Mobile Portal Technologies and Business Models

Mobile portals have become a common entry point to the mobile Internet, and take a number of forms. They may be service provider portals, such as Vodafone’s Live! portal (Vodafone, 2006), offering access to both in-house and brokered external services. Alternatively, they may be public pure play sites that provide some kind of managed access to resources using a yellow-pages approach. Good examples of this kind of mobile portal are WordDial (WordDial, 2006) and graBBit (Grabbit, 2006), though they have very different approaches to the way that they provide targeted access to resources, with WordDial using a keyword approach and graBBit modeled on more traditional search engines. As well as mobile and pure play operators, mobile portals are also provided by device manufacturers (e.g., Palm (Palm, 2006)), software companies (e.g., MSN (Microsoft, 2006)) existing Web portal providers (e.g., Yahoo (Yahoo, 2006)), mass media companies (e.g., AOL (AOL, 2006)) and transaction providers (m-commerce sites).