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The ascendancy of fiber isn’t just happening in our home broadband and long-haul networks, but also must occur inside the data center and even on the chips themselves as we demand more from our computers and networks. Luxtera’s chip helps usher in the age of light inside the data center in a way that doesn’t require the replacement of all the existing gear. Luxtera will sample the chips this year with the chips supporting both Ethernet and Infiniband applications.

The service seems to be designed for enterprise use, with a centralized online service center where user accounts and transactions can be monitored and managed. An entire staff’s payments can also be synced with QuickBooks for organizational purposes. Intuit states in the press release that motivation for the product stemmed from the observation that more and more entrepreneurs are relying on iPhone’s to manage businesses.

Today Intuit has announced that GoPayment, a mobile applications tailored to process credit card payments, is available in the App Store for the iPhone or iPod touch.

The app essentially turns the iPhone or iPod touch into a credit card terminal that can process payments, track past charges, and generate electronic receipts for the customer. Rather than wait for checks to clear or invoices to be paid, transactions can be processed on the spot via mobile connection. Card information can be inputted manually, or synced via a bluetooth enabled card swipe device. Intuit also assures that information is never stored on the handset, and that data is protected during transmission with financial industry standard technology.

The service seems to be designed for enterprise use, with a centralized online service center where user accounts and transactions can be monitored and managed. An entire staff’s payments can also be synced with QuickBooks for organizational purposes. Intuit states in the press release that motivation for the product stemmed from the observation that more and more entrepreneurs are relying on iPhone’s to manage businesses.

It will definitely be a while before people feel comfortable swiping credit cards through a mobile device, but as large, reputable companies like Intuit enter the space the stigma surrounding mobile payments may slowly wane.

6. Location and Local Groundswell: Chicago to Des Moines to Boston and Back Again The partnership between daily deals service Groupon and location check-in Foursquare was a big one. The two got together and made it happen. Or, as the Groupon blog says, "when we think of mobile addiction beyond Now! we think foursquare, and many of you guys do, too." The idea of positioning daily deals on Foursquare as an "addiction" doesn't exactly insure longevity; rather, it signals imminent burnout. But hey, we'll forgive Groupon's marketing team - with Groupon's stock prices slumping, the company is needs to keep looking for new ways to hit up consumers. Dwolla, mobile payments system based in U.S. mobile payments capital Des Moines, Iowa, seeks to completely sidestep credit cards. Unlike its main competitor PayPal, Dwolla does not snag a percentage of the transaction; instead, it asks for a shiny silver quarter, regardless of the transaction amount. LevelUp from Boston-based SCVNGR brings location-based gaming to the daily deals space. The idea is simple: Users will receive better deals the more they use the system. Much like the "unlocking" of Foursquare badges, LevelUp users will unlock new "levels" of awesome deals with particular merchants as they continue buying. Like its competitor Dwolla, SCVNGR recently began building local mobile payments into LevelUp.

Conclusion Mobile commerce is at a tipping point. It has not hit a critical, mainstream mass, however. First, the battle of NFCs vs. mobile wallets vs. dongles will need to settle, with one emerging and the others either following and finding their niches, or disappearing completely. Carrier billing will play a crucial role in how consumers start easing into the idea of mobile commerce. The daily deals space will become more focused on mobile, particularly in the ares of personalization and location-based targeting - people who use their phones are glued to them, naturally, and they must start receiving time-sensitive offers at exactly the right moment. Tablet commerce will continue to expand, as more people buy tablets and engage in "couch commerce." Catalogs, tablet-optimized websites and fast conversion rates make this the perfect platform for capturing consumers who already feel devoted to their tablets. In the dongle space, Square will continue to position themselves as the thought leaders, though they will face a fierce competition from Intuit.

