, it's
useful, but it suffers from lots of ugly compromises
as a communications device, mainly growing out of
its dependence on Palm's feeble "Web-clipping"
approach. It's also hideously expensive, if you use it
much -- exactly the wrong pricing approach for a
tool 3Com (COMS:Nasdaq - news - boards) wants
to make ubiquitous. A new flat-price contact for
Palm.Net, announced last week by 3Com, will
help, but using a Palm VII is still an expensive
proposition.
Yes, I know a lot of TheStreet.com members love
their Palm VIIs, sometimes even for accessing TSC
content -- and I know I'll be hearing from a
significant percentage of them.
But a lot more people -- hundreds of millions -- rely
on their cell phones. We're just a couple of years
away from a world market of a billion cell phone
users. And as we make more and more of those
phones smarter and more useful -- especially in the
new, third-generation, or 3G, phones -- they're going
to become even more dominant.
There are lots of knocks on m-commerce. For
example: "So how often do you find yourself walking
down the street, and suddenly have an
overwhelming urge to jump online and buy a book
from Amazon.com (AMZN:Nasdaq - news -
boards)?" Or, "The keyboard is too small, and the
displays are even worse." Or, "But I love my Palm
Pilot."
These comments all miss the point. It's not that
you'll have a sudden urge, riding up to the 67th floor
in an elevator, to buy a book. Or that you'll be using
today's tiny keyboards and displays. Or that
anyone's asking you to abandon your Palm Pilot,
with its eight months of appointments and 1,400
contacts.
The real point is that m-commerce-enabled smart
phones are going to be ubiquitous. For many
people, five years from now, a smart phone is going
to be the primary means of communicating over the
Net. For many people, three years from now, a
smart phone is going to be the primary tool for what
we today call "e-commerce."
Sure, that means a lot of retooling of today's
e-commerce sites. Successful e-commerce
companies will split their customer access between
more conventional pages and smaller pages,
organized very differently, with better and sharper
searching, optimized for m-commerce machines.
The whole role of these pocketable smart phones is
going to change. We'll use them constantly -- for
everything from checking stock prices and making
trades to buying movie tickets and Cokes from
vending machines (already commonplace in some
parts of Europe), as well as for sending short
messages to one another.
As the Net spreads its tentacles, we'll use them to
trigger events in Net-controlled environments --
turning on the heat at home, for example, so it's
warm by the time we get there from the airport, and
getting intrusion alerts from vacation homes when
the alarm system there goes off.
M-commerce will be only a part of this, of course,
and in fact, I'm convinced that in maybe three
years, as the number of truly smart, Net-enabled
3G phones reaches critical mass and the number of
services we can easily access through them has
exploded, all this will seem unremarkable -- utterly
evolutionary, utterly predictable.
As an investor, how can you cash in on this move?
More on that tomorrow."
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