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In 2012, there will be more NFC-enabled Android devices. For now, only the Samsung Nexus S and a few others have mobile wallet capabilities. Lest we forget PayPal, it is important to note that it recently launched an Android app that allows for money transfer via NFC. 3. Carrier Billing Is Alive And Kicking Carrier billing allows users to pay for apps on their mobile phone bill instead of using a credit card or a third-party mobile payments service to pay at the time of purchase. This payments system is moving right along. In April, Spring joined T-Mobile and AT&T to support carrier billing in the Android Market. Mobile payments company BOKU went live for Android app developers in June. It began offering carrier billing on 230 operators in 56 countries worldwide. eBay purchased mobile payments company Zong in July, and integrated it into PayPal. Zong allows users to make mobile purchases through carrier billing. PaymentOne, another leader in carrier billing, lets users pay with their phone numbers, and validates transactions via text.

Some highlights of the report include: Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise The three pillars of enterprise gamification The six elements of sustainable engagement Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)

Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise business processes will you gamify first? next?   Ready to turbo charge your next generation customer experience?  Have you tested out iActionable, CrowdTwist or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

High mobile penetration in the UAE is cited as a key reason for travellers’ readiness to use mobile applications and devices at payment points. Statistics show that the UAE is expected to lead with 100 per cent mobile broadband penetration in 2012 while the mobile market penetration has already crossed 200 per cent.

“Traveller needs are definitely seeing a dramatic change in the UAE with customers preferring advanced mobile applications and devices to conduct transactions. This reflects evolving changes in consumer lifestyle and travel requirements. The travel sector is also beginning to realise that the world is changing and travellers will increasingly expect intelligent information exchange,” said Humayun Baig, Amadeus’ regional market manager in charge of the UAE, Oman and Bahrain. Based on extensive research and input from key industry experts, the study explores six key areas in which future technology and innovation could be deployed

According to the study, developed by leading global foresight and futures consultancy The Futures Company, factors such as augmented reality, gamification, intelligent passenger records, long range biometrics and the rise of the wellbeing agenda will drive change in the next decade and beyond, heralding a new era of industry and global travel collaboration.

Amadeus’s global report highlighted that travellers in the UAE prefer making payments via mobile rather than using cash or credit card. More than 90 per cent of the UAE respondents found mobile payments “somewhat appealing” as opposed to 78 per cent of the respondents among the other countries surveyed.

The study also revealed that 94 per cent of the UAE respondents preferred using visual applications that reflect the physical world on the mobile device. Augmented reality, which is a virtual view on the real world, is experienced in applications such as games, location apps and business cards. Other findings in the study reveal that 56 per cent of UAE respondents cited having a strict boundary between work and personal life, while 66 per cent of Emirati respondents stressed the importance of being reachable and available at all times, much more than the total response rate of 48 per cent.

Offline payments The test is running for five days, during which time anyone who downloads the app from the Android store or Apple store in Sweden and enters their PayPal credentials can receive an NFC sticker when they arrive at one of the two stores so they can tap to pay for items in the store.

“Our wallet lives in the cloud and not on devices. There are plenty of ways to access your wallet in the cloud and NFC could be a great way to do that.”

“We think it is a very interesting technology and we are looking at ways to use it,” he said. “It is one of the technologies that we are looking at – we are not betting the bank on NFC.

PayPal parent company eBay has not been a big supporter of NFC – or near-field communications – technology. However, as a leader in the alternative payments space, it makes sense that PayPal would want to investigate NFC.

“While eBay maybe hasn’t been a big proponent, PayPal has been quite vocal about the opportunity,” said Drew Sievers, CEO of mFoundry, Larkspur, CA. “PayPal is the biggest jewel in the eBay empire, so their vision is, in my opinion, the most interesting driver for eBay corporate.

“PayPal’s publicly stated goal is to become as important a payment option offline as it is online,” he said. “NFC is a potentially disruptive technology that could offer fertile ground for PayPal’s offline payments endeavors.”

NFC has been embraced by numerous companies such as Google, Isis – which is a partnership of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile – and others. However, there are significant challenges facing these companies’ efforts to expand NFC as there are still a limited number of mobile phones available that support NFC.

However, PayPal – as an alternative payment solution – also faces the challenge of getting retailers to accept PayPal payments if it were to try for a broader NFC roll out.

“PayPal faces the same challenges with NFC as everyone else in the ecosystem: NFC-enabled phone penetration combined with merchant acceptance penetration,” Mr. Sievers said.

“In fact, they face an additional challenge since nearly every existing NFC-enabled merchant takes Visa, MC, Amex, and Discover, but those same points of sale don’t take PayPal yet,” he said.

