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Microcommerce Viable, Gartner says

As I continue to catch up on back news, I see that research firm Gartner has blessed the emerging market of micropayments for digital content. InformationWeek reports:

Users of mobile applications already spend $570 million on ring tones, logos and screen savers annually, the company finds. By 2015, Gartner says, microcommerce for new products and services below $5 will generate between $60 billion (Gartner puts a 70% probability on hitting that mark) and $240 billion (60% probability) in revenue annually. E-commerce Websites and mobile commerce wireless networks are the major enablers of this trend. And music sales are rising thanks to the sky-rocketing popularity of portable digital music players such as Apple’s iPod.

Garter suggests companies think in new ways and consider microcommerce as a new opportunity to increase revenue in cases where a mobile-phone or Web infrastructure exists to create a viable business model.

That last sentence is worth re-reading…. e in the infrastructure exists. And where is that exactly true now? Only really tthrough the carrier networks, and upstart services like Preminet (What a dumb name - completely forgettable. I need to look it up each time!). This gets us back to last week’s discussion of open vs closed carrier markets.