I’m not prescient. Honest.

But the futuristic notion of mobile-based payment – which seemed a vague rumbling just a few short days ago is now ballooning into the bona fide mobile-IT strategy trend of 2011:

First Google’s Eric Schmidt hints that the search-and-services giant will be “all about mobile” in ’11.

Then came today’s thumper: Apple may launch a mobile payment system for iPhone and iPad later this year based on a technology called “near-field communication” (NFC), according to a consultancy quoted in Bloomberg News …
NFC lets devices interact at a distance of about four inches – and by device, I mean cellphone, smart card or any other enabled device, say, a cash register.

Other companies have tried NFC-based commerce -and, indeed, Sony’s FeliCa makes mobile payments routine in that land of rampant mobile innovation, Japan. I visited Tokyo in 2009 and I can attest, shoppers routinely enjoy slapping their cellphones upside a cash register and walking out with purchases.

But until Apple’s hugely popular iPhone and iPad came along, no mobile manufacturer in North America had quite the reach needed to make NFC ubiquitous enough to become a standard.

Now, apparently, AT&T and Verizon (Apple’s two mobile service providers) along with T-Mobile are backing Isis, a pay-by-phone technology company that claims it can bring 200 million cellphone users to the till, and it’s not too audacious a leap to suggest they’ll be channeling transactions through whatever their hardware providers peddle..

Apple has already laid substantial pipe in terms of its popular hardware and software: iPhone and iPad owners routinely buy music, subscriptions, games, apps and other digital goods using nothing more than their iTunes logins. iPhone’s slice of the booming smartphone market is rising dramatically, and iPad sales are projected to hit 28 million in 2011.

Apple also recently added Verizon service to the mix with flagship carrier AT&T, and if they’re not already hammering out a similar deal with T-Mobile, I’ll be having ketchup and a side of fries with my propeller beanie shortly, thank you very much.

If the analysts are correct, Apple could include NFC into the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 – but they’re trailing Google, which already built it into the Nexus-S phone running Android.

So a few open questions remain:

1. What specific payment technology does Google have up its sleeve?

2. How will the backers of NFC get NFC-friendly cash registers into enough retail establishments?
3. How will MasterCard, Visa, AmEx (and every other pay-by-plastic credit bank) react – Partnership? Litigation?
4. And finally, how many black marketeers are licking their chops over the prospect of adding NFC-enabled iPads to their inventory?

Watch this space.

(via PC World)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 1:08 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.