Making a Market for Mobile Commerce

Visiting the Seattle offices of Qpass last month to report on this issue's cover story yielded some very interesting insight about wireless data applications, including the idea that momentum in the sector is rapidly turning the area of mobile content creation and delivery into a much more broadly defined area of mobile commerce. In other words, wireless data has finally become a business.

How and why that happened is perhaps one of the most intriguing parts of the story, in large part because no one really seems to have the exact answer. Part of it is that networks have evolved to the point that they're much better able to transport data applications than ever before, and underlying software platforms are better able to deliver and process and bill for those services. Part of it is that the devices that connect to the ends of those transport pipes are likewise much more capable than ever. And part of it is that content developers have finally figured out — at least for now — what kinds of apps are most appealing to mobile consumers.

But there's still a large part of it — the part about sociological trends and human behavior — that no one can ever fully identify. As Tom Trinneer of Qpass put it in my profile of the company, which begins on page 40, “Almost independent of any carrier marketing, people started doing it. You had peer group influence and word-of-mouth, which is the way most of the really cool fads and market trends take off in the first place. Most really compelling stuff didn't get cooked up by a marketer.”

Well-put — and honest, especially considering that Trinneer himself has held a number of executive positions in marketing, including one in the multimedia division of AT&T Wireless. The fact is that mobile content, or wireless data, or mobile multimedia — or whatever you choose to call it — is something that the industry has been trying to figure out for a long time. Then something seemingly unidentifiable happened — or, more accurately, a number of identifiable things happened, as well as a couple of things we may never completely figure out — and the consuming public began turning mobile content into mobile commerce.

That's certainly not the end of it, though, and several important questions must still be addressed: What must wireless carriers do to take advantage of the momentum behind this trend? What evolutionary network or back-office steps must they take to ensure that their success in mobile commerce isn't fleeting? How will they be able to identify when the apps that are selling today wane in popularity and the right point at which to introduce the new apps that will sell tomorrow? How will they know what will sell?

Maybe they won't, always. But if they get it right some of the time, and if they have the right kinds of back-office platforms in place that allow for margins of error without eroding their margins, maybe they'll be alright anyway.