A New Era in Mobile Commerce, Ecommerce : iPedia

At the forefront of these initiatives is the use of chip-enabled cards with, in particular, the adoption of the EMV standard promoted by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa. But EMV has made little progress since its announcement in 1996. Chip-based systems have proven expensive to deploy and their actual effectiveness seriously criticized.

According to APACS, the U.K card association, the conversion to chip-enabled cards will cost over $1.6 billion for the U.K alone. And the problem is even worse when it comes to adopting chip-based solutions for securing online transactions. Every major online pilot involving chip-enabled cards has failed, unable to absorb the cost to deploy and support the necessary consumer infrastructures.

Chip-based systems do not provide a panacea against card fraud either. Despite ten years of consumers entering a PIN at the point of sale, France reported card fraud doubled in the year 2000, blaming the cloning of the so-called smart cards for the $1.5 billion in fraudulent cash withdrawals. Realizing the difficulties in rolling out chip-based solutions in the home market, the card associations have recently proposed new alternatives to securing online transactions. Known as SPA-UCAF at MasterCard and 3D-Secure at Visa, these solutions have definitively drawn on the lessons learned from the failure of SET, even though they still appear far more complicated than necessary.

Unfortunately, SPA and 3D-secure are incompatible. This only adds to the burden of merchants, issuers, and cardholders who are already required to adopt multiple solutions to solve these problems. Moreover, recent experiments have shown that these solutions have been narrowly designed for the

While the card industry struggles to devise practical solutions and dedicate its resources to demonstrate the benefits of a large-scale roll-out of chip-enabled systems,

The Internet (also known simply as the Net) can be briefly understood as "a network of networks". Specifically, it is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and governmental networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
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Leveraging the messaging and identification capabilities of millions of cellular phones, wireless carriers have found ways to enable and secure proximity payments, positioning themselves as the trusted intermediaries through which secure payment transactions will happen. Mobipay in Spain, Paybox in Germany, and Orange in Denmark have already enrolled several thousand of merchants and consumers, collecting fees on every payment transactions whether they originate over the Internet or at a point of sale.

Leading this phenomenon is the Java enabled phone, which allows independent solution providers to develop and deploy their own mobile applications. In the year 2001, mobile manufacturers have shipped over 10 million Java phones, principally to the Japanese market. Nokia alone predicts world-wide shipments over 50 million units for 2002, and nearly 100 million units for 2003. According to the ARC Group, there will be over 1.1 billion Java phones worldwide by year-end 2006. At this time, there will be as many consumers carrying a Java phone as there will be distinct cardholders.

Computer networking is the scientific and engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems. Such networks involves at least two computers, which can be separated by a few centimeters (e.g. via Bluetooth) or thousands of kilometers (e.g. via the Internet). Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of telecommunications.
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A mobile phone or cellular (cell) phone is an electronic telecommunications device. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception are satellite phones). Cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). Prior mobile phones operating without a cellular network (the so-called 0G generation), such as Mobile Telephone Service, date back to 1946. Until the mid to late 1980s, most mobile phones were sufficiently large that they
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BlueTooth is the technology that will transform the entire mobile phone market. When equipped with a BlueTooth transceiver, mobile phones are capable of interacting with neighboring devices independently of the cellular networks. Wireless interactions take place free of any line-of-sight or close proximity constraint. Instructions can be communicated directly from the mobile phone to any radio-enabled point of service over a local

Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft for use on personal computers, although versions of Windows designed for servers, embedded devices, and other platforms also exist. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing trend of graphical user interfaces popularized by the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft Windows eventually came to dominate the world's personal computer market with market analysts such as IDC estimating that Windows has around 90% of the client operating system market.
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Already several mobile payment initiatives have experimented BlueTooth-enabled mobile phones for transactions conducted at a point of sale. These pilots have however met a limited success with the consumers, having failed to find a practical solution to enable transient associations between a mobile phone and the point of sales terminal. In one these pilots, Europay and Ericsson required consumers to swap the batteries of their mobile phones before making a payment.

Still, practical solutions are coming to light. Unlike chip-enabled card systems, mobile payment solutions significantly reduce the overall cost of the infrastructure necessary for acceptance of card transactions. The point of sale terminals can be stripped of their secure PIN-PAD and other cryptographic capacities necessary today to establish trust between the consumer device and the terminal. These solutions also save financial institutions the cost of providing their cardholders with a smart card. Mobile payment solutions use virtual smart cards that can be downloaded over the Internet, and the cryptographic capacity is already built into the mobile phones.

Communication is the process of sending information to oneself or another entity, usually via a language. Specialized fields focus on various aspects of communication, and include Mass Communication, Communication Studies, Organizational Communication, Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics, Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semiotics, and Discourse Analysis.
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