“So PayPal has two things to sell: NFC acceptance and PayPal acceptance. That’s a tough sell.”

Long-term strategy While the NFC test is limited, it is another example of how PayPal is trying to bring its technology to bricks-and-mortar retailers. PayPal wants to get merchants to use PayPal and is looking for ways to embed PayPal in the shopping experience via applications, deals and a variety of other merchant services.

“EBay is recognizing that NFC is one of those things that would enable them to grow more in a physical retail environment rather than providing online or electronic transactions,” said John Devlin, London-based group director of AutoID and Smart Cards at ABI Research.

However, it is likely to be some time before PayPal would be able to deploy an NFC solution on any kind of scale. “This is something that they are thinking about on a medium to long-term basis,” Mr. Devlin said.

“In the next couple of years, NFC is really going to be used at the local or national market level rather than an international basis,” he said. “Once it becomes more widely available, that is when PayPal would be more actively interested in pushing ahead.

The sticker model of NFC – where an NFC sticker is placed on a mobile device to make it compatible with an NFC reader – is more of a limited solution.

“It is not able to plug into the handset and take advantage of all of the different smartphone functionality,” Mr. Devlin said. “It has advantages in that you can upgrade existing handsets quickly and easily but I don’t think anyone is really pushing ahead with stickers for a long-term consumer solution on a mass market level. This indicates that this is a trial rather than a precursor to a wider deployment.”

Proximity payments PayPal expects to do $3.5 billion in mobile payments this year using its existing payments solutions. The NFC mobile app test is another way that it is experimenting with new payments solutions as proximity payments grow “This is what we’ve always done – experiment and test and be open to partnerships to drive innovation,” Mr. Nayar said. “What we are going to start to see soon is the growth in proximity payments where you need to be in contact with a reader of some sort,” he said. “This can be done with Bluetooth, RFID and NFC is another way to do it.”

Sony's Xperia S will initially be available with the 2.3.7 version of Android Gingerbread OS at launch, with users being able to upgrade to Android platform 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) during the second quarter of 2012. For reasons unknown, it will be joining an exclusive group of devices which only use a microSIM card, such as the Nokia Lumia 800 and Motorola Razr. This follows the original trendsetters Apple, and their devices. Also, there is no microSD slot; a feature, or lack there of, that many of the newly released handsets are keen to adopt.

As we saw with the marketing strategy of the Xperia Arc and Arc S, the company will probably be positioning the Xperia S just below the top devices, aiming to fill the niche right underneath the flagship products of Apple, HTC and Samsung. The ‘S' certainly packs some heavy hardware without overwhelming technical spec, and we believe the price will validate this theory.

The Xperia S will arrive PlayStation certified, with access to the PlayStation store and a fast-growing library of music and videos. Despite this, the real benefit of the phone are its ability to take high-resolution photos and videos, whilst being able to view them on the device itself. The idea is to better integrate smart devices, and for them to communicate intelligently.

Perhaps a tenuous example of this is the wrist watch worn by the spokesman for Sony Ericsson at CES, who could remotely control the camera and view messages on a tiny screen. It's therefore no surprise that the Xperia S comes with a built-in TV out function, where you can connect via HDMI and enjoy both pictures and videos on the big screen, and in glorious high definition.

This will be the inaugural handset, in the batch of the new Xperia NXT series - which stands for NeXT generation of smartphones. The Sony Xperia S has enjoyed no privacy since pictures were leaked back in early December, but it has now been confirmed that it runs from a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 12MP camera and a 4.3-inch screen that uses Sony's mobile Bravia engine.

Variants of the Xperia S are also set for launch in the springtime, when the Xperia ion, Xperia NX and Xperia acro HD will be released. The Acro HD will hit the Japanese market with specific features such as infrared port data exchange, mobile wallet and mobile TV.

In 2010, Nordic Choice Hotels was first to try mobile NFC key technology in hotels: It was an important learning experience that helped identifying needed improvements and changes

“When Nordic Choice Hotels conducted an NFC key pilot in 2010 at our Clarion Hotel Stockholm property we learned that mobile keys are the future for hospitality. We also learned of some limitations to the technology and it was decided not to expand the trial,” said Svein Krakk, Nordic Choice Hotels CIO. “Indeed the pilot we ran was very educative and helped us identify several areas that needed to be improved in order to make NFC viable within a hospitality environment.

