Unwired Business: Cases in Mobile Business

Philip Barker (University of Teesside, UK)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 1 July 2006

335

Keywords

Citation

Barker, P. (2006), "Unwired Business: Cases in Mobile Business", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 572-574. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610689269

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Human activity is driven by people's need to solve problems. The essence of effective problem solving is knowledge, access to relevant information and the availability of suitable resources. As people become more mobile, there is a growing demand for appropriate technology to support global access to information and communication resources. Undoubtedly, over the last decade, “mobile technology” has taken the world by storm. Devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), pocket computers and wireless‐enabled laptops have become quite commonplace in both the private and commercial sectors – particularly for the promotion of business opportunities and the achievement of competitive business advantage. This book presents an edited collection of 18 case studies of business applications – each one of which is based on the use of portable (mobile) technology. The contributions are organised into five basic theme areas that deal with: consumer applications of m‐business, mobile marketing, organisational applications, mobile applications in healthcare and the use of mobile technologies in international markets.

The five chapters that make up the first part of the book present a number of useful examples of mobile business applications. They provide some very helpful background to the area and serve to define the broad “domain of interest” with which the rest of the book deals. The consumer applications covered in this section include: selling ringing tones for m‐phones via the internet; mobile banking in Japan; the provision of alerting services; users' perceptions of gaming on m‐phones using WAP (Wireless Application Protocol); and the use of bar‐codes (by businesses in Japan, New Zealand and the UK) for information transfer. The material in the second part of the book describes three applications relating to mobile marketing. Together, these fulfil three broad objectives. First, they present a European perspective on mobile advertising (involving push, pull and dialogue campaigns); second, they describe some of the key issues relating to mobile marketing acceptance and permission; and third, they provide a description of a project which studied consumers' perceptions and attitudes towards the use of SMS (Short Messaging Service) for the realisation of mobile marketing in New Zealand.

Organisational applications of mobile business are discussed in Chapters 9 through 12 (the third part of the book). This section starts off with a discussion of how to achieve improved business performance (in the “fine‐paper” industry in Finland) through the use of mobile technology for realising various aspects of the Freedom Economy. Subsequent chapters then deal with the use of mobile (hand‐held) terminals (PDAs) within a pan‐European project designed to give service engineers access to their company's enterprise resource planning system and the application of wireless technology for the automation of a national sales force within the food industry in New Zealand. The latter study was based on the use of an analytical framework derived from the underlying constructs that define the Mobility Enterprise Model. The final chapter in this section of the book provides a description of the use of a mobile portal (called “U‐Know” – a contraction of “ubiquitous knowledge”) for knowledge management within a German University department. An important component of this system is its speech recognition facility that translates spoken commands into database queries; search results are subsequently converted back into spoken utterances for delivery via a telephone.

In my view, because of the nature of the problems involved, one of the most interesting parts of the book is that which deals with mobile applications in healthcare (Part 4, Chapters 13 through 16). The first of the four contributions in this section outlines some of the many issues that need to be considered when introducing wireless technology into healthcare environments such as hospitals and care centres. Fundamental to the realisation of this type of application is the use of a wireless healthcare portal that enables medical staff to access various forms of patient data using hand‐held computers such as PDAs. The second and third contributions to this part deal with, respectively: the use of a mobile pre‐hospital database system (called “iRevive”) for use by emergency medical staff for recording patients' details and vital‐sign sensory data; and, the application of SMS for providing a professional e‐health news service for medical personnel in Finland (practitioners' views about it were elicited using a short SMS survey). The final contribution in this part of the book describes a hand‐held mobile computing application for documenting the care interventions made by staff involved in caring for elderly people in residential care homes. The pros and cons of the system are discussed and compared with other similar applications.

The last part of the book (and by far the shortest) contains just two contributions. These deal with issues relating to international marketing. In the first of these essays, an analytical framework defined by MOSIM (a MObile Services Industry Matrix derived from the Double Helix model) is used to compare the Japanese (vertical integrated) and Finnish (horizontal modular) mobile services market in terms of key performance indicators. The second essay gives a description and an analysis of the digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) service in Korea. DBM allows users to watch multimedia content on the screens of their m‐phones (and other portable devices) while they are on the move. This contribution explores some of the business opportunities afforded by DMB services and identifies some of the issues that must be solved in order to launch these services successfully – both in Korea and elsewhere in the world.

There is a lot of new, informative material in this book. However, although it is produced to a fairly good standard, the quality of the writing varies considerably from chapter to chapter. Sadly, without very tight editorial control, this is one of the problems that can arise when producing a book containing contributions from many different international authors (in this case, 35 in all). Despite this, I found the content of the book interesting, useful, stimulating and enlightening.

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