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sees them as pretty common in Japan, "but it's not something we're evaluating right now in the U.S."
It's difficult to buy the idea that McDonald's doesn't want to go wireless because customers truly enjoy face to face interactions with the staff. It's also difficult to believe, from personal experience, that all McDonald's restaurants consistently serve customers within a 90 second window. What's obvious is that the company doesn't see a measurable or predictable payback for adopting mobile phone-based ordering and payment. For a large enterprise, adopting any new technology can be a multi-billion dollar risk that needs to have a well defined business case. It makes sense that a large company like McDonald's would wait until western society is ready to pay for things using a mobile phone before it would adopt the approach.
Infrastructure Ready
For once, it's society and not technology that might be holding back the move to mobile commerce. "What you described is a combination of mobile banking, multimedia messaging, WAP messaging and text messaging," says Anatha Ramu, vice president of engineering and principal architect for Acision. All of the building block pieces are
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Is society not ready to take this step? Or are telecoms not doing enough to mash-up the infrastructure into a tidy package that makes it easy for large enterprises to adopt? |
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this isn't a payment method, it is a promotional technique that drives traffic into the cafes in the hopes of generating revenue. Driving payment through the mobile phone would seem like a logical next step should this kind of mobile advertising catch on.
Ramu says that eBay and other catalog retailers are also prime candidates to drive mobile ordering and payments. He says the technology is there to allow, for example, an eBay user to snap a photo of a golf club and put the item up on eBay with a multimedia message. Once a sale is made "the application could automatically debit from the account, we can exchange shipping information, and I can ship this out via UPS who shares tracking information via wireless," says Ramu.
Acision is the leading provider of SMS technology in the world, so it's on the leading edge of this kind of application. Ramu says
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now in place to enable mobile payments. Payment by SMS has been around for a few years already, and more sophisticated methods of executing and securing debit, credit, and direct-to-bill transactions via the mobile phone are ready for prime time now.
Ramu explains that some major retailers are already using mobile marketing to pull customers into their locations. Starbucks, for example, "is sending barcode coupons by multimedia message that can be s anned," says Ramu. The coffee giant is also using SMS to send unique code numbers to consumers that play the same role as the bar code. While
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that while there's a lot of talk and excitement, there still isn't a lot of forward movement. "When we talk to our prospective customers, they get excited. We're not telling a pie in the sky story. The pieces are in place to do this already. We can tell (major mobile operators) what we can do, but someone has to bring all of these players to the table and talk about how they're going to launch this," he says.
This issue is rapidly becoming a conundrum. It's an endless circle, or chicken-and-egg problem. Is society not ready to take this step? Are corporations missing the point? Is
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