Cellphone technology gives new meaning to mobile homes

Serge van Dam (left) and Adam Clark hope to expand their business to Australia. Picture / Brett Phibbs

A service allowing house hunters to download property information and details of recent nearby sales to their mobile phone is a showcase for the technology being developed by Auckland company M-Com.

"Consumers want to engage with their mobile phone, there's not much doubt about that," says M-Com's market development manager Serge van Dam.

The property database application has been developed for mapping and property information company Terralink International and is being trialled by real estate agents and Terralink staff.

It will be launched commercially this year as Terralink's Mobile Terranet service and is, van Dam says, an example of a wave of services headed from the internet to the cellphone.

There are plans to develop an option allowing aerial photos of a property to be downloaded simultaneously to a customer's phone and home PC.

"Our view is that mobile is just a channel and it should work in conjunction with other channels," van Dam says. "So if you're going to look at an aerial photograph of a property you're interested in, you're not going to make the decision to buy based on the photo you see on your mobile, but the point is if you're there [at the property] you want to see where the boundaries are."

M-Com (Mobile Commerce Ltd), founded in 2000 by Adam Clark and Graeme Ransley, now counts New Zealand's five major banks among its client list.

The suite of transaction and e-commerce applications it has developed include technology to allow basic banking services such as balance inquiries and fund transfers via text messaging. It also has a mobile credit card payment facility.

Clark, who worked for Eftpos company Advantage (now Provenco) until 1998, says he and Ransley founded M-Com because they believed the mobile phone would become a secure and convenient means of making transactions.

"We saw in the mobile phone an emerging market. We saw that the technology in the phones was improving and it was getting to the point where everyone would have a phone, which is now pretty much true," he says. "It's always with people, it's always connected and it's got a user interface that works really well for transaction-based services."

M-Com plans to open an office in Australia within the next few months. And while it does not have any Australian clients yet, van Dam says given its history with New Zealand banks, the company is confident of picking up business there.

"There's a high degree of interest in what we're doing. A lot of Australian enterprises see New Zealand as a pilot market in terms of payment and secure technology stuff. They're keeping an eye on what we do."

Van Dam predicts banks will lead the charge of service organisations to introduce more applications over the mobile.

"Mobile banking is really going to take off this year. I think we'll see a number of banks do things differently. [By the end of the year] every bank in the New Zealand market will have done something significant in the mobile channel."

BNZ's general manager of marketing and business development, Shona Bishop, says the bank has a strategy to introduce new text and online services in coming months, which is part of its response to customers' needs.

For example, it is about to launch a service which will send text or email alerts when accounts have gone above or below a certain balance, Bishop says.


MOBILE COMMERCE

* Who: Adam Clark, founder and chief executive officer.
* Where: Auckland.
* What: Mobile phone payment and e-commerce applications.
* Why: "More and more, consumers are wanting instant gratification. One of the things the mobile phone does is allow them to make decisions and act on those decisions."