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An obvious fact: The building has to be there before tenants can move in. The same goes for mobile payments: If they're ever going to become an important part of this industry, there need to be merchants hawking their wares wirelessly. And if that's going to happen sooner rather than later, standards need to be set regarding how these payments will be made. Pronto.

Accordingly, Sprint PCS and electronic payment technology provider eONE Global recently announced plans to set mobile payment standards and create a platform for authentication, routing and settlement of transactions. That's good news because eONE has been putting a lot of its eggs in the mobile payment basket — already a force in wireline e-commerce, the company recently signed a similar deal with Vodafone for the European market.

Right now, the Sprint/eONE platform is being designed with an eye toward handling payments for premium content, which everyone anticipates will be the first type of m-commerce to see widespread adoption. Expect progress to be slow, however. Sprint and eONE are only in the planning stages. The companies hope to have another carrier signed on to the plan by the end of the year, but completion of the actual platform is not expected until mid-2003, and nobody's sure when it will actually be used.

If enough carriers eventually join the party, the effect of this partnership will trickle down to consumers, said John Duncan, managing director of eONE Global. By making it easier for sellers to offer their goods wirelessly, more sellers will do so, thereby making wireless commerce more appealing to Joe Handset.

“We think we bring value to the merchant in that we're trying to create a standard so they don't have to sign up for 16 different standards with 16 different carriers,” said Duncan.

But an essential problem remains: Right now, there simply aren't a lot of people who are champing at the bit to buy something over their wireless phones. According to Adam Zawel, an analyst with The Yankee Group, that's because mobile transactions are still too difficult to conduct.

“Once the user interfaces on these devices are pleasing, then we'll start seeing usage of wireless Internet appliances as a full-fledged member of the Internet device gang,” he said. “Simple things like color and graphics are going to go a long way toward encouraging adoption.”