The worldwide mobile commerce (m-commerce) market place is growing rapidly, enabled by an increasing use of micro-payments and retail integrations at point-of-sale (POS). Polar Mobile creates mobile applications, enabling content from publishers large and small to be published and monetized on the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android platforms.
In addition to advertising, micro-payments enable the purchase of ringtones, music tracks and games, as well as car parking and cinema tickets. Polar Mobile specializes in mobile apps, especially for the Blackberry, the largest selling smartphone in the United States.
Polar Mobile provides a content and advertising platform (SMART) providing publishers, brands and advertisers a way to deliver, measure and monetize digital media on all major mobile devices, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile.
With smartphone sales set to form two thirds of mobile handset sales in the US in 2015, opportunities for mobile eCommerce are expanding significantly,” says Coda Research (above).
Anttenna is a free, real-time iPhone application that acts like a hyperlocal Craig’s List.
The location-aware application is similar to Twitter — users quickly create short “mobile micro-listings” of up to 140 characters of items wanted or for sale. It appears immediately to other nearby Anttenna members.
- Apple introduced its mobile ad platform called iAd in April. In January Apple purchased Quattro Wireless for $275 million. Quattro Wireless analyzes more than 10 billion mobile actions each month to target and optimize ad campaigns. It’s available on the Android and iPhone
- Google’s purchase of AdMob is now under intense scrutiny by the FTC for anti-competitive issues. The Federal Trade Commission is challenging the proposed deal on antitrust concerns. Google may want Apple to debut its plans for mobile advertising, in hopes that it will get the FTC off its back by proving that Google won’t dominate the mobile ad space, says Mobile Marketing Watch.
- Engineers at Yahoo have begun to create a dynamic layout, so when the consumer reloads the home screen — which resembles a living room with couch, magazines and television — they will get a different experience. Perhaps the next time a consumer launches the application they see a can of Coca-Cola, cup filled with Starbuck’s coffee, area rug from IKEA, and Bose speakers hooked up to the TV.
U.S. mobile commerce sales will grow 100% this year to $2.4 billion from $1.2 billion in 2009, according to ABI Research. That’s following a 203% jump in 2009 from $396 million in 2008, the firm says.
In 2015, shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones. That number represents about 8% of the total e-commerce market. While the U.S. surpassed the $1 billion mark last year, Japan dwarfed the U.S. at $10 billion, ABI says. M-commerce is growing solidly in Europe, too, and is expected to outpace the U.S. by the end of 2010, the firm adds.
According to Wikipedia, mobile commerce was born in 1997 when the first two mobile phone enabled Coca Cola vending machines were installed in the Helsinki area in Finland. They used SMS text messages to send the payment to the vending machines.
