Mobile Portals

The diffusion of mobile services is one of important technological phenomena of the twenty-first century (Dholakia & Dholakia, 2003). According to the International Telecommunication Union,1 the number of mobile service users had exceeded 1.5 billion individual subscribers by early 2005. This represents around one-quarter of the world’s population. The introduction of .mobi, a new toplevel domain,2 is expected to further facilitate the usage of mobile services. Because of their high penetration rates, mobile services have received cross-disciplinary academic attention (e.g., Ruhi & Turel, 2005; Serenko & Bontis, 2004; Turel, Serenko & Bontis, 2007; Turel, 2006; Turel & Serenko, 2006; Turel & Yuan, 2006; Turel et al., 2006). While the body of knowledge on mobile services in general is growing (Krogstie, Lyytinen, Opdahl, Pernici, Siau, & Smolander, 2004), there seems to be a gap in our understanding of a basic, yet important service that mobile service providers offer, namely mobile portals (m-portals). M-portals are wireless Web pages that help wireless users in their interactions with mobile content and services (based on the definition by Clarke & Flaherty, 2003). These are a worthy topic for investigation since, in many cases, they represent the main gate to the mobile Internet and to wireless value-added services (Serenko & Bontis, 2004). Particularly, users of premium wireless services typically employ m-portals to discover and navigate to wireless content such as news briefs, stock quotes, mobile games, and so forth. Given this, m-portals have a strong value proposition (i.e., a unique value-added that an entity offers stakeholders through its operations) Chapter 1.15 Mobile Portals