In a mobile-commerce world, shops could provide product brochures, cards, sounds, songs and so forth in the form of multimedia messaging presentations, which could be used by a customer to send to friends. Shopping malls will have information kiosks equipped with wireless access capabilities, and could perform searches across the mall’s network to update its multimedia message repository. Customers can download and distribute to their friends such multimedia content via mobile messaging, leading to increased revenue for the shops. Over the years, mobile messaging has become an essential means of communication, and it is going to be even more so with the merging of the Internet and Mobile Networks. The ability to message from a phone to a computer on the Internet and vice versa is making messaging a powerful means of communication (Yeo, Hui, Soon, & Lau, 2001). This article discusses the development of a multimedia messaging client for a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a Kiosk providing multimedia messages composition, search, share and send capabilities. Various messaging technologies, enabling wireless technologies and the peer-to-peer model, are also discussed and evaluated in this article. We substantiate the ideas discussed in this article with a description of an MMS PDA client application using JXTA with specific references to a shopping mall scenario.