“The No. 1 priority for Nordic Choice Hotels is to provide freedom of choice for our guests," Krakk said. "Freedom to choose the phone you prefer, to use any mobile operator, to use mobile keys or ordinary keys independently or in combination. We started looking for alternative technologies addressing some of the shortcomings of the pilot. First the user interface needed to be improved. With the latest generation of NFC phones it is not very easy for the end user to figure out how to position the phone vis à vis the lock reader. We also wanted a solution that bypassed the SWP protocol which is designed to make the solution mobile operator and mobile carrier dependant. The pilot was limited to one mobile operator. More than 1,500 mobile operators / carriers exist around the world and our guests could come from anywhere, so offering a solution that works only with one or a few carriers would be pointless.”

Hotelier’s independency and cost control are key "Equally important, the SWP standard drives the cost and complexity if implementation towards areas that hoteliers do not like," he said. "It implies a long list of fees to pay to the mobile phone carriers and it places our brands and hotels in a state of dependency that is not acceptable. In addition, we felt that using a solution that would make us dependant on one lock vendor only was not a good idea."

A good mobile front desk bypass solution must be guest centric, supported by a strong business case and must be deployable for real "In 2010, we also tested the Mobile Key solution by OpenWays with CAC™ technology," Krakk said. "We appreciated that it was compatible with all cell phones worldwide, that it was easy to use and that it was mobile carrier independent. Equally important, the pilots conducted were great successes both from a technology and a guest satisfaction stand point. As a result, we decided to deploy Mobile Key by OpenWays in several hotels and we are continuing as we speak. "We also decided to challenge OpenWays to think about the next steps and to include NFC as part of their strategy," he added. "Obviously, we wanted an NFC solution that would be free of the identified shortfalls but also would allow us to eventually offer more services to our guests in the years to come. We do realize that it will take years before NFC phones reach any form of critical mass, nevertheless we want to be sure to deploy and invest in the most future-proof platform while our dependency on both mobile carriers and lock vendors would be minimal. As a result, OpenWays proposed to us Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™. We were immediately seduced with the open architecture of the OpenWays solution. We were thrilled with the idea to offer a DUAL platform allowing us to leverage all mobiles today with the CAC™ technology while building an infrastructure for when NFC will be reaching critical mass. We are now looking forward to go live with several hotels this year."

Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ is very unique: The solution is protected by 26 patent filings and patents; It allows OpenWays' customers to deploy globally without having to ever worry about knowing if their guests have the right phone or the right carrier; And, it works with all phones and all carriers. "Pure NFC™ allows adding NFC features while still being fully carrier and lock provider independent," Metivier said. "It is highly secured and operates on trusted networks. It leverages modern cryptology combined with highly secured OTP (One Time Password) principles. Implementation costs are significantly lower than with the sole SWP protocol and significant engineering efforts were invested in making the user interface intuitive. This was achieved with the design of very specific RFID antennas designed to provide high reading performances with the next generation of NFC handsets. Other areas of focus were ergonomics and human factors. With NFC, what appears to be a good idea -- because you simply have to wave your phone to a lock to open it -- can sometime be a very bad idea when you truly analyse user behaviours and expectations."

A solution compatible for both new build and existing hotel locks Like Mobile Key by OpenWays, Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ can be applied to existing hotel locks and/or major renovations. New locks that are factory made with the OpenWays module built in can be provided by the major electronic lock vendors.

A solution that works with ALL cell phones and ALL Smartphones With Mobile Key by OpenWays, all smartphones can receive an app and leverage any data network (2G, 3G, 4G and even the hotel WiFi network) to use Mobile Key. The same is true for hotel staff who use our “Mobile key for Master Keys” that offers much more security (real time master key management) and flexibility than traditional plastic cards.

A “green” solution that contributes to reduced waste Mobile Key is green. The more guests use their mobile phones as room keys, the less plastic key cards will end up spoiling the environment. Today everyone is concerned about the planet, and hoteliers want to allow their guests to contribute to waste reduction programs. Because Mobile Key by OpenWays is only made with data, it is the cleanest room key a hotelier can offer. "With Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™, we are making a giant step forward and confirming our global leadership in key management via Mobile phone," Metivier said. "Mobile Key DUAL© with Pure NFC™ is a solution that is going to be 'new for long time' and will be also applied to many other market segments outside the hospitality industry, such as residential, commercial buildings, university campuses, and more. "We would like to thank our partners Nordic Choice Hotels, Nokia, NXP, KABA SAFLOK and Ariane systems that are making these first 2012 deployments possible," he said.

