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Of course, some aren’t so bullish on NFC, notably eBay (who owns PayPal) CEO John Donohoe, who in a recent earnings call said merchants refer NFC “not for commerce.” And odd statement considering PayPal just dipped its toes in the NFC pool with support for Android.

Gajda tells is, “I think for some people NFC will replace the actual physical credit card but it will be a long time before NFC replaces all payments.” He believes that we are going to start seeing more traction by end of this year but says the capability of “taking credit cards and putting them on mobile phones will represent the long tail” in payments. But he adds, “the pieces are in place for NFC to take off.”

The second part of the Visa’s mobile strategy involves the digital wallet and the mobile web. Gajda says that as e-commerce ramps up on mobile phones, there is a need for one-click, simple username and password checkout experience in a transaction being made on a mobile device. That’s an area where PayPal has been working hard to dominate in but Visa sees room for other players. Should we expect a PayPal-like, one-click mobile payments technology coming from Visa soon? Perhaps, the company hasn’t been afraid to enter PayPal’s territory in the past, launching a peer to peer payments service earlier this year.

Gajda tells us that the biggest challenge of mobile payments in the current market the massive amount of fragmentation in the mobile industry. He explains that with all of the various mobile operating systems, specific manufactured phones, applications and more, keeping up with pace of innovation on the development side is a major challenge for Visa.

Visa actually tested a partnership with retailer The Gap earlier this year which alerted customers via SMS of discounts in stores near them. Gajda tells us Visa is working with a number of other retailers and banks on similar deals which will be announced soon.

Gajda says there are a number of other factors at play in the mobile payments place that need to be highlighted when talking about mobile payments. International is a huge growth area in mobile payments. He tells is that outside the U.S., there are a large number of people who have mobile phones but don’t have banking relationship or credit card. In fact, he says there are 2 billion people in world that have phone, but don’t have a bank account or credit card.

In these markets, Visa’s goal is to bring prepaid accounts, purchasing power and other financial services to basic phones. These could include topping up a mobile phone with airtime, buying transit tickets, peer to peer payments. And this goal was the mean reason behind the purchase of behind the $110 million purchase of Fundamo. The company’s platform delivers mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services.

MOBILE Gajda explains that there are three prongs to Visa’s mobile payments strategy. One of these is NFC, and focuses on payments using a mobile phone at a physical store. For background, NFC (near field communications) enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with Google Wallet, Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. Visa recently joined the ISIS network, a NFC mobile payment network that is a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. ISIS will soon launch in a number of markets, including Utah and Texas.

Connecting with the small business world that don’t yet use credit cards or are new to the system is another area where Visa feels there is strong potential, especially with mobile payments. That’s why the company invested in disruptive mobile payments company Square and took an advisory role in the company. Gajda says that the power of Square is that it is enabling small businesses and independent workers such as doctors, designer and other merchants to start using credit cards and grow their businesses. It would make sense for Square and Visa would somehow work to harness the power of their partnership (As of April roughly two-thirds of transactions using Square’s payments service were through Visa credit cards.), but it’s unclear what the two companies will reveal any new co-produced products soon.

Schulz explains that the idea behind the wallet is that consumers want control over their wallet and want to have payment information and access available to them at all times. She believes that the digital wallet will click to buy incorporated on retailers’ sites is essential to the future of e-commerce in both the U.S. and emerging markets.

DIGITAL Visa’s digital payments guru Schulz outlined her strategy for digital payments at the company, which centralizes around the creation of the digital wallet. Schulz says that because of the fact that e-commerce is being more easy and convenient with customers, especially with m-commerce, the underlying payments infrastructure has to evolve.

And Visa’s answer to this is a new digital wallet initiative. Here’s how it works. Users will have an account, and they can add their credit card numbers (and cards from other credit card companies such as American Express and Mastercard). Visa is partnering with a number of financial institutions to offer this product to their customers.