The purchase is a way of competing with Amazon’s Web Services and other cloud services that offer applications and infrastructure resources via the net. With its cloudSHIFT hosted desktops, mindSHIFT providers business users with access to standard applications like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, PDFCreator, and Adobe Acrobat Reader, but it also provides good old-fashioned managed hosting services, helping businesses run websites and other applications in its data centers.

Peer 1 will operate Zunicore across three data centers in Fremont, Calif.; Toronto; and Portsmouth, England. The company also offers a service level agreement aimed to luring businesses to the cloud. It appears that Peer 1′s cloud will not compete for hard-core developers that tend to like the ability to scale on Amazon, no matter the drawbacks, but it might appeal to those customers wanting a little more flexibility than a PaaS might offer but don’t want to sweat the uncertainties that might come with a true IaaS.

The screen behind the steering wheel displays your speed and estimated range, and a sort of activity level on the right hand side. It's this widget that has captivated me.

It's designed to give you real-time feedback on your driving style.

When the car is happy (i.e. being driven efficiently), the ball is green and in the center of the gauge.

Stomp on the accelerator, and it rises to the top, changing color to yellow.

Brake too hard (so you're bypassing the kinetic energy recovery) and it dives to the bottom, again changing color to yellow.

The more time you spend in yellow, the fewer miles you'll go before you have to start burning hydrocarbons. 

GM claims you can drive about 35 miles on a full charge, but this is highly dependent on the driver. Depleting the battery won't leave you stuck at the side of the road the way it would in a Tesla or Nissan Leaf—but if you wanted to burn gas, why did you buy a Volt in the first place?

Very quickly I found I'd adapted my driving style. Instead of hustling it around as I would another car, I became more relaxed at the wheel, doing my best to keep the ball green and in the middle.

If anything, the experience was almost like an playing an early video game, except that I was on the streets of Detroit rather than in front of an Atari console. 

And I enjoyed it! It's a really elegant idea from GM, one that very rapidly induced a behavior change from me.

Which is quite impressive, as doctors and public health experts from around the world will tell you, modifying peoples' behavior is a lot easier to say than do.

(Others have reported similar experiences with less game-oriented gauges like the Prius' MPG readout.)

The second half of the NFC conundrum is that there are a lot of hands reaching for the supposed pile of money that NFC payments will enable. Look at Google's announcement of the Wallet product. Or the ISIS partnership between Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T. Google is partnering with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (the NFC partner), Hypercom, Ingenico and NXP (another NFC partner). All of these large companies are going to want a slice of the pie. Where does that leave the retailers? You know, the ones that are actually trying to make money with good and services? Sadly, on the outside of the circle. The carriers are the biggest culprits, wanting to take as much as 50% of transaction revenue because it is "going over their pipes." The financial services companies will be happy taking their normal rates in the 1.75% to 3% range as long as there is a promise that more people will pay electronically (read: sans cash). Between retailers, partners and infrastructure, NFC has years to go before it will be viable for all parties involved.

What will happen in this time frame? Think about the so-called "4G" technology WiMax. The technology is already becoming antiquated with LTE and all the major carriers are working on the next version after that. Sprint is keeping a hybrid of WiMax and LTE going forward but overall it is a tech that died before it even matured. NFC may be the same. What if there are massive leaps in quantum teleportation in the next several years? Does NFC become the WiMax of the payment world?

Maturation Of Direct Carrier Billing The "I do not see myself buying a fridge with this" line comes mostly from the direct carrier folks. Direct carrier billing is the perfect area for micro-payments and payments that stem from ease of use. Think of parking. If you could pay for your parking on the street with your phone, would that convenience be worth an extra couple of cents on the dollar to you? The direct to carrier ecosystem has evolved to the point where it actually makes sense for offline and online use. Zong (acquired by eBay for PayPal integration), PaymentOne and Boku are the leaders in this space. PaymentOne has processed $5 billion in mobile payments and lets users pay with their phone numbers, validating transactions via text. Zong allows that capability as well. Payment One's "One Care" features, announced last week at CTIA, makes direct to carrier billing safe and secure. Transparency is important in mobile commerce because consumers do not really trust their phones to handle their money quite yet. The most important aspect of direct to carrier billing now is that the revenue mechanism has been flipped. It used to be that merchants only got some 40% or less of payments while the carriers and partners took the rest. Even with high margin transactions, that is unacceptable. Today, direct to carrier billing provides the merchants with more than 80% of the revenue, sometimes nearly 95%.

