New perspectives on mobile service development

Abstract

The future development of mobile applications and services has to take into account the user needs more carefully than before. The investments in mobile telephony, which are made from the point of view of technology, disregard the fact that users are not interested in technologies; they are interested in possibilities to fulfil their needs. The main problem for the ICT industry in mobility concerns its business that is mainly based on the technology-oriented view, inadequate understanding of users' needs, and the uninteroperable and isolated application and service perspective. The main aim of this article is to explain the existing problems in the development of mobile applications and services explicitly, and illustrate them by examples on a route to our vision of taking better into account the user needs based on their roles and tasks. We conjecture that a comprehensive view of user role specific needs would beget a new arena in mobile business - the Integrated Mobile Applications and Services industry. The other aspect is that the user needs are only one part of the triple play of business, users, and technology. Intense co-operation between the players in the industry is required to jointly create standards and platforms that enable Integrated Mobile Applications and Services. Technological development requires platforms which enable the bundling of services and applications as easily as Lego bricks can be attached on different platforms. © 2006 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg.