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Here’s a quick breakdown of the big differences between desktop and mobile platforms: Mobile device hardware is smaller and generally tends to have lower hardware resources than desktops/laptops. Smaller screens bring about different design considerations and challenges. Touchscreen technology introduces new interaction concepts that differ from traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse). With a mobile device, internet connectivity is not always as reliable as a hard-wired broadband connection, which means internet connectivity is a concern and data transfer could be significantly slower. Although these sound as if they are hurdles to get over, with careful thought and consideration, there’s no reason why they should be. Touchscreen technology is exciting. The smaller screen design will really make you think about how to get the user to interact with your mobile web app in the most satisfying way possible. What we should really be doing is looking at the list of differences above and seeing opportunities to deliver our content in a different way. Building mobile web apps will be a paradigm shift from traditional web development and web design.

In the next sections, we will discuss development/design considerations, as well as concepts and techniques for building mobile web apps.

Keep File Sizes Small

Who cares about ancient history? If you're a gamer you should, because it's happening again. This time, though, its console gamers lobbing the same lamentations at Angry Bird players, Words With Friends addicts, and ever-sneaky Fruit Ninjas. As smartphones and tablets get more powerful, the dedicated gaming machine looks more and more quaint. Where once software supported hardware in one big, happy family, it's all becoming rather more... disjointed. For a gamer like me, that's a little troubling. If app gaming does for consoles what those consoles did to the PC scene a decade ago, a lot of big game studios are going to be in trouble, and a lot of gamers are going to be pining for the good 'ol days.

It's hard to tell at what point mobile gaming became a serious threat to the console scene, but surely nobody at Nintendo lost any sleep when Snake crawled its way into the hearts of many a Nokia user back in the late '90s. Then, just a few years later, Steve Jobs started comparing iPod sales to those of dedicated gaming machines. I initially thought the very notion was preposterous; that an iPod didn't hold a candle to the DS and PSP I took with me on every flight. In the ensuing months, however, I've changed my tune.

In recent years we haven't exactly seen a lot of innovation on the console gaming front. Sure, there was a giant rush to jump on the motion gaming bandwagon -- Microsoft with the Kinect and Sony with the Move, even Nintendo sauntering back in with the MotionPlus -- but none of those technologies have delivered the new gameplay experiences that even grizzled veterans like myself secretly hoped they might. Nor have they succeeded in whetting my appetite for something truly new. As someone whose youth was punctuated by a three-year console cycle, booting up the same 'ol hardware almost six years later feels wrong.

PayPal’s first retail tests of its in-store payment system is happening at Home Depot, the payment company acknowledged last week. But the bigger test will be ensuring that many more retailers and merchants are in a position to easily integrate PayPal’s system as it looks to roll out its offering this year.

PayPal is taking a big step forward by partnering with AJB Software Designs, which helps connect the point of sale terminals at many tier-one retailers to payment processors and financial institutions. AJB is now incorporating PayPal’s mobile payment system into its framework and building out a specific PayPal interface, which will allow PayPal users to pay through 250,000 point-of-sale terminals that connect to AJB software. AJB said it services 20 percent of the top retailers in North America. The AJB integration should be become available to retailers in the first quarter of this year.

Retailers will still have to decide if they want to enable payments via PayPal. And the process of outfitting stores and chains can take anywhere from days to weeks. But if they choose to make the software upgrade, retailers will be able to receive payments via a PayPal Access Card or through an “empty hand” payment in which a user accesses their PayPal account by entering in their phone number at a point of sale terminal. In both cases, they will need to confirm a transaction with a PIN code and then AJB’s software takes the request and pings PayPal, which authenticates the user. PayPal can send back coupon information or deals stored on a user’s PayPal app, which the user can then decide to apply before selecting their payment form and checking out. After the transaction, users will receive an e-receipt on their PayPal app and online in the PayPal account.

Don Kingsborough could have called it quits. The man who founded Worlds of Wonder Toys, famous for Teddy Ruxpin and helping lead the introduction of Nintendo in the U.S., and the former president of of consumer products at Atari, was just winding down his time last year at Blackhawk Network, a pre-paid card company that he had sold to supermarket Safeway. With his options expiring, he decided to sell and contemplated retirement.

