| Nowadays, mobile communication, mobile devices, and mobile computing are widely available. Everywhere people are carrying mobile devices, such as mobile phones. The availability of mobile communication networks has made a huge impact to various applications, including commerce. Consequently, there is a strong relationship between mobile computing and commerce. The Encyclopedia of Mobile Computing and Commerce brings to readers articles covering a wide range of mobile technologies and their applications.
Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is expanding, and consequently the impact to the overall economy is considerable. However, there are still many issues and challenges to be addressed, such as mobile marketing, mobile advertising, mobile payment, mobile authorization using voice, and so on. Providing users with more intelligent product catalogues for browsing on mobile devices and product brokering also plays an important role in m-commerce. Furthermore, the impact mobile devices give to the supply chain must be carefully considered. This includes the use of emerging mobile technology, such as RFID, sensor network, and so forth.
A wide range of mobile technology is available for m-commerce. Mobile phones are an obvious choice. Additionally, there are many different kinds of mobile phones sold in the market, some of which are labelled as smartphones. There is much research conducted in conjunction with the use of mobile phones. Mobile phone text messaging and SMS are common among mobile users. Subsequently, the use of text messaging and SMS enriches m-commerce, including the ability to support multilingual text messaging. Mobile phone supporting disability has also been a focus lately, which focuses on text messaging to disabled people. More advanced applications now require additional services, such as chatting using Bluetooth, mobile querying, and voice recognition. Mobile privacy issues are also still an important topic.
Apart from mobile phones, there is a wide variety of mobile technology, some of which are mobile robots, RFID, penbased mobile computing, and so forth. Many advanced applications have been developed utilizing these technologies. Current research has been focusing on man-machine interfaces and sensory systems, particularly for mobile robots, biometric and voice based authentication, traffic infractions, and so forth. The context of smart spaces also gives a new dimension to mobile technology. |