Assessing the potential of mobile commerce applications: A quantitative survey in the agricultural sector

Recently there has been a spate of interest in how to find feasible applications for mobile devices. Compared with the great expectations in mobile applications, the actual acceptance rates of users both in commercial and private sectors lag far behind. This is especially true for Europe, whereas in other countries, such as Japan, companies like DoCoMo literally created their own demand. This paper suggests that, instead of pursuing a supply-oriented strategy, it would be better to look at the actual demands of potential users and develop products that would meet their needs. In doing so, we concentrated on the agricultural sector and analysed the needs of farmers and their willingness to adopt new technologies. A statistical analysis helped us to evaluate our findings and served as the basis for the creation of a set of possible applications that could help farmers to carry out their work more effectively and efficiently.