But then PayPal came calling, and Kingsborough couldn’t resist the opportunity to make one more big stab at shaking up the retail world. Kingsborough joined PayPal in March 2011 as VP for retail and prepaid products, heading up PayPal’s efforts to launch an in-store payment system.

In his first extensive interview since joining PayPal, Kingsborough said he wasn’t just interested in extending his career; he saw a huge chance to fundamentally change the way people shopped in retail stores as digitalization moved payments beyond cash and credit. And he believes that PayPal is uniquely positioned to bring that vision to market.

Mobile payment app LevelUp will launch with its first national brand partner, Villa Pizza, on New Years Eve. Members of the annual Time Square New Years Eve mob who use the app to pay at the restaurant can enjoy $10 worth of free pizza while they’re waiting for the ball to drop — regardless of which phone, bank or credit card they’re using.

LevelUp, which was created by check-in game SCVNGR, makes mobile payments more practical by taking NFC hardware out of the equation. It can be used with an iPhone app, Android app or through a mobile website. Google Wallet, by contrast, can only be used by those who have a Citi Mastercard or Google prepaid card and an NFC-enabled phone.

A trickier problem than practicality, however, is getting people interested in using their phones to pay in the first place. “I don’t think the payment experience is particularly broken,” SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch told Mashable. “You need to add something more.”

MasterCard, the longtime credit card and payments processor, wants to reposition itself as a technology company. Throughout the latter half of 2011, it has been pushing hard on the technosphere to make sure that journalists and bloggers know the company is doing some cool stuff around payments research and the cutting edge of technology, like NFC, audio signals and QR codes that can lead to purchases through smartphones.

It now comes as no surprise that MasterCard has announced a partnership with Intel on a multi-year strategic partnership that is intended to enhance the security and payment experience for digital commerce. These are two titans in the tech and financial industries and shows one of the first steps of these two industries merging in the future.

Making A Dent In The 85%

Cloud Computing is both an abstract concept which can reffer to every logical grouping of software services provided by one or more companies which may or may not be on the same hardware architectures. ted ar It also stands for the physical architectures involving SOA (services-oriented architecture) systems, server farms and a lot of hardware to provide on demand services 24/24 no matter what may happen. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk.  Of course it’s a 2010 buzzword and I am personally seeing some kind of Terminal Server (Mainframes anyone?…) à la sauce New Millenium coupled with web technologies. The thing is… Cloud Computing along with Software Virtualization are really promising.  I put the second one with it because everything is about having almost nothing on the client side. ore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be ga The idea of having every service in the Cloud is to ensure that eveything you need is always available from wherever you are on the planet.  You don’t need your PC or Laptop anymore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be games, movies or any software.  And with the huge Mobile market, you’re about to have any of your services right there in your pocket. Read more at www.gamasutra.com 

Bling's system, you may remember, worked by attaching an NFC-enabled sticker on the back of phones. Users could then tap the phone onto specialized hardware (the Blinger) at the register and Bling could debit the user's PayPal account to pay the merchant.

Unless you have a Sprint Nexus S 4G on Sprint, you'll be attaching an RFID tag onto the back of your phone if you want to try out Google Wallet this summer. Google Wallet is an Android app, so presumably even though the RFID hardware is a sticker, the system won't work on any non-Android phones. Even so, Google should be applauded for getting its program rolling without having to wait on the handset makers.

Ryan Kim on GigaOm has a good write-up detailing Google's partners in the effort and the likely gains to NFC as the dominant mobile payment platform.

We are in the early stages of the Internet of Things, the much anticipated era when all manner of devices can talk to each other and to intermediary services. But for this era to achieve its full potential, operators must fundamentally change the way they build and run clouds. Why? Machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions are far less failure tolerant than machine-to-human interactions. Yes, it sucks when your Netflix subscription goes dark in a big cloud outage, and it’s bad when your cloud provider loses user data. But its far worse when a fleet of trucks can no longer report their whereabouts to a central control system designed to regulate how long drivers can stay on the road without resting or all the lights in your building turn out and the HVAC system dies on a hot day because of a cloud outage.

