The Future
The omnipresent Google are moving forward with major mobile initiatives. Spending vast amounts of money to stake a claim in this fledgling market. There's the mobile version of Froogle for one and they've also developed mobile business listings specifically for the potentially huge 'local search' market. They also offer a free SMS based information service http://www.google.com/sms/ and http://www.google.co.uk/sms/
Another major company Real Networks, creators of Real media Player, recently bought Finnish mobile phone game developers Mr Goodliving for $15M. Essentially buying a back catalogue of high profile mobile games.
NTL a cable TV company here in the UK recently streamed the Grand National, the biggest race horse meet here in the UK, live to Nokia owning subscribers.
This is early days and that's a small glimpse of the future.
The M-Commerce Market is very different from the online market in terms of what content consumers are currently paying for. The biggest revenue generators online, 70%, are porn and dating sites. A similar percentage via mobile is for games, music and video. Films, that's another one, Nokia are now distributing Hollywood movies via memory card!
The technology specifically 3G, an always on network with transfer rates of 384kbs a second, is here and trickling into mainstream culture. These devices are in fact capable of 1920kbs. Compare that to GPRS at 56kbs. You don't need these speeds to take advantage of this market but you should keep them in mind to realise the full potential of where mobile communication is going.
Here's a brief, eye opening, wish list from consumers for future mobile phone payment abilities:-
10 | Use your mobile as a key |
9 | Marketing communications |
8 | Retail checkout payments |
7 | Vending machine payments |
6 | Flight check in |
5 | Credit / debit cards |
4 | Season tickets |
3 | Loyalty cards |
2 | Parking Meter payments |
1 | Mobile Coupon redemption |
Getting Started How do you Accept Payments?
Reverse SMS is very popular at the moment. It provides the ability for you to direct consumers to secret download links on your site whilst taking payment through a premium SMS message. Another method known as 'WAP Push' sends a link via SMS that automatically launches when the message is opened. You will need to set up your own WAP / SMS Gateway on your server which will require server administrator access to use both these solutions.
But there are other easier solutions a number of websites are springing up that allow you to upload your content available for download, games, video, wallpaper, MP3's etc . A small fee is taken from each paid download by the SMS Gateway company.
I've compiled a list of useful links to a number of the above solutions and I've also thrown in a couple of links to 'mobaphile' websites were you will find some interesting predictions for the future development of mobile phones along with some real off the wall ideas for making money with mobiles.
To paraphrase a strap line 'The future's bright the future's mobile'.
About the author.
Darren Yates is the owner of How-to-make-money-online.info a site focused on Making Money Online and Internet Marketing, listing the many and varied ways of making money online. Featuring, resources, thousands of Internet Marketing articles and useful links.
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