Users can also load their loyalty points and rewards cards, as well as organize their shopping lists. Schulz describes it as a “wallet in the cloud.” But she says the key to the success of the wallet is a seamless, one-click payments experience for the consumers. So Visa has partnered with a number of large-scale retailers (which will be announced soon) to integrate what Schulz refers to as a ‘new acceptance mark’ on a merchant payments page.

So there will be a button you can click on, which will prompt you to sign-on and then will sync your digital wallet with the purchase in your shopping cart. So for example, imagine you had a camera in your cart, and Visa offered a 20 percent off at camera’s purchased at BestBuy, the wallet would sync and show the discount in your cart. The same works for loyalty points and more.

Visa competitor American Express is also working hard to innovate both at the large retailer level, as well as among smaller retailers, with GoSocial.

She compares the digital wallet offering to “two-hand clapping.” ” You can have a digital wallet,” Schulz explains, “but you need a merchant solution of click to buy, and Visa’s going to transform that experience.” And Schulz highlights another recent acquisition, Playspan, has helping drive a simplified commerce experience, a.k.a. click to buy, within game or within app.

Of course adding another checkout experience to online retailers’ sites can be a complicated and time-consuming process. But that’s where Visa’s $2 billion acquisition of CyberSource comes in. CyberSource is said to process about 25 percent of all e-commerce dollars transacted in the United States, and operates e-commerce for hundreds of thousands of retailers. Schulz says this relationship has helped speed up the pace of implementation.

Creating the digital wallet, both on the mobile and web platforms, is no easy task. Visa has a name for itself in the credit card industry but the fact is that the brand still has to attach innovation to itself in order for people to take these products seriously. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Google’s Mobile Wallet news created waves, even though NFC technology is in its early stages.

But he says that there is still so much room for innovation around how we pay with mobile phones. “With the rise of smartphone usage, we are already seeing a lot of innovation around commerce,” he explains. “It’s inevitable that this will extend to the payments around the sales in mobile commerce.”

While Visa, American Express and others are looking to capitalize on the changes taking place in the payments industry, it is a challenging effort. Local commerce is a big part of this, and everyone is trying to find a way to close the redemption loop. But e-commerce, amongst larger retailers, is also a multi-billion dollar market that Visa hopes to continue to play in with products like a digital wallet. And in-store payments, whether that be through NFC, Square or others, represent another market.

I’ve been talking to a number of executives of payments companies and founders of innovative payments startups, and while their objectives are different, they all seem to agree on one thing. It’s early and there is still much more innovation were going to see in the next few years in the online and mobile payments space.

New York-based Foursquare tackled the combination of mobile and social at its inception. The service initially focused on letting friends share information about their whereabouts through their phones and collect virtual badges for check-ins. As the company has racked up nearly 9 million users worldwide and more than 500 million check-ins during 2010, it has turned increasing attention to the local commerce component.

Foursquare built a self-service platform for merchants to offer special deals that give consumers another incentive to check in, with perks ranging from discounts to reserved parking spots.

The startup also sees opportunities in mobile-based loyalty programs and worked on a pilot with Dominick's parent Safeway that linked the grocery chain's rewards card to a member's Foursquare account. A person who had checked in to a gym at least 10 times a month, for example, might receive coupons for Gatorade.

"Commerce is happening when you're there and mobile puts you there," said Jake Furst, Foursquare's business development manager.

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.

Jumio is introducing three products for online merchants: Netswipe Start, Netswipe Scanning and Netswipe Processing. Additional products, including a mobile solution, will be released later this year.

The idea of processing digital payments by scanning credit card information isn’t entirely new, we should note. Last month, for example, saw the launch of Card.io, a startup that is developing mobile applications also capable of scanning credit cards using smartphone cameras, and some other applications like AisleBuyer include similar features.

Mattes posits that online retailers and e-commerce site owners can quickly and easily implement Netswipe on their websites, and that the solution doesn’t rival but instead complements existing payment solutions that have usually already been deployed (PayPal etc.).