The current cloud infrastructure could crumble under the data weight In the very near future, everything from banks of elevators to cell phones to city buses will either be subject to IP-connected control systems or use IP networks to report back critical information. IP addressability will become nearly ubiquitous. The sheer volume of data flowing through IP networks will mushroom. In a dedicated or co-located hardware world, that increase would result in prohibitively expensive hardware requirements. Thus, the cloud becomes the only viable option to affordably connect, track and manage the new Internet of Things.

That is critical, in turn, to mitigate growing latency risks for mobile connectivity resulting from the wild proliferation of IP enabled devices on mobile networks coming in the new era of the Internet of Things.

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

Intuit wants to give its customers a glimpse of the future of mobile payments through an adaptation of its GoPayment service that eliminates the need for credit cards. Tapping into the growing field of NFC (near-field communication) technology, Intuit's reimagined GoPayment service would let consumers wirelessly pay for items on the go through just a touch of an NFC-enabled cell phone. With the necessary NFC hardware and credit card information stored on a mobile phone, consumers could leave their money and credit cards at home and use their phones to buy items and services at stores, restaurants, and other retail outlets. Retailers themselves would be able to send certain information back to the consumer's phone, including receipts, coupons, and loyalty programs.

1. Just Gimme My Mobile Wallet, Man There are a lot of deviations of a mobile wallet, and everyone does it differently. Essentially, the mobile wallet is exactly what it sounds like: A service that stores everything you would normally put in a physical wallet, including debit and credit cards, coupons and loyalty cards, in a mobile wallet. Not all wallets store data on the phone itself; SCVNGR's LevelUp and PayPal, for example, store data in the cloud. Your mobile wallet arrives empty, just like an wallet. You decide what goes in it. Google's mobile wallet works off of an NFC chip called the Secure Element, which acts like a secure wallet and differentiates this product from being just an app. It's also separate from the phone's main operating system and hardware.

Google launched its Wallet program in late May. The official launch (yes, a beta) happened in September. Google chose MasterCard as its official partner in the realm of mobile payments using near-field communications (NFC). At the time of launch, Nexus S 4G on Sprint with Citibank and payment network MasterCard was the only phone compatible with Google Wallet. The industry is preparing for Wallet, but the consumer side isn't quite there yet. In September, however, Visa also signed a licensing deal to include credit and debit cards in Google's Wallet program. MasterCard's has begun its shift toward technology innovator thanks to its new partnership and investment with mFoundry. This solidifies MasterCard's commitment to the field of mobile payments. PayPal has a slightly different vision for its mobile wallet. With a wallet in the cloud, consumers can select a payment instrument (credit card, debit card, bank account) and then use any Internet-connected device to enable that purchase. Really, PayPal wants to be technology agnostic, meaning that its mobile wallet should work on any device regardless of the operating system. In mid-November, PayPal unleashed its mobile wallet that features a card and a smartphone app that lets consumers store credit cards, gift cards, frequent flier miles and more. Speaking of mobile wallets, whatever happened to Apple's iWallet? NFC never did come to the iPhone4S.

2. Where NFCs Will Go, Few Do Know NFC (near field communication) enables the exchange of data between devices (typically, mobile devices) that are in close proximity to each other. NFC devices are used for more than just payments, though - they can be the link between real world actions and consumer-facing or back office systems. While card issuers love NFC options, they would force payment processors to radically redesign. Are consumers ready to trade in the swipe of a credit card for the tap of an NFC-enabled device? NFC may never be widely used as a form of payments, writes RWW mobile expert Dan Rowinski. While the technology around NFC is ready and being widely adapted within the industry, the actual infrastructure is not there yet. But the NFC hype is here. Since Google's Beta Wallet launch in September, it has partnered with Mastercard, CitiBank, Sprint, FirstData, Verifone, VivoTech (NFC partner), Hypercom, Igenico and NXP (NFC partner). On the opposing end, NFC mobile payment solution ISIS is poised to attack Google's Wallet; it recently partnered with Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T.

