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DUBAI — Digital contactless payment has become more popular among UAE travellers as they prefer to make payments and seek information in a visual format on a device, according to a latest global industry study.

Around 32 per cent of UAE respondents find using their phone rather than cash or credit cards to pay for things “extremely appealing” as against 24 per cent globally, revealed a major global industry study “From chaos to collaboration: How transformative technologies will herald a new era in travel”.

Commissioned by Amadeus, a travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, the new report outlines the way new technologies and social change will transform travel by 2020. The study challenges the industry to overcome the uncertainty and stress of modern-day travel through the application of new innovations.

RFID tag information can be communicated in real-time to the enterprise database through Wi-Fi, CDMA, GSM or Bluetooth connections associated with PDAs and Smartphones. The SDiD Card allows for safe and secure product and client information storage, updates and processing.

The SDiD Card also supports Near Field Communication (NFC) technology allowing consumers to use their devices to access product and entertainment information, compare prices and perform transactions. Consumers can make contactless payments, redeem coupons and points and receive instant promotions and rewards. NFC is a combination of contactless identification and interconnection technologies developed by Philips and Sony. NFC enables short-range radio frequency (RF) communication between personal electronic devices. The NFC based SDiD Card allows PDA and Smartphone users to access product information or entertainment content such as pictures, music and video clips by waving their mobile devices in front of a smart poster or kiosk. Users can also exchange such information with other users through NFC or mobile connection of their devices.

Wireless Dynamics offers two SDiD Card versions, the SDiD 1010 and the SDiD 1020. The SDiD 1010 is a NFC-based SD Card supports ISO14443A standard, NFCIP-1, Philips MIFARE tag and Sony's FeliCa tag. It is ideal for contactless payment, advertising and promotional applications.

Late last month, I ordered the beverage at Sightglass Coffee in SoMa, grabbed it from the counter and walked out without cracking my wallet.

Nobody chased me down because, when I first approached the cafe, the Card Case app on my iPhone detected the store's perimeter and automatically switched on. It broadcast my picture to the barista, who could then tap my pre-entered credit card number to cover the bill. The phone never had to leave my pocket.

It felt a lot like buying in the one-click environments of iTunes or Amazon, which is to say it didn't feel like buying at all. Square, the San Francisco startup behind the app, has come close to replicating the frictionless online buying experience in the brick-and-mortar world.

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.

t 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.

Yelp and Groupon are both being sued by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework, an obscure patent troll that earlier filed a similar patent infringement suit against Foursquare.

On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO, for reasons unknown to mankind. In summary, this patent describes:

a subscription-based system for providing commerce information for one or more mobile devices for one or more merchants. Some techniques employed feature a subscription-based method for presenting commercial resources to a mobile device. The method involves receiving mobile device user information relating to a geographic location to locate one or more merchants within a subscription-based shopping network, and receiving mobile device user information relating to a merchant type within the subscription-based shopping network.

Furthering its efforts to extend its social network to mobile users regardless of which handset they own, Facebook has today announced a partnership with mobile chip maker MediaTek to deliver social networking capabilities to millions of consumers with Internet-connected featurephone devices.

The partnership will see Facebook embedded into MediaTek’s mobile platform solutions, providing mobile device owners in emerging countries with access to Facebook via affordable handsets. It will use MediaTek’s Runtime Environment (MRE) to deliver social networking from the core of the device.

MediaTek says that phones powered by its chipsets accounted for 40% of the overall Indian mobile market, with the company predicting that more than 50% of its customers will utilise its new runtime environment to deliver Facebook functionality. Facebook use is growing in the country, pulling users from Google’s Orkut social network, with additional mobile partnerships set to extend its growth.

At the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop (NEXT) conference in Aarhus, Denmark today, Clark Dodsworth gave a talk about how contextual awareness will transform our usage of devices such as mobile phones. Contextual awareness uses a variety of sensors in a device to give you information that’s relevant to what you’re doing. Imagine your phone being able to offer relevant alerts for traffic when it knows you’re driving, for example. As Dodsworth notes, Apple’s purchase of ‘virtual assistant’ service Siri last year is one example of how this is set to become a reality. He believes contextual awareness features will soon be built into mobile operating systems as standard.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

When trying to piece together the devices that we use to connect to each other, it’s easy to see that it’s going to take a piece of paper the size of Texas to feature them all. Even if we manage to do so, we will be far from connecting them all in whatever way they use the Internet. So what do we do? Well, we do it anyway, and on a computer of course. Intel put together a really interesting infographic that lines up all the devices (breeds) that we use to connect to each other. For the first time (I guess), we can get a clear view of how the technological infrastructure was built and to what extent it reaches out. As you can see, the numbers represented get multiplied with each major technological milestone, and it’s easy to see that we’re heading for something really interesting in the future. Whatever it will be that will beat the Internet will be major, and even though I can’t imagine what that will be right now, it’s still exciting to know that we always come up with something to beat the previous technology. What do you think will be the next big thing in technology that will top the Internet?

