Mobile commerce – or m-commerce – is characterized by the emerging class of location-based commercial services delivered by a variety of handheld terminals such as mobile phones and palmtop devices. At COTIM-2001, an international conference in Germany, academic researchers and business practitioners shared their experiences and frameworks about m-commerce. Selected authors from COTIM-2001 were invited to further develop their conference contributions for this Special Issue. This paper discusses the preconditions that led to the emergence of m-commerce, the main dimensions of m-commerce that distinguish it from e-commerce, and the key arguments from the contributions on m-commerce in this special issue o