Netswipe will, howevever, allow merchants to securely process payments both on the Web and mobile – and like Card.io, Jumio intends to enable third-party developers to integrate the technology into their own apps and services. It’s also worth noting that Jumio claims its technology is patented.

The main benefits for merchants to implement such a solution are: reducing the time between a customer’s decision to purchase something online and effectively making a transaction, minimize the friction (entering credit card information by typing can be tedious and distracting) and reducing fraud.

Jumio CEO Daniel Mattes says that, during the pilot phase, a survey with a focus group showed a decrease in churn rate from 52% to 21%. This may well have been more of an exception than the rule, but for most businesses even a 5 percent decrease would have a big impact on the bottom line.

Jumio says credit cards that are used to pay for goods and services via Netswipe are not ‘photographed’ – rather, the scans are made using videostreaming technology, which enables the company to recognize and verify the card details without storing any data on the client side.

If all this is true, the Netswipe technology solution is one hell of a unique selling proposition for everyone involved – little or no downside and a lot of upsides for sellers and an additional, convenient method of payment for buyers.

The proof of the pudding is of course in the eating, as they say, so I’d be very interested to learn from online merchants and e-commerce business owners what their thoughts on the new service are.

There are non-retail uses too. This could finally be the technology that lets us exchange business card info without the card. You could pay tolls or get information from governmental agencies. Wouldn't it be nice if Mount Rushmore told you all about its sculptor Gutzon Borglum, or that it took 12 years to complete?

Of course the first concern for such communications is security, and there's plenty to worry about with NFC--not the least of which is that the standard doesn't presently encrypt transmissions. Nonetheless, all the major phone, credit card, and carrier vendors and a good number of governments are setting to trial the technology in 2012. NFC is one to watch.

The jointly owned company, Wireless Payment Services, aims to standardize and commercialize an easy-to-use mobile phone payment system. The carriers declined to say how much they're spending on the initiative.

The announcement is the latest example of Canada's wireless providers joining forces to push potentially revolutionary technology.

It's also further evidence that cellphones are moving way beyond their traditional use and into music playing, gaming, Internet and other applications.

Consumers should expect to see some changes starting next summer.

Prepaid wireless users will be affected first. The aim is to allow them to use their phones to buy more account minutes instead of having to visit a merchant.

After that, the carriers want to gradually roll out the system at retail points of sale and service centres like ticketing outlets.

"What the user will be able to do, ultimately, is to tap or wave their mobile device in front of a point-of-sale terminal to pay," said Jeff Chorlton, president of Wireless Payment Services.

Payment will be withdrawn from the user's bank account or charged to a credit card.

"All of your payment methods could be contained on your cellphone," Chorlton said.

Many handset makers have begun trials to add a payment function to their cellphone product lines. Payment works through a short-range wireless technology called near-field communication. NFC lets users exchange information securely by bringing two electronic devices close together.

The technology could forever alter consumer lifestyles, predicts the NFC Forum, an industry group promoting the technology founded in 2004 by Nokia Corp., Royal Philips Electronics and Sony Corp.

The Forum offers this future scenario on its website: "With Near Field Communication enabled devices, you will make your travel reservations on your PC and download your tickets to your mobile phone or PDA, just by bringing it next to the computer. Then you will check in for your trip by touching your hand-held device to the departure gate kiosk - no paper, no printing."

The system will allow retailers and other companies to save money, Chorlton said. "For some merchants, it could represent the roll-out of infrastructure at very low cost because the infrastructure largely exists through hand-held devices."

Mobile users in such places as Hong Kong and Finland are already using NFC technology to hop on a bus or buy some new threads. Canadians should take to wireless payment because they already frequently use cashless commerce like debit cards, said Dennis Kira, an e-commerce specialist at Concordia University.

