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Mobile Commerce: Technology, Theory and Application Brian E. Mennecke and Troy J. Strader Idea Group Publishing Hershey, PA 2003 339 pp. ISBN 1-59140-044-9
Review DOI 10.1108/09564230410532529
If this book had appeared during the heady days of the dot.com boom when anything connected to IT, the Internet or mobile applications was flavour of the month, this book would have been pounced upon for its title alone. But in the calm of the post-boom era this book will need to be relevant, coherent, insightful, helpful, provocative, forward looking and much more to be accepted. The title promises a lot and in my opinion achieves a lot. This is a collection of 18 articles divided between academic and practitioner contributions, providing comprehensive insights from both perspectives.
This was a difficult book to compile, needing to document the current situation and include future predictions, while avoiding the hype and rhetorical that abounded during the dot.com era. This book highlights the complexity of the mobile computing landscape and the reality of the current challenges facing businesses as they view wireless options with interest and some trepidation. A strength of this book is that it clearly shows the emerging nature of this market from a variety of perspectives. It is an informative and interesting exploration of the technology, business models and user applications in both the consumer and the business worlds. If we have learnt anything over the past decade it is that technological diffusion takes time and user acceptance only comes with value added. This book reiterated that despite anticipated growth (which incidentally varies widely from chapter to chapter) growth is dependent on the consumer and business adoption, which will be based on value added. This book has to tread carefully between being overly positive or cautious and the chapters generally strike the right tone, though of course some are more positive than others and it is really only by reading the whole book that you get the real flavour for the reality of the situation.
Another strength of this book is that it is a global book designed for the global networked market and as such is an important contribution, with US, Japanese, Dutch and Finnish examples and world-wide information dotted throughout the book.
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