A variety of mobile technologies and mobile services have emerged during the last two decades. The term M-Commerce was adopted by marketers in the late 1990s, and predictions were made of rapid growth in the volume of commerce conducted through mobile devices. Recklies (2001) reported a Boston Consulting Group prediction that "global M-Commerce sales" would rise rapidly to $20bn in 2001, $60bn in 2002 and $100bn in 2003. The guesses of other consultants were wildly different. For example, Vrechopoulos et al. (2002) said that "According to Jupiter Research (2001), the global m-commerce revenues will reach $22.2 billion in 2005". See also ePayNews.com (2002).

By 2004, Jupiter Research had become vastly more optimistic, offering "Global mCommerce Revenue Projections for 2009" of $426 billion, most of it in "phone-based retail POS sales" ePayNews.com (2002). On the other hand, the slow growth had led other organisations to offer much more circumspect prognostications, e.g. "2006 will continue to see the development of experiential mobile applications and the emergence of m-commerce services, increasing in reach and importance over the next two years" (Atos 2005, p. 12). Juniper Research remains unabashed, and was quoted in early 2008 as forecasting that "over 612 million mobile phone users would generate over $US587 billion ... worth of financial transactions by 2011" (Moses 2008).