"In my mind, the public in general is ready for it."

Canada has about 16 million mobile phone subscribers.

According to the joint press release, the initial focus of the MasterCard and Intel partnership will be on MasterCard's PayPass payments hardware and Intel's Identity Protection Technology (IPT). The idea will be to make a faster, more secure transaction with a just a click or a tap of a card or smartphone through the NFC capabilities of PayPass.

There are larger currents in motion here than just creating better transactions hardware. According to MasterCard, 85% of transactions are still done in cash. The company's goal is to make a dent in that number. Even a half a percentage point change towards digital purchases could mean hundreds of millions of extra dollars flowing towards the payment processing industry. This is why MasterCard is repositioning itself not just as a payments firm, but as a technology company.

Convergence Of Tech & Payments

In 2011 there have been a multitude of partnerships made between tech and financial companies. A lot of the movement has to do with the emerging model of mobile payments, especially into the physical (not Web-based) world. The biggest one is probably the Google Wallet initiative, that has a wide group of companies in its early rolls (and more to come), including Google, Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and various NFC makers. There is also the Isis project that brings the other three carriers, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to bear with NFC capabilities. Last week American Express announced a $100 million fund to help fund e-commerce projects. While mobile will be a huge focus for this convergence between tech and financial, it is not the only push.

Square is pushing itself into the mainstream with deals with Wal-Mart, the carriers and Apple while Intuit has made partnerships with both Verizon and AT&T with an eye towards pushing its GoPayment dongle and QuickBooks infrastructure at small businesses. PayPal wants to be two things at once, both a technology leader and a payments company and has been making a lot of horizontal movements in the sector as well.

This is not just about the financial industry moving towards technology, the way MasterCard is trying to do it. The technology industry is equally as fervent to moves towards payments. Jack Dorsey, one the founders of Twitter, is probably the best example of this. He saw earlier than most that mobile was changing the entire tech industry and that payments would be a huge part of that. Hence, he started Square, one of the first pillars of the bridge that is being built between the two industries.

Both Apple and Google have been making pushes into payments. Apple has hundreds of millions of credit cards on file to support its iTunes model where as Google Checkouts has been positioned to be the de facto purchasing solution for Android apps.

This model offers a glimpse of one version of what the future of commerce may look like. E-commerce is infinitely more convenient for certain things, but sometimes consumers still need to see and try a product in person, whether it's a MacBook Air or a pair of jeans.

For retailers, offering a mobile app that alleviates some of the pain of real world, bricks-and-mortar shopping can provide a competitive advantage on digital platforms without cannibalizing physical in-store sales. Mix in location-based offers and coupons and the incentive for consumers to swing by the store is even greater.

Peter Ayliffe said: “The way we pay is changing, driven by the rapid uptake of new technologies and growing consumer demand for more flexible payments

We are already seeing early adoption of mobile payments, and in the coming months we will see the arrival of mainstream NFC technologies, advanced loyalty and e-commerce services, and ultimately, the launch of a new digital wallet.”

Support for other mobile Operating Systems, multiple currencies and payments to and within non-European countries will be added over following months.

Visa Alerts notify registered Visa cardholders on a real-time basis whenever their card has been used to make a purchase or to withdraw cash through Visa Europe’s payment network.

developed by Visa Europe in partnership with Monitise, the first of many services that will be made available through the partnership announced in early 2011.

Visa Mobile Person-to-Person payments allow registered users to transfer funds to any Visa cardholder in Europe from their mobile phone, backed by all the security and expertise of Visa Europe’s industry-leading processing systems. The app makes it easy to send money to an address book contact, to a mobile phone number, or to a specific Visa card number – whether or not the recipient is registered with the service.

Monitise plc (LSE: MONI.L) is a technology company delivering mobile banking, payments and commerce networks worldwide with the proven technology and expertise to enable financial institutions and other service providers to offer a wide range of services to their customers in developed and emerging markets.

