Acceleration of Mobile Commerce using Predictive Retrieval

With the increasing number of competing mobile services, the process of acquiring new, and retaining existing customers becomes harder. Acquisition of new customers can, to some degree, be done with increased marketing efforts, but marketing has less effect for retaining existing customers, since they allready know the service. Improving the mobile service is likely to be the best way to retain existing customers. The mobile service is improved when the customer gets more ”bang for the bucks”, e.g. cheaper service, better and fresher content, more support, and the feeling of being a valued customer. S/he also take for granted high reliability and availability of the service, quick response from and fast access to the service. The latter is quite hard due to the relatively low-bandwidth wireless connection from the mobile network provider to the customer with a mobile device. This providercustomer connection is described as the “last mile problem” by Bell and Gemmel [1996].