The Dongle World: Smartphones As Credit Card Readers Square, VeriSign and Intuit are pushing hard into the dongle department. Jumio is doing the same thing, just without the dongle. There is not much to be said about the dongle world that we have not already touched on at ReadWriteWeb outside of the notion that it is bringing easy credit card readers to the mobile masses.

The dongle competitors are not worried about what is happening in the ecosytem because it does not really touch their core business. For instance, PayPal does not see NFC or dongles infringing on its business in any way, shape or form. As Laura Chambers, PayPal's head of mobile, said in a recent interview, "we are not worried about much in the ways of competition. There is a lot of white space in the industry for horizontal movement."

What Is PayPal Really Doing? In the interview with Chambers, the first question I asked was, "Why does it seem like PayPal has become a "me too" operator in mobile payments?" It is a fair question, even if Chambers balked to acknowledge that PayPal has been in "me too" mode for the last year or so. PayPal has ignored the dongle movement and NFC is not on its radar as a technology it feels it needs to integrate. "What is the difference between a tap versus a swipe?" Chambers asked. "We are working with what works in the current infrastructure ... We have sat down with consumers and merchants to work with them on what they want." PayPal is growing sideways because there is not a ton of room right now to grow vertically. PayPal will get into NFC solutions when the time is appropriate. Its strategy now is to create as much flexibility for consumers as possible through its mobile wallet program. PayPal's stance is data driven - the company can track when and what consumers buy from mobile phones and tablets. Hence, PayPal is focusing on the shopping end of the spectrum, as opposed to a pure payments play. "60% of people buy more and spend more on mobile," Chambers said. "But, we see that people are not really buying different things on mobile ... the No. 1 driver of growth in mobile payments is boredom." That fits in well with what PayPal sees as "couch commerce." They released a study recently saying that mobile shopping is going to boom this holiday season. As such, PayPal is ready to deploy an end-to-end solution for merchants and consumers to reward loyalty and provide deals and offers along with digital receipts. PayPal believes that it has a lot of room to grow in mobile through these types of horizontal movements. We are also seeing this on a non-mobile front with eBay partnering with Facebook and the Open Graph API and the new X.Commerce initiative that consolidates the PayPal, Zong, Magento, RedLaser and Milo technologies. The company is calling it an "open commerce ecosystem."

Future Of Mobile Payments This article is the first in a series of the trends in mobile payments that ReadWriteWeb will be working on in the next several months. There are a lot of questions and the answers are just beginning to emerge. Who are the winners in the space? Are retail shops in danger of "becoming expensive fronts for online shopping," as Chambers said in the interview? Does NFC really have potential to disrupt offline payments or is it just cool technology? These questions and more are what we will be tackling in the months to come.

While the aforementioned offers have expired, merchants can set up new Foursquare check-in deals via Amex's "Go Social" self-service center for SMBs.

Here's how the Amex-Foursquare marriage works for consumers: Sync Amex card with Foursquare account online. Check in at a location. Tap a "redeem offer" button. Pay with Amex card. Get a Foursquare push notification about the money-back reward (see image) within moments after the card is swiped by the merchant.

Swipely has begun working with 150 merchants in Boston, its launch market. The start-up offers consumers the chance to sync a credit card to its loyalty program. From there, whenever they spend money at a participating merchant, they can receive a reward or discount. Swipely supplies local businesses with point-of-sale signage and materials to promote the program.