Operating income was $13.0 million, with an operating margin of 17.9 percent, compared to operating income of $4.7 million, with an operating margin of 6.3 percent, in the third quarter of fiscal 2003. Operating cash flow was $23.1 million with a cash balance of $158.9 million, compared to operating cash flow of $12.1 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2003, an increase of 91 percent.

For the nine months ended June 30, 2004, revenue totaled $223.1 million, compared to $205.5 million for the same nine-month period in fiscal 2003, an increase of 9 percent. Operating income for the nine months ended June 30, 2004 was $42.5 million compared to $23.4 million, which included a goodwill impairment charge of $9.3 million, for the same period last year, an increase of 82 percent. Operating margin was 19.1 percent for the first nine months of fiscal 2004, compared to an operating margin of 11.4 percent for the same period last year. Operating cash flow was $44.7 million for the first nine months of fiscal 2004, compared to $26.1 million for the same period last year, an increase of 71 percent. Net income was $36.7 million, or $.97 per diluted share, compared to $5.2 million, or $.15 per diluted share, an increase of 604 percent for the same nine-month period in fiscal 2003.

During the quarter, the Company added 13 new customers while maintaining a worldwide presence of 76 countries. ACI Worldwide, the Company's largest business unit, added seven new customers during the quarter. Solutions licensed to these customers included BASE24®, BASE24-es™, WINPAY24™, and ACI Proactive Risk Manager™. ACI Worldwide also licensed capacity upgrades to 13 customers and licensed seven new applications to existing customers during the quarter.

Insession Technologies, the Company's e-infrastructure business unit, added six new customers and licensed 12 new applications to existing customers during the quarter. Solutions licensed to new and existing customers include GoldenGate™, WorkPoint®, VersaTEST™, WebGate, SafeTGate, ICE™, Automated Operator™ and AutoDBA™.

IntraNet, the Company's international payments and message processing solutions provider, added one new Money Transfer System™ customer. IntraNet also licensed one capacity upgrade and entered into 17 services contracts with existing customers during the quarter.

The Company completed the third quarter of fiscal 2004 with $232.8 million in backlog. Included in backlog are all software license fees, maintenance fees and services specified in executed contracts to the extent that the Company believes that recognition of the related revenue will occur within the next twelve months. Recurring backlog includes all monthly license fees, maintenance fees and facilities management fees and amounted to $173.6 million. Non-recurring backlog includes other software license fees and services and amounted to $59.2 million.

"We are pleased with the quarter's and year-to-date financial results," said Gregory D. Derkacht, President and CEO. "We continue to make progress on our tax-planning initiatives and other projects, and we look forward to building on our worldwide leadership position in the financial services sector with our proven software solutions."

The Company has revised its revenue estimate for fiscal 2004 from a range of $282 to $292 million to a range of $291 to $296 million. The Company has also revised its EPS estimate from $.74 to $.83 to $1.10 to $1.17, which includes the $.28 net one-time tax benefit.

The company also recently launched a mobile version of UltimatePay, which gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The mobile focused platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game

As virtual goods becomes a booming business, PlaySpan has reaped the benefits of technology and media companies looking to incorporate virtual goods into their platforms.

Visa says that ecommerce sales, which reached an estimated $948 billion, are a big growth area for the company. Approximately 45 percent of U.S. online spending takes place on Visa’s network today and for Visa’s fiscal first quarter 2011, the company reported 25 percent year-over-year growth in ecommerce payment volumes globally. Visa is going to use PlaySpan to capitalize on the growing digital goods market, which generated an estimated $25 billion in consumer spending globally in 2010 and is expected to reach $280 billion by 20143.

The acquisition is even more impressive when you conside that the company was founded by 12-year-old, Arjun Mehta, in 2006. PlaySpan is actually run by the teenager’s father, CEO and co-founder Karl Mehta.