About OpenWays | OpenWays is a global solution provider of mobile-based access-management and security solutions. With offices in Chicago, Las Vegas, Seoul and in Europe, OpenWays provides technology solutions allowing for the secure issuance and delivery of access rights and keys process via any cell phone operating on any network. The OpenWays solution is truly unique as it is built on the concept of credential dematerialization. The OpenWays mobile room key solution works on ALL the 6 billion cell phones in service in the world today. For more information, please contact Barb Worcester at +1 440 930-5770 or email barbw@prproconsulting.com. More information can be found by visiting www.OpenWays.com.

Gemalto is becoming a major player in the emerging market for TSMs. It has signed a deal to become the TSM for Deutsche Telekom and also Singapore’s nation-wide NFC system. It has also secured TSM deals with Barclaycard and Orange. Sebastian Cano, SVP Telecommucation for Gemalto, said the company has 45 NFC projects underway but the Isis deal would be the largest.

“The secure element will not be an open asset to allow people to write content to it or it will lose the first portion of it birth name,” said Hughes. “Any suggestion that a secure element is an SDK that sits on top of an open OS is a fanciful argument.”

I asked Ryan Hughes, the CMO of Isis, about the situation and he declined to comment on the Verizon situation. But he said that the secure element must be managed by a TSM and the owner of the device, which will be the carriers in the case of Isis. Creating a completely open situation where any company or developer can access the secure element would not be safe or practical, he said.

The deal is interesting because it follows word last week that Google Wallet has not been enabled to run on the Galaxy Nexus, Google’s flagship Android device which is expected to go on sale soon with Verizon. Verizon said it has not blocked the NFC application but is working on commercial talks with Google, which many have interpreted as Verizon holding back the wallet until its own Isis payment tool is available.

That suggests to me that we shouldn’t expect to see Google Wallet instantly enabled on Isis phones. It can still happen eventually and Verizon makes it sound like it’s just a matter of working things out with Google. But each Isis carrier will be able to decide what service provider gets access to their secure element, and it looks like it will not be a free-for-all. That makes sense on some level for security reasons but my hope is that ultimately, Isis members won’t find reasons to keep Google Wallet or other competing applications off their phones for too long. The NFC wallet market is just emerging and it will be good to have competition and options for consumers.

The information that is derived from a payment transaction" can be used in "closed marketing loops, can be used to populate your budgets automatically, it can be used to automatically create loyatly, to be able to pay for things in ways that we traditionally haven't been able to do," Schulman was careful to point out.

A lot of people think of future payments as an evolution of payment method, "like tapping your phone at a point of sale. We think of that more as a form-factor change, as opposed to a complete value-proposition change" in the way the entire process of commerce is conducted, he added.

Amex may very well "partner with different hardware manufacturers, whether those will be OEMs, handset manufacturers or point of sale terminal manufacturers" but the primary intention is to look at software solutions to form an ecosystem that operates alongside the transaction itself (which could not involve a credit card number but instead a phone number) including loyalty points, offers, discounts, and so on.

This covers new ways of paying as well as new customers who'll be able to make digital payments for the first time, "the millennials, the youth market, the underbanked or the un-banked" population segments, as well as other parts of the world "where charge and credit is a very small part of the payments industry."

With the acquisition of smartclip, Adconion will gain 118 employees in Europe and expand to 27 offices servicing clients across European key markets, and Russia.

Listrak sampled Internet Retailer's Top 1000 online retailers, loading up carts and then abandoning them ("Hey you kids! Knock it off!") to see who would follow up. Only 14.6% sent a follow-up email, and fewer still sent a second or third email which, Listrak's CEO Ross Kramer told Internet Retailer, is where about half of the revenue comes from. Among Listrak's suggestions to retailers: get the shopper's email address first.

Intuit cuts payment rate for AT&T subscribers Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T for its GoPayment mobile payment solution, which competes with Square. Like Square, Intuit offers a free card-swiping attachment that plugs into the audio jack of an iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry device, allowing anyone to collect credit card payments. Intuit's basic rate of 2.7% slightly undercuts Square's 2.75%, but AT&T customers will pay even less (1.7%). Intuit originally charged customers $175 for the swiper dongle, but last January, in a bid to compete with Square, it began offering the dongle for free. Still, Intuit has struggled to gain the visibility that Square founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois and high-profile investors like Richard Branson have brought to Square. This week's deal with AT&T is a reminder that Intuit is serious about GoPayment, which may actually offer more to merchants since it integrates with QuickBooks, its bookkeeping package that also targets small businesses.

