By J. Gerry Purdy on 7/28/2010  

In my July 7 column, I suggested that mobile advertising may become the largest advertising media market of all time.  Here, I suggest that mobile commerce may become larger than eCommerce. 

While that’s quite a leap from where we are today, it seems to me that in just a few years years most people will be using a phone and/or tablet capable of managing business and commerce.  Mobile commerce is already affecting brick-and-mortar & online sales. Compete found that a majority of SmartPhone users (68%) already check prices at competitors using their SmartPhone while shopping online. And, nearly a majority (48%) use their phone to look up customer reviews while standing in the store (Compete, 3Q09 SmartPhone Intelligence Survey, published 1/4/10).

And if conducting commerce (such as buying things, checking account balances, transferring funds and paying bills) becomes easy – or at least as easy as using a notebook PC today – then the sheer number of users will create a large mobile commerce market, perhaps even larger than eCommerce is today.  Here’s why. 

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Mobile Musings Mobile Musing is written  monthly by Tom Wheeler, Managing Director ath Core Capital Partners in Washington, DC.  Tom was the past CEO of the CTIA.  Dr. Purdy and Tom are professional friends and agreed to post Tom’s column on the MobileTrax web site each month.

By Tom Wheeler on 7/10/2010

The decision to go to usage-based pricing for wireless data appears to have returned rational thought to mobile pricing. Now do we need to keep thinking anew and find a different way to keep score?

In a mobile data world, why is ARPU relevant? The “U” in ARPU – users – has pretty much crested. With five billion “U’s” in the world and 285 million in the U.S. (out of a population of 310 million) the people saturation point has been reached for all practical purposes. The benchmark CTIA Wireless Industry Survey, it should be noted, measures “connections” rather than “subscribers” (since one subscriber can have multiple connections) and some carriers have even begun to break out non-traditional “connections” in their reporting.
 
The nature of a wireless connection is changing in a manner that will challenge the concept of a “User” even further. Forecasters tell us there will be 50 billion (or more) wirelessly connected devices in the next few years. From machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, to health monitors that look like a big Band-Aid but transmit vital signs, to carpets that know and report if there is an intruder or if an older person keeps falling down. There will be so many wirelessly connected microprocessors that some have started calling it “digital dust.”

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