Much like Apple with iTunes, Facebook takes a 30 percent cut on every dollar spent through the Credits platform.

Today users can buy Credits with 15 currencies, including U.S. dollars, Euros, the British Pound and the Venezuelan Bolivar.

It is important to first highlight, that for any mobile payments system to work, consumers will need to open some form of application to allow users to connect the phone to complete the payment. 

To date, Facebook sees over 200 million unique users accessing the social network through a mobile devices each month.

Almost all of the major brands who would adopt mobile payments in the beginning (i.e. Best Buy, Gap, Target) have invested heavily into growing a Facebook presence. It is this ability to connect to users and their social graph through a Facebook payment option that makes Credits and mobile payments an attractive model.

From this point, it is Facebook’s network that makes its payment option so attractive. As I scan my phone to finalize my purchase, I am presented with the option to share this purchase with my friends. Selecting yes, opens up an additional discount for my friends and I. From there my friends have the option to use the promotion through Best Buy’s ecommerce page or on location.

For now, Facebook prefers to play down talk of its broader ambitions for Credits. The 30 percent tax Facebook imposes on those who accept Credits might be too high to allow for the regular sale physical goods and services.

Other big players include PayPal who has more than 81 million active registered accounts and 210 million accounts, in 190 markets and it supported 24 currencies.

Google, with its Google Checkout and Android phones is also set to be a big player. With NFC technology being implemented on all future Google phones, we expect a mobile payment app preloaded on these phones. 

Probably an even bigger player is Apple and its 100 million iTunes users. The iPhone is set to be the main phone to drive mobile payments, even if other phones offer these features. But one thing is for sure: the mobile (social) payments market will be fragmented for the first few years and Facebook is easily in the position to come out victorious.

While analysts feel 2011 is the year for mobile payments, there is still uncertainty of how quickly consumers will move their wallet to a digital format or what platform they will use. 

One factor that is definite is the speed at which small business will adapt mobile transactions.

Third-party companies such as Bling Nation and Square to name a few win over merchants by cutting the transaction process fee by as much as 50 percent. With consumers swiping their debits cards more so than ever, this is a huge savings for any company.

Additionally, the three major U.S wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile partnered with Discover Card to form a mobile payment company called “Isis,” a venture to provide mobile payment carrier billing solution for payments.

The closet form of mobile payments in the U.S. that can be utilized nationally is the Starbucks digital gift card. 

While this option only applies to Starbucks stores, consumers can now makes purchases by scanning their phones.

The biggest challenge, currently keeping mobile payments from going mainstream is technology adoption. 

Not only do consumers need to carry a phone that has the correct technology, retailers also need to implement technology that connects with the phone.

Other challenges that could cause slow growth are the number of companies attempting to break into the space. 

From small start-ups to large tech companies such as Google and Apple, many consumers could be slow to adopt as they wait it out and see which platform becomes widely adopted.

To truly accelerate growth, we believe a large company needs to step up and look at the opportunity as a way to break into the $6.2 trillion retail market by covering the costs of technology adoption.

One player who is seen to have this ability is Apple. 

As the largest tech company in the world, rumors have come up, that Apple will implement NFC technology into the next generation iPhone 5 and with 100 million users already connected through iTunes, giving away the retail technology to scan mobile payments could be a quick way to gain accelerated usage.

Though it cannot be applied to all of your purchases, Starbucks seems to be the furthest along, allowing customers to purchase digital gift cards that can be scanned at all Starbuck locations nationwide.

To help accelerate growth, implementing a rewards program will draw more consumers to try the new payment platform.  This option to collect and track rewards is one of the key features that have helped Starbucks see quicker adoption.

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.

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.

In recent news, Adyen has opened a new Latin America office in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Metaio's view is that AR is "more than a marketing gimmick or hype, it's actually an interface revolution". However, there are currently relatively few companies able to take part in this revolution, since creating AR content remains the preserve of developers willing and able to get to grips with the tools.