PayPal embraces NFC (just a little) PayPal has made something of a point of not jumping on the NFC bandwagon, emphasizing the technology-agnostic nature of its mobile payments platform. Demonstrations at PayPal's recent Innovate conference emphasized payment options like PayPal's Empty Hand system, which lets you buy things with only your mobile number and a PIN. Still, NFC seems an inevitable part of the payments picture in the years ahead, and this week, PayPal delivered the peer-to-peer NFC payment technology that it promised last July. Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile Applications, wrote on the PayPal blog that the technology for NFC P2P is included in version 3.0 of PayPal's Android app. No need for it in the iOS app yet, obviously, since the most recent iPhone upgrade disappointingly didn't include support for NFC. As we noted back in July, in practice, the transfer of funds through PayPal's NFC system isn't substantially different from what was already possible using Bump, which sends the transfer through servers in the cloud rather than wirelessly between the mobiles. But the NFC system will let PayPal developers acquire experience with NFC wireless transfers, which should serve them well as NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals begin to show up next year and beyond.

Square, one of the most recognisable, is a small, square dongle that plugs into the headphone jack on an iOS or Android device, and lets the merchant swipe a customer's magnetic stripe card, converting their account data to an audio signal.

The corresponding app software encrypts it and sends it to Square's servers, which communicate with the card-processing companies to complete a transaction. The customer signs their name with a dash of their finger on the touchscreen, and they're able to have a receipt sent to them over email or SMS text message.

The main advantage to using the headphone jack rather than the iPhone's 30-pin dock connector is that the dock connector is only on iOS devices, while every mobile has a headphone jack. This meant Square could roll out its system to Android by simply writing compatible software.

But you won't see Square - or its many competitors, including the GoPayment, Intuit Credit Card Reader, Mophie Marketplace, VeriFone's PAYware Mobile, the MagTek iDynamo and others - in use at your local pub, since the UK, as well as all of Europe and most of Asia, has moved to using Chip and PIN.

Chip and PIN (also called EMV for Europay, MasterCard, Visa) is more secure, since magnetic stripes are more easily read and cloned by black-market devices, and signatures can be forged. The chips in these cards are much more difficult to clone, and even if a card is lost or stolen, it can't be used without the matching PIN. It's been standard in the UK since 2004, but it isn't widespread in the USA, with both banks and merchants reluctant to invest in the new hardware required.

But one iPhone-based card reader does support Chip and PIN transactions: the iZettle, a free EMV chip card reader with accompanying app that connects to an iPhone or iPad's 30-pin dock connector.

New company Card.io is even offering mobile developers a new way to accept card payments within their apps without needing a scanner at all. Users take a photo of their card and the account number is read and captured by the software.

Facebook continues to outfit as many mobile devices with the ability to access its network, having already signed deals with numerous carriers around the world to provide free access to its networks regardless of handset. With MediaTek already working with handset vendors in India, Philippines and Indonesia, Facebook could see additional growth in these regions.

The app also includes traditional and social sharing capabilities. You can the send ecards as well as holiday offers from Starbucks, among other things.

The object, says Alexandra Wheeler, vp-global digital marketing for Starbucks, is to “surprise and delight” customers during the holiday season.

Although Starbucks experimented with an AR app years ago in an ad, Wheeler says this is the first major AR push by the company. The effort follows some other recent AR programs from marketers including an app from Nivea featuring Rihanna and an Amazon app that lets you point your phone at objects and then buy them.

Cup Magic, created by Blast Radius, caps off a year of successful mobile implementations by Starbucks. The brand launched a mobile payment app in January that has been used in more than 20 million transactions and a QR code program designed, like Starbucks Cup Magic, to enhance the in-store brand experience.

With Tapit, however, the idea is to leverage NFC for use in marketing campaigns by working with agencies, brands, handset manufacturers and carriers. Its marketing services include mobile commerce, coupon distribution, ticketing, surveys and reviews, content delivery, competitions and social community building (e.g. tap here to “like” us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter).

Says Tapit CEO Jamie Conyngham, “the speed in which this round was closed is an endorsement of the Tapit team and the business models we have created around our unique NFC enabled technology. Everyone we meet loves the idea of Tapit, it’s addictive.”

NFC, indeed, would be a step up from the now-ubiquitous barcode scanning technology, which involves using smartphone apps to scan QR codes via the phone’s camera. Unfortunately, NFC generally requires an accompanying chip built into the phone itself. Due to this requirement, it’s currently being held back by the limited availability of supported handsets.

Still, analysts are bullish on NFC’s future, with ABI predicting over 35 million supported handsets by 2012 and Frost & Sullivan estimating around 868 million by 2015.

Terms of Tapit’s seed investment were not disclosed, but the Sydney Angels Sidecar Fund typically invests between $100K – $500K in its portfolio companies.