LG Telecom, South Korea

In terms of the evolution of services being offered on mobile applications, South Korea is showing the way.

The big push came when LG Telecom Ltd., the smallest of Korea's three mobile service providers teamed up with the Kookmin bank to launch the ‘Bank on' service. Under this scheme mobile users were able to use smart chips embedded in cell phones for accessing all of the transaction and enquiry based services. The chip-based service automated the authentication of users when they accessed their bank's financial services to make the whole process much faster and convenient. The icing on the cake came with the ability of these chip enabled cell phones to be used simultaneously as cash cards.By October 2004 there were already about 100,000 infrared readers adapted to take payment directly from mobile phone handsets in Korea.

Users can now use their cell phones to pay for everything, from restaurant bills, travel tickets, merchandise and even haircuts.

Reliance Infocomm, India

When Reliance Infocomm, India rolled out its CDMA network, (at the time the mobile market in India was still in its infancy, and data services were almost never heard off) it made sure that all handsets supported Java.The Reliance application platform, also known as R-World brought Java compatibility even to the lower end phones.

Reliance used a novel way to overcome the memory limitations of lower-end mobile phones, which hampered deploying of multiple standalone J2ME based clients. Instead of storing applications statically on their cell phones, users access a single menu based application called R-World, which connects them to the Reliance servers. Using the menu based user interface, mobile users select the application, which they want to run and download them over-the-air to their cell phones. These applications are then executed locally on the mobiles.

From mid-2004 Reliance tied up with two of the popular private sector banks, HDFC and ICICI, to provide a host of their enquiry and transaction based mobile banking services through its R-World environment.