Angus Davis, Swipely CEO, said his product should attract consumers and businesses alike because of its usability. There's no need for a smartphone app, much less a printed voucher, he said, in order for shoppers to get rewarded for retail store visits.

"Consumers don't have to change the way they behave in order to check in," Davis said. "Nor do they have to change the way they pay by scanning a QR code [or] using newfangled technology. Our program employs technology that everyone already has and uses."

He added, "For the local merchant, the program doesn't require any changes in the store. They don't have to upgrade hardware, install software, implement any special cards, or re-train their staff."

The 33-year-old CEO said his company would expand to New York, San Francisco, and other major cities in the first half of the upcoming year. "I do think that 2012 is a very ripe time for disruption," Davis said, "especially as the payment space interacts with Main Street merchants."

Other noteworthy developments as digital wallets came into focus during 2011: March/April:Groupon and LivingSocial launch "GrouponNow" and "Instant Deals", respectively, which allow consumers to buy time-sensitive offers with one click on their smart phones. To use the mobile commerce feature, users need to input their credit cards into their daily deals accounts. May 9: Scvngr struck a partnership with American Express to make redeeming LevelUp deals easier for consumers. Amex members who buy the deals need only use their cards while making a purchase to get the discount. As is the case with Swipely, it's not necessary to show the store clerk a paper voucher, barcode, or message on a mobile screen. May 26: Google introduced Google Wallet, which lets consumers pay for Google Offers and other items through their Google account. The Wallet mobile app works with credit card users for Citi, MasterCard, and First Data. Aug. 1: Verizon partnered with Amex to serve as the mobile carrier's digital wallet platform. The telecom was one of the first in its competitive space to create its own digital wallet.

“We are looking to provide innovative services to our customers,” he said. “We have to be competitive and to be competitive you have to offer these services.

Banks that feature a rewards program will increasingly look to mobile to drive interactivity for the program and drive customers back into mobile banking apps.

For example, City Bank Texas will introduce a new service early next year that enables customers to quickly and easily temporarily turn off their debit card via the mobile app if they have lost it and then turn it back on just as easily. Currently, customers have to find and call the bank’s 800 number to accomplish this.

Mobile check capture Many of the big banks currently give customers the ability to deposit checks into their bank accounts using their mobile phones. However, next year more banks are likely to jump onboard and offer this service to meet consumer demand. Malauzai Software’s research shows that a lot of bank customers are investigating remote capture on their mobile phones even if they have not made a deposit yet. For those customers who are using the service, they typically deposit one to two items per month. “We see mobile check capture becoming really big in 2012 – we expect over half of our clients to adopt it next year,” said Robb Gaynor, chief product officer and co-founder of Malauzai Software Inc., Austin, TX.

“If we can move certain things to mobile so customers can do them on their own time via mobile, it’s a big advantage. It is a stickiness that gets them to stay with us.”

For example, City Bank Texas offers a rewards account that enables customers to earn higher interest rates and ATM fee refunds based on how much they use the bank’s various services. However, because there was no way for customers to keep track of how many transactions they made or how close they are to earning a reward, customers were frequently calling the call center for this information.

To address this, City Bank Texas put a real-time reward monitoring service in its mobile app. Now customers can use the app to find out how many more transactions they need to reach the next level of rewards.

Person-to-person payments Person-to-person payments have been around for several years but use has been limited because the transactions did not take place in real time. However, with Visa recently changing certain rules to enable two consumers to exchange debit card information in a secure way, person-to-person payments will now be able to show up in someone’s checking account within seconds. Visa is expected to roll out a solution for person-to-person payments in the first quarter of 2012. “With real time settlements, you will see a lot more customers use person-to-person payments,” Mr. Gaynor said. “We see this as the beginning of real mobile banking.”

Some banks may try to ease customers into mobile payments to get them comfortable with the idea. For example, City Bank Texas will give mobile customers next year a way to manage their prepaid, loyalty and gifts card via the mobile app.

