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Recent developments suggest that mobile payments at scale is getting close

There has been a flurry of activity in the mobile payments space lately

While these developments are helping to enable mobile payments and build awareness, it still is not clear which solutions are likely to drive the most usage

Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.

Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 

Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items

In South Africa, the continent’s strongest economy, mobile phone use has gone from 17 percent of adults in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010. Today, more South Africans – 29 million – use mobile phones than radio (28 million), TV (27 million) or personal computers (6 million). Only 5 million South Africans use landline phones. Nielsen’s recently released Mobile Insights study in South Africa, which examined consumers’ usage of and attitudes toward mobile phones, networks and services, reveals a number of interesting insights such as: -- Nokia rules: More than half (52%) own that company’s handsets, followed by Samsung and BlackBerry, and 56 percent of those currently using other brands indicated their next handset would likely be a Nokia. -- SMS text messaging is practically ubiquitous among South African mobile customers, and is used by almost 4.2 times more people than e-mail. More than two-thirds (69%) of consumers prefer sending texts to calling, in large part because it is less expensive, and 10 percent believe texting to be a faster way of communicating.

NFC still isn’t too common in the US, but it looks like it’s going to be a standard feature for all future mobile devices. Manufacturers have been slowly implementing NFC functionality into their phones and tablets recently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 will ship with native support for NFC. For those not in the know, NFC (Near Field Communications) is a method of communication that two mobile devices can use to communicate with each other just by being in each other’s presence. It can be used for a whole range of functions such as making payments, to collecting information. Today at the BUILD conference, Microsoft also demonstrated the usage of NFC on its Windows 8 tablet. Using an NFC-enabled business card, the demonstrator could simply collect the website address from it by pointing the corner of the tablet towards the card and tapping the notification. It sure beats launching a QR code scanner or manually typing it in. Check out the video after the break:

Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results. The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

"Mobile is fundamentally reshaping how we as consumers spend from housing and healthcare to entertainment and travel, from food and drinks to communication and transportation. Mobile not only influences purchase behavior but also post purchase opinions. When the share button is literally a second away, consumers are willingly sharing more information than ever before. Mobile is thus helping close the nirvana gap for brands and advertisers who seek to connect advertising to actual transactions. The long-term battle is however for owning the context of the users. Having the best knowledge about the user to help drive the transaction is the simply the most valuable currency of commerce."

There will be more than six billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2011. According to the report, it took 20 years of mobile development to reach one billion connected devices. The jump from five billion to six billion took 15 months.

Mobile games are the most popular type of apps amongst smartphone users, according to the latest report by Nielsen.The report shows that 64% of users who downloaded an app in the past 30 days have downloaded a game.Weather, social networking and apps that fall into categories of maps/navigation and search are also very popular apps, followed by music and news apps, as you can see in the chart below.

Young British teenagers would be less worried at being deprived of television than losing access to the internet or their mobile phones, as attachment to the medium slides among the young, according to new research from Ofcom.

On average, they watch 17 hours 37 minutes per week, up from 15 hours 37 minutes in 2007.Internet use has also become pervasive, with 95% of 12- to 15-year-olds having internet access at home through a computer. But the research by the communications watchdog also points to a "digital divide", in which only 80% of children in lower socioeconomic groups have access to the internet at home, compared to 98% in the richest ones.

The annual survey was carried out in spring with 1,717 in-home interviews, and focused on attitudes to communications technology by parents and children. It found that 28% of children aged 12 to 15 said they would most miss their mobile, and 25% would most miss the internet if deprived of them – compared to only 18% citing television. A year ago mobile was the most desired, while TV was level-pegging with the internet at 24%.