MCom. Pass.

Finally, did my first mobile commerce transaction. Purchased a Rs. 99 teddy bear and gifted it to myself. But for me the real value of M Commerce will be realised, when on a Sunday afternoon sitting at CCD, me & my friends suddenly decide to check out a movie at Fame Andheri a good 15 km away. Some utility, I must say. Now for Travel booking, I would any day find Internet more convenient. But gifting .. hmm .. me not the gifting types though.. But the application promises to be sooo cool, that I am tempted to try it out.

Fancy this gift shopping feature. My mobile has contacts of all friends with their postal address,email, mobile numbers and birthdays stored. Now I do get birthday reminders otherwise. But this application that runs on my mobile finds the birthday in the contacts table, reminds me to buy a gift ( from among the many options) and on purchase even pulls out the postal address for delivery of the gift. The reminder is also persistent asking me whether I really don't want to gift this person anything. Yes or No. This repeats all day, until I decide. Cool isn't it :).

Now sample this Movie ticket booking app, Come friday morning, you get reminder on the movies releasing on that day. You make a choice of movie and timing, it next asks to select friends or friends group to invite and automatically sends an SMS to them with the details. Their replies are also tracked. If you are taking your own sweet time to book tickets, it will also send reminders on the status of seat availability for the chosen show just to induce that urgency.

The third cool bit is the analytics. Mobile call usage trends, purchase trends, application usage preferences (games vs music/videos). All useful to target products and services more accurately.

But still somehow, I am still wary about keying in my credit card details on the mobile. The application developers have found a innovative way around it. Use of cash cards as an alternative. The Pre-paid cards limit the upside for any losses due to hacking, while providing the convenience of mobile usage for small token purchases. NGPay already accepts ITZ Cash cards for mobile transactions in India.

Yes, I can hear cynic in you shouting aloud, "I don't need any of these.. neither now nor in the near future". That's exactly why, you have the apps store application (like apple apps), which will catalogue all your application needs, so that the moment you need, the store application will download just the right application for you on the go.

A few other apps really impressed me at the store. Smart Sound Manager - keeps track of my workday calender and appointment schedule to automatically switch between silent and loud mode. Works really well for me. First, my windows phone synchronises with the outlook calender at office. Second, most often, I tend to switch from loud to silent while getting into a meeting. But once the meeting is done, I rarely remember to switch back to loud mode.

Just Do It is a smart task manager. The usual task manager on phone just maintains a list of TO BE DONE things. Most often, the list is obscured by other items competing for the limited screen space. So I never felt convenient using the tasks feature, instead stickling loyally to the good old post-it sticky notes. But this application, goes one better. It captures all the tasks in the form of a screen saver, which is activated after 10 seconds of idle time. Now, you have enough screen space with big fonts and a near perpetual display to catch your eye all the time. Now thats what I call a really cool e-postit.

Face2Face does something like face capture in a photo shot on the mobile phone. So after a click, it requests you to tag the faces identified with contacts on the phone, much like the tagging on orkut/facebook. Now all calls from friends will be accompanied by their smiling faces beckoning you to pick up the phone. For someone like me, who thinks a camera is the most useless accessory in a phone, this app comes as refreshing change.

Ofcourse, there are the usual suspects - the much written about GPS or bluetooth applications. I cant let my imagination go haywhire now.

It is just soo exciting, thinking about the numerous possibilities that mobile phones can create in the future ! Goose bumps!