Today we’re announcing our new open-source wearable electronics platform and series of accessories. We rarely announce something until it’s shipping to customers, but you’ll see a lot of these out in the world from our testers as they show off some projects – so we wanted to post about this now.

For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit’s community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers. After months of planning, designing and working with partners around the world for the best materials and accessories, we can share what we’re up to. The hardware is now in the hands of our staff and testers!

We call it the FLORA.

The so-called digital wallet made important strides in 2011, sometimes eliminating the logistical need for paper vouchers, mobile apps, QR codes, and even cell phones.

At times this transition seems to be sneaking up on us. Earlier this month, thousands of merchants nationwide didn't know they had gained foot traffic and sales thanks to American Express and Foursquare. Amex rewarded consumers who synced their credit cards with their Foursquare accounts with $10 back if they spent the same at local businesses after checking in with the geo-social app. That effort followed up a successful post-Black Friday stint dubbed "Small Business Saturday," when Amex users checking in on Foursquare could get a $25 credit if they spent $25 with a local merchant.

Jake Furst, a business development director at New York-based Foursquare, said there was little to no organizational outreach to local businesses. "The merchants didn't necessarily know what was happening as we drove customers to their locations," he explained. "Small Business Saturday was a huge success. We got a ton of interest from Foursquare users and Amex card holders that didn't know about Foursquare yet."

The first of these changes is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) computing. BYOD is a much better term than “consumerization” and really portrays the meaning that many of us are buying smart phones, tablets or laptops to use them on a work network. The tension this creates is predictable.

In 2012 and beyond, we’re going to see more and more different devices coming into the workplace.

If you use PayPass, Tap & Go, or other contactless credit cards, that’s NFC. In fact, NFC hardware already is appearing in smart phones and tablets. There are relatively few devices with NFC today, but there will be more in 2012.

Intuit is announcing major news this evening around its mobile credit card swiping device and Square-competitor GoPayment reader. Intuit is one of the first major U.S. mobile payments readers to go international, with a launch in Canada. And Intuit is debuting a newly, redesigned sleek version of its reader.

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and similar to Square’s device, the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).

The GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee. And Intuit recently started allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account.

Bao network technology companies yesterday announced the launch of ultrasonic mobile payments-”bat”, consumers only need the phone close to the payment terminal, you can complete the identity verification, payment and settlement. 　　It is understood that the “bat” is based on ultrasonic wireless technology, allowing electronic device between a non-contact interact point to point data (10cm) to enable mobile payments and near field service more online business solutions. 　　With existing mobile payments in different ways is, today, most mobile phones through text messages, picture (QR) to implement a pay, this payment is a one-time; if you are on a mobile phone RF technology implementation is similar to the bus card payment, and hardware modification to the mobile phone. “Bats” is used, only requires the user to download an ultrasonic software can be. 　　According to the company General Manager Tan Xinglie introduction, this technique may be more in the future for restaurants, cafes, and needed on-site consumption places, such as where the user through the online booking, get coupon, which acts as the identity verification and payment tools; another application area is the logistics industry, such as express delivery, user to mobile payments. (Reporters Zhang Yi)

If it were up to Jumio, we’re all going to be ‘netswiping’ to purchase books, clothes, travel, FarmVille crops and whatnot online in a couple of years. The startup has been extensively testing its digital payments service in private beta mode since last year, when Jajah founder Daniel Mattes started teasing whatever they were building.

The startup has since assembled an impressive advisory board, including former Google exec Zain Khan, former Amazon exec Mark Britto and Maarten Linthorst, CEO of CSI Communication Systems. And we recently learned that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and other investors pumped $6.5 million into the startup.

Today, Jumio is finally unveiling Netswipe, a technology solution that enables e-commerce site owners and Internet retailers to process online and mobile payments by having customers ‘swipe’ their credit cards using virtually any webcam. Think of it as Square for the Web, without the need to purchase and install additional hardware. Watch the video below to see how it works, in a nutshell.