Mobile commerce seen as future for Japan retailers

According to government data, 80 percent of e-commerce by teen-agers aged 15-19 was done on cellphones in 2005.

[...] "One of the changes that came with the 3G services is an increase in flat-fee users," said Jun Hasebe, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research. "Impulse shopping accounts for most of the purchases done on mobile phones, and that would not usually happen unless users are on flat fee-based services."

[...] One of the issues that may hold back those could-be shoppers from using mobile phones is safety. Many Japanese consumers still fear punching in their credit card numbers online or on cell phones.

More than half of e-commerce sales in Japan were paid with cash rather than electronically in 2005, while 13 percent were settled with credit cards, government data shows.

Let's assume we have an object tagged with a QR Code, an associated mobilized RSS feed and an SMS alert service. For simplicity let's call this a QRSS object (the longer version would be QRSSMS). A good scenario would be: a good - the book from Amzn - delivered to you by a postal service.

The QR Code which the QRSS object gets (could be a combination of the unique item number and the ISBN or with even more information the EAN code number) is then tracked from it's coming to life till it gets to you. The first part of the story that interests us is the way from buying the book on the Amzn website till it arrives at your house. As the book is from Japan, you really want to know where it is till you hold it in your hands. So anytime, the book is scanned by a QR Reader somewhere, this creates a node in the RSS feed, which you can either watch in your Feed Reader, on your mobile or be alerted by SMS. Here the nodes would be mainly, date, time and place (mapping could also be added). You can call this the CRM part and there are many customers who would adore this service and definitively pay for it via the SMS alerts. Just ask Peter.

A second part would go further with this and add social interactions with this object. Now that the book has arrived, you will probably read it (if the object is a mobile phone you would test it) and as you have now a unique id - the QR Code gets an additional node parameter coming from the RSS feed - about the book being in your possession, you can now link to it and write about it in your blog (pinging is required:). After having read the book, you send it over to a friend where another node in the RSS feed of the book is created. She as well writes about that book and so on.

By this you not only would see what several people think about the book, but you could also follow other things, especially time and place which we lack today. For example, how many books are sold at which bookshop/website, how the book is sold and lent and so forth. Travel routes. There would be international and local books, probably. Lifetime - how long does it circulate. How much is it talked about and when. What role does media play in a book's success etc.


* first inspiration coming from Marco

See also:
Infolust

RFID and the Internet of Things, 14-16 November, Mediamatic, Amsterdam

RFID & The Internet of Things is a workshop for a maximum of 16 designers and artists who want to learn more about RFID and its possible (cultural) effects and uses.

[...] RFID plays a pivotal role in joining the physical world with the digital. An object tagged with an RFID chip has a unique digital identity. Any kind of online data can be linked to these unique ID's. Here is where the real world and the internet become two faces of the same reality. Things go online, in other words, an internet of things evolves.

Check out the Reader for RFID Workshop, a collection of projects, theory and criticism on RFID

See also: Thoughts about Blogjects

Blogjects are "only" sources of information if that is all we want from them. Websites were only sources of information once, too, until they became conversational (in a Weinberger/Searls/Locke sort of way way) and changed the way we engage in social discourse, and even had measurable, substantial effect in 1st life politics and further. We know this for a fact. The social web changed things measurably. Can objects, also participating in the same register of discourse, do likewise, and perhaps have impactful effect?

Yep, they can have such an effect. I still remember Peter's complaint about not knowing about the whereabouts of an object (cell phone/iPod?) delivered to him. Now, let's assume we would have blogjects or shouldn't we call it rather a QRSS:). Well I need another post to go further with this...