Monday morning to-do list: monthly banking; pay TV licence; look over some new Retirement Annuity products; and buy tickets for the Killers concert.

Now, if only you could do all of this from the couch via your cellphone.

Well, Arno du Toit, director of Virtual Mobile Technologies, reckons that it's only a matter of time before you should be able to do so and it all comes down to commercial mobile applications. He reckons that the mobile commercial space in South Africa is still largely untapped, but that when South Africans buy into it, it will fundamentally change the way we do business.

"The South African mobile commercial space is definitely still emerging. Companies in general are aware that it is something that they should investigate and implement, but in general are still unsure about the technology and market demand for a solution," says Du Toit.

"There has been a massive adoption in the social media space as seen with Mixt etc, but there has not been a commercial success story of the same magnitude."

There are many reasons for this, not least because companies are faced with having to choose between USSD, WAP, SIM and application-based solutions and that these solutions vary significantly in ability, security, price and marketability.

Crossing the digital divide

However, South Africa is in a prime position to embrace commercial mobile solutions. Not only because only a small percentage of the population has access to desktop- based Internet, but also because South Africa has very high cellphone penetration.

Although figures vary due to cellphone churn, users having multiple Sim cards and cellphone theft, it is estimated that between 18 and 39 million people use cellphones in South Africa. Even at the conservative end, these figures far exceed the number of people who have access to desktop computers. And those who do have access to desktop computers are faced with the challenge of slow and unreliable Internet connectivity.

Furthermore, a significant number of South Africans have limited access to banking and financial services. This same demographic is also generally excluded from the more traditional digital space.

Steps into the mobile space

According to Du Toit, commercial use of mobile applications in South Africa is very low. The banking and payment industries have, however, been taking tentative steps into the mobile commercial space with varying degree of success.

If the recent Mobility 2009 research project conducted by World Wide Worx is anything to go by, mobile applications are already proving popular among clients of the banking industry. The study found that more people bank from their cellphones (28 percent) than over the Internet (16 percent ) in South Africa. Of the cellphone banking customers, 24 percent use their cellphones to buy pre-paid electricity and 21 percent make general purchases (movie tickets, flowers etc) via their cellphones.

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