Mobile users with NFC-enabled devices will no longer need a special application in order to exchange contact details or other types of data between their phones thanks to a new NFC specification which has just been released.

a standardization of the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol (SNEP) to use peer-to-peer mode for data exchanges.

the new specification extends the NFC data exchange format (NDEF), which previously described how data, like a website URL for instance, would be moved from an NFC tag to a NFC-enabled phone by tapping or waving a mobile device within close proximity to the tag.

Nuance Communications (NUAN) CEO Paul Ricci must have taken copious notes in class because his company's recent purchase of Swype has catapulted it from a voice recognition company to an input organization.

I think this is a big move for the company because it expands what it, as an entity, does.

To "swype," a person traces across keyboard letters in a continuous motion to comprise a word. Swype says its input method lets people do more than 40 words a minute, and says the application is meant to work across not just phones and tablets, but also game consoles, kiosks, televisions and other screens.

Mobile payment start-up Square, is set to deploy its credit card readers for smartphones in Wall-Mart Stores at locations in the US, according to reports.

According to online media outlet businessweek.com, before being made available in Wall-Mart stores, Square’s device has been sold via about 200 Apple stores, as well as via Target, RadioShack and Best Buy outlets.

The technology employed by Square for this device works on Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as Google Android. The card reader is plugged into the headphone jack of the mobile device which allows merchants to swipe customers’ credit or debit cards.

Although Siri is limited in what it can do, what it does do, it does well. And based on my experiences with Siri so far, I think it illustrates what I think of as the “invisible interfaces” of future connected devices. Admittedly, that sound like a bold claim, but the reality is this: Thanks to the “Internet of Things,” more devices are gaining connectivity that makes them smarter and more useful. At the same time, computing interfaces haven’t changed all that much in the past several decades. They’re going to have to, however, as we can’t have a multitude of different interfaces across a myriad of connected devices in this new world.

The key for potential success here is in Siri’s uncanny ability to understand not just natural language input, but also context. This is great for smartphones where we have so much personal data such as contact names, addresses, phone numbers and digital music tracks. Even better is when Siri works with multiple apps or services on our handsets; tying them together through a simple command. “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” for example, leverages both the Reminders application and the integrated GPS radio of an iPhone.

“Close the windows and turn on the air conditioning if the outside temperature rises above 85 degrees,” could be a real-world example in just a few years time.

We just can’t give enough love to mobile payments as we watch the world move from cash to credit to cardless. Intuit is feeling the evolution too and created an infographic to explain just how much mobile payments are growing and where they’ll be in 2015.

The two biggest payment players last year were obviously credit and debit cards, with a small, but rising mobile payments only making up 5 percent of purchases executed. But important to note is that as credit, debit and other forms of payment increase, cash exchange decreases. People have long trusted plastic to deliver their currency, so why not trade in the plastic for airwaves? Well, according to Intuit, people will do just that. Cash is expected to drop to just over $1 trillion changing hands in 2015, and alternate payments jumping up considerably to $2.7 trillion, hugely surpassing cash as a trusted method of payment.

Also important to keep in mind is the proliferation of smartphones themselves. Smartphones have permeated over 40 percent of mobile users, but more interesting is the fact that this is mirrored in business owners. 37 percent of entrepreneurs also work through the smartphone, creating a level playing field for people wanting to buy and sell over the phone.

Consumers will be able to pay for everything on the high street with their mobile phones in five years time, a new survey says.

Research by Forrester, commissioned by PayPal, found that “2016 will be the year when UK shoppers will be able to use their mobile phones to pay for things on the high street with digital money rather than cash, cheques or cards”.

The findings are based on interviews with 10 senior executives from major UK businesses, representing a combined 2010 turnover of £85 billion.

Wearable computing becomes the next mobile frontier.

We’ll remotely connect to our smart homes.

A jump in wireless home broadband adoption.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL  ) filed a patent at the tail end of 2009 dubbed "Local Device Awareness," which describes automated connections between a number of close-range devices. Some potential applications could be device position targeting (think locating your keys) or proximity-based gaming.

If Apple's patent seems overly broad, patent hoarder InterDigital (Nasdaq: IDCC  ) has gone for specificity. It holds some 33 known patents covering machine-to-machine communication.

Motorola and Google seem to be behind in patents, with only one highly technical machine-to-machine patent showing up for Motorola Mobility, and none for Google. But as you'll soon see, the two companies might be hoping for a more open environment.

The technology is run through an application call QkR that users can download for iPhone or Android devices. Australian movie chain Hoyts is being used for the test program.

“MasterCard is constantly looking for ways to improve the consumer payment experience by making life easier, and initiatives such as QkR have been developed for these reasons,” said Matt Barr, head of market development and innovation at MasterCard Australia, Purchase, NY.

“Hoyts decided to partner with MasterCard for this pilot because they recognize the benefits of innovative payment applications in enhancing the overall cinema experience for moviegoers,” he said.