“This is the first step to moving customers to mobile payments concepts,” City Bank Texas’ Mr. Simpson said. “New companies are sprouting up weekly to do mobile payments but the problem is that the debit card is not broken yet – it is still relatively easy to swipe that card.

Mobile marketing Mobile offers and deals from retailers and third-party services such as Groupon and others were a big phenomenon in 2011. Next year, banks will be looking to cash in on the opportunity here by providing local offers via their mobile banking apps. Bank customers will be able to opt-in to the service so they can receive offers via the mobile banking app when they walk past a local business making an offer and redeem the offer via the app as well. In the past, banks have been reluctant to allow other business to market to their customers but because of the personal nature of a mobile phone and the ability to serve offers based on a customer’s location, this is starting to change. “We see this as a huge opportunity for banks to start making money through the mobile channel as offers are redeemed,” Malauzai’s Mr. Gaynor said “We feel it can be pulled off in an unobtrusive, value-added way.”

Customized apps Currently, a lot of banks have one mobile app for all of their customers. However, next year there will be a growing number of customized banking apps that are tailored to the needs of a specific customer group. For example, regional banks could customize apps based on which local market a customer belongs to. Or, an app could be customized to the needs of college students, who often have a different set of services available to them. “The first generation of mobile apps lost some of the customization found in Internet banking but now we are seeing more customized mobile experiences,” Mr. Gaynor said. “This is an example of how mobile banking is getting smarter and banks are trying to deliver a better mobile experience,” he said.

Twenty-two EU member states signed the treaty at a ceremony in Tokyo on January 26. Other nations interested in signing the agreement have until May 2013 to do so. According to Wikipedia, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement “creates a governing body outside national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.” The scope of the agreement includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, and pirated copyright-protected works.

The provisions of ACTA grant copyright holders direct powers to demand that ISPs remove material from the Internet, without the requirement of a court order, and permit foreign influence over ISPs in the United States. Advocates of the treaty seek to give copyright holders the ability to demand that users who do violate intellectual property rights have their Internet connections terminated as a punishment. To enforce such a system would require the creation of an individual Internet ID.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes”/Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers.

The EFF has been vehement in its opposition to ACTA, particularly regarding the secrecy surrounding the treaty negotiations. Likewise, Michael Geist, in writing for Copyright News, asserted that ACTA was “shrouded in secrecy.” He pointed out that ACTA negotiations did not include civil society groups or developing countries, noting also that “reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty’s provisions leaking to the public.” The European Commission denied this allegations in 2008, arguing, “It is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion.”

As noted on Wikipedia, opponents of ACTA also assert that it will impinge upon freedom of expression and communication privacy. A large number of the World Trade Organization’s 157 members have voiced concerns that the treaty would have a negative impact on trade. Others have pointed out that ACTA does not include provisions for legal safeguards protecting ISPs from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Without such provisions, ISPs will be forced to invade the privacy of their subscribers in order to protect themselves. Aaron Shaw, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, stressed that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”

The technology news and information website ArsTechnica.com argues that ACTA encourages ISPs to collect and provide information about suspects by providing for those ISPs “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” In protest against the treaty, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into the Federal Trade Commission’s cybersecurity advice website on January 24, replacing the homepage with the Anonymous logo, a rap song, and a message threatening more attacks if anti-piracy legislation in Congress were to pass. According to The Next Web: The message left temporarily on OnGuardOnline referred to the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. If they pass, the message said, "we will wage a relentless war against the corporate Internet, destroying dozens upon dozens of government and company websites."

The most interesting aspect of this project is the collaboration between three different groups to create a single brand experience centered on creativity and engagement. Two of the musicians involved, Plan B and Tinie Tempah, will promote the campaign with their massive social media following, with the hope that their ‘cool’ will spread to the client and that all involved will be seen as innovators.