ucommerce

The convergence of industry, technology and communications has plunged us into a dynamic economic environment. New e-commerce and mobile commerce capabilities are bringing us closer together and empowering individuals as never before. These changes are heralding the emergence of “u-commerce” – universal or ubiquitous commerce, where the traditional barriers of time, geography, currency and access have ceased to exist.

U-commerce is not a trend that will occur some time far off in the future. It is a real-time change that is happening today. U-commerce is the natural evolution of e-commerce and mobile commerce from “point of sale” to “point of convenience” – whether a transaction occurs in a store, in your home, on the street or even on an airplane.

The way that consumers access the Internet and shop online is changing. Desktop computers, laptops, mobile Internet devices, and mobile phones are converging into a larger category of Internet enabled devices. Millions of new users and new shoppers come online daily.

By way of example, last year eMarketer estimated that by 2013 74.9 percent of all Canadians would be Internet users. Put another way, essentially every Canadian between the age of 5 and 65 will have web access within a few years. In the U.S. there were an estimated 234.4 million Internet users at the end of last year or about 76.3 percent of the total population.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch has reported that mobile Internet use in North America grew 110 percent in 2009 according to Quantcast. That number would be impressive except it trails worldwide mobile Internet growth, which was pegged at 148 percent in 2009.

After the emergence of e-commerce in the late 90′s, we reached a new milestone in the evolution of how goods and services are exchanged between producer and consumer. Businesses all over the world need to be ready for the next big step: a full integration of traditional commerce, e-commerce, mobile commerce and even television commerce.

U-commerce or universal commerce covers these newly arising opportunities and challenges that companies are facing by defining four fundamental constructs: ubiquity, uniqueness, universality, and unison.

• Ubiquity allows users to access networks from anywhere at any time, and in turn, to be reachable at any place and any time.
• Uniqueness allows users to be uniquely identified—not only in terms of their identity and associated preferences, but also in terms of their geographical position.
• Universality means mobile devices are universally usable and multi-functional. Currently, for instance, U.S. cell phones are unlikely to work in Europe because of different standards and network frequencies, and vice versa.
• Unison covers the idea of integrated data across multiple applications so that users have a consistent view on the their information-irrespective of the device used.