Anonymous network access using the digital marketplace

With increasing usage of mobile telephony, and the trend towards additional mobile Internet usage, privacy and anonymity become more and more important. Previously-published anonymous communication schemes aim to obscure their users' network addresses, because real-world identity can be easily be derived from this information. We propose modifications to a novel call-management architecture, the digital marketplace, which will break this link, therefore enabling truly anonymous network access

Characteristics of Mobile Payment Procedures

Companies are not going to invest into the development of innovative applications or services unless these can be charged for appropriately. Thus, the existence of standardized and widely accepted mobile payment procedures is crucial for successful business-to-customer mobile commerce. The acceptance of mobile payment procedures depends on costs, security and convenience issues. For the latter, it is important that a procedure can be used over the different payment scenarios mobile commerce, electronic commerce, stationary merchant and customer-to-customer. Current payment procedures can be categorized with strategic, participation and operational criteria, using the morphological method. The proposed scheme allows to unambiguously identify and characterize any given mobile payment procedure. The design of today's mobile payment procedures should less try to optimize on the future mobile commerce problems but focus on the ease of spreading in the electronic commerce setting as lead-in scenario.

Credit Cards and Debit Cards in the United States and Japan

This article examines differences in credit-card and debit-card usage between the United States and Japan. Although I do not doubt that social and psychological factors have some significance, I contend that four institutional factors also have useful explanatory power: the freedom of banks to enter the industry; the size of retailers; the level of telecommunications costs; and the size of the national economy. Generally, credit cards in Japan are used for a smaller share of transactions, with a higher average amount, and with less borrowing per transaction. The costs to merchants that take the cards and the rates of fraud also are noticeably higher in Japan than in the United States. The article argues that the difference in usage is attributable primarily to regulations that largely excluded banks and their affiliates from credit- card lending until 1992 and also, to some lesser degree, to the relatively small size of Japanese retailers. The article concludes that the differences in discount rates and fraud rates are more likely to be transient, but attributable to a combination of factors, including the comparatively small payment-card market and high telecommunications costs, both of which have hampered the sophistication of responses to fraudulent transactions. Debit cards are used quite rarely in Japan?the first general-use debit card was not introduced until the spring of 2000. Although that card is cheaper for the merchants that take it than credit cards, and also is much more resistant to fraudulent transactions, the article suggests that the debit card will not find as large a market in Japan as it has in the United States. The reason is that the shift of the credit card from its use as a borrowing device in the United States to its use as a near-cash payment device in Japan leaves a much smaller niche for the debit card in Japan.

Conditions for acceptance and usage of mobile payment procedures

Mobile payment (MP) is crucial for, but not limited to mobile commerce. The key to mobile payment acceptance is in the hands of customers. In this paper we examine the conditions for acceptance and actual usage of MP procedures by the customer. We identify essential conditions which belong to the categories costs, security and convenience. Different preferences lead to an individual set of essential conditions for any single user. We propose a scheme for their representation and comparison and, based on these results, examine the relevance of the different criteria with empirical results. Additionally, we propose an approach to a commensurate condition for the usage of MP procedures based on the theory of informational added values. Finally, applications and constrictions of the results are shown and an outlook on the future of mobile payment is given.

A User Satisfaction Study of the London Congestion Charging e-Service

This research seeks to measure citizen satisfaction with the electronic London Congestion Charging (LCC) payment system offered by Transport For London (TFL) in the United Kingdom (UK). The paper reports on the findings of a survey of 500 users of the TFL LCC online payment system. Satisfaction is measured using the four dimensions from the COBRA framework 0that comprise the cost, opportunity, benefits and risk assessment constructs. The results show that most citizens using the LCC electronic service are satisfied with the service and that the service meets their essential needs. The paper also presents the results of qualitative feedback obtained from the participants that can be used to determine the areas that need further improvement in the current electronic LCC electronic-service (e-service) system and potential influences on user satisfaction