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I have fond memories of 1999 and 2000, between the industry parties for that latest dot com startup flush with new VC money to drink away and working late hours just trying keep my company’s platform running we were all in awe and wonderment about the future world we were working so hard to build. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the then 1" thick bi-weekly Business 2.0 publication without reading latest trends in ecommerce and many of them were mobile. There were countless predictions that we’d all be walking the sidewalks and each time we passed a Starbucks, our cell-phones would vibrate with a little SMS message offering us a $1 discount off a creamy Grande latte if we stepped inside.

Fast forward to 2007 and many of those predictions never came to fruition. We don’t bank on our cell phones, we use our home computers. We don’t pass our cell phone screen over the grocery-store bar code scanner to redeem a coupon, we still clip the old-fashioned paper variety and we certainly don’t do much ecommerce shopping on our phones. Or is that all set to change?

You can’t have picked up any newspaper across North America over the past few weeks without reading at least one story about the new Apple iPhone. It’s a little device that’s captured our imaginations and got the tech geeks salivating over un-boxing pictures on Flickr. It’s also the first mobile phone to include a fully-featured browser – Apple’s own Safari browser.

Could this be the first of a new wave of phones with fully featured browsers with (finally) fast enough connection speeds that will mean the era of mobile commerce may finally be coming? It will take the next couple of years to find out for sure, but I know if I was you, I’d be trying one of these magic little phones out for myself to see how my site looks and works on it. You never know, that next order just might come from someone sitting in a Starbucks enjoying a discounted latte while they browse for a new shirt or pair of pants in the palm of their hands.