The new mobile accessible services: current initiatives, players' strategic positioning and market growth scenarios up to 2004.

• Operators and manufacturers: - current experiments and commercial services; - technical, financial and content partnerships;- key factors for success and strategies;
• Panorama of the service offering: messaging, banking and brokerage, locating, entertainment, e-commerce…;
• Mobile Internet's stakes and prospects: - players' positioning along the value chain; - the portal wars; - transaction payment and security; - market growth scenarios.
With the advent of next gen mobile phones, telecommunications are on the verge of undergoing yet another revolution whose repercussions will go far beyond the realm of information technologies.
The expected success of this terminal, which is bound to become the focal and unavoidable medium for new services, relies on the convergence of a number of phenomena: - massive and worldwide distribution of mobiles, with already close to 500 million current subscribers and a predicted 1 billion in four years' time; - accelerated Internet penetration and blossoming e-commerce; - the development of an extremely favourable technical context which will enable mobile telephony to take full advantage of the massive growth in new Web and multimedia services: deployment of a mobile network based on high speed data transmission technologies, the advent of a global third generation standard, increasingly sophisticated terminals and a veritable concentration of technologies.
The strategic significance of mobile Internet is due to the breadth and diversity of applications which will enable its development.
It opens up the world of personal communication to a vast array of services in the fields of entertainment, locating and assistance, real-time information on demand, financial and banking services, e-commerce… The mobile-Internet convergence has proven highly attractive to the various players who, consequently, are in the process of repositioning their strategies on this value chain now undergoing a radical transformation, and which is expected to be a source of potential contention between: - equipment manufacturers who are compounding integrated added value in their turnkey technical solutions, endowing them with a wealth of software and application features in the hope of stimulating the market, - telecoms operators who, in order to enhance customer loyalty and to compensate for ever lowering ARPU, are extending and developing the continuity of services (fixed-mobile-Internet), - content editors who, with an eye on broadened presence, perceive mobile as an extremely powerful broadcast channel, - Web portal operators and increasingly numerous start-ups who are implementing solutions geared to mobile interfaces, and to WAP in particular.