26 February 2006 73 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Scott Loftesness from Payment News.com stumbled across a posting from late January on the MobileRadicals Blog (from a a collection of mobile researchers based at the Department of Communications at Lancaster University in the UK) titled Mobile Payments - Six Years After WAP.

It’s a good survey of what’s transpired since the WAP-frenzy years when every bank and financial services company thought they had to mobile-enable their web presence. Unfortunately, the handsets were very immature as browsers and very clunky in terms of display size, etc. back in that era.

A lot has changed since those early days of WAP: handset technology, display size/quality, keyboards, network speed, sheer number of consumers enabled with devices, SMS automatically enabled, etc.

The author concludes by focusing on the P2P applications most talked about today - tallying up and splitting lunch/dinner bills, paying a friend for an incidental expense - along with lightweight P2B applications like paying for parking and buying a soda from a vending machine.

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