me-Commerce: An Infrastructure for Personal Predictive Mobile Commerce

Given mobile phone penetration statistics and current mobile phone technical specifications, it is apparent that in developed countries, the majority of citizens carry not just mobile phones, but true mobile computing devices. These devices are still primarily used for telephony, although information access is slowly emerging as a popular service on these devices. Despite the availability of network connectivity and device characteristics that make Information Access possible, this is currently generally confined to accessing the WWW. While useful, this method is not the best way of providing information access to mobile devices. This paper discusses current research in the use of mobile services and proceeds by presenting a background on an infrastructure for a focused information access application for mobile commerce. Through this background, we discuss the need for embedding multi-dimensional context awareness into the design of applications that provide dedicated, targeted and personalised information access to users, and describe the dimensional vectors necessary for the acquisition of contextual information. Further to this, the paper highlights the challenges that must be overcome in obtaining contextual information on a mobile computing scenario, as required by the design we propose.