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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.

The first mobile phone to work with the new Nokia NFC is the Nokia 3220 (pictured), a tri-band camera phone that is available in two versions: a GSM 900/1800/1900 primarily for the European and Asian markets, and a GSM 850/1800/1900 primarily for the Americas. The Nokia NFC shell is a functional cover developed for the Nokia 3220 phone. The Nokia NFC shell with four tags will be available during the first quarter of 2005 in Europe, and during the second quarter 2005 in the Americas and Asia.

The technology is predicted to generate high revenues, explained Howard Wilcox​, senior analyst at Juniper Research.

"NFC-based services in North America will account for nearly $47bn, or 41 per cent of the total, by 2016. The Far East and China ($31bn or 27 per cent) and Western Europe ($23bn or 20 per cent) will follow," he said.

However, Wilcox warned that there are still significant infrastructure challenges, and institutions including banks and merchants will need to have sufficient point-of-sale readers installed.

The Google Nexus S was the first smartphone to ship with NFC technology, but the hardware has seen limited use in the UK so far.

Google is to start trialling NFC services in US this summer, and O2 is expected to roll out a mobile wallet application in the UK this year.

RIM has also backed the technology, and its forthcoming high-end devices, including the BlackBerry Bold Touch, are expected to ship with NFC.

HTC, meanwhile, has taken a more cautious approach, stating that it will incorporate the technology once there is established demand.

The iPhone 5 was tipped to feature contactless payment, but the latest reports suggest that Apple will omit NFC from its fifth-generation iPhone.

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.

Contact-less payments are just one of the many uses for NFC, which is one of the most-talked-about technologies of the last year. Some other use cases include exchanging contact information, mobile gaming and unlocking doors, to name a few. Still, mobile payments are perhaps the most anticipated of its future uses, as everybody from banks and credit card companies to Google and smaller tech startups have been preparing solutions in this space.

New York City's transit system started its own pilot program for mobile payments last year, which lets riders pay for trips with their iPhones. Since the iPhone does not yet support NFC natively, the devices need to be housed in a special casing in order to work with New York's subway, rail, bus and taxi systems.

With NFC terminals and providers will working hard to finalise their offerings for the next wave of NFC-enabled smartphones, Starbucks has stolen a march on other retailers with its mobile coupons. Despite a love for queuing, we predict this app will reduce coffee shop lines and hasten the injection of caffeine into commuters all over the UK.

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GoPayment hardware reader and payments apps can now be used by Canadian small businesses and entrepreneurs as a way to accept credit card payments on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch device. Intuit says that GoPayment for Canada and the new GoPayment card reader will both be available in early 2012.

The most physically noticeable aspects of Intuit’s newly designed reader is its color and shape. The reader is now black (compared to its older white sibling, pictured in this post), and cylinder-shaped, creating a sleeker, smaller look. The reader has been designed to feature a silicone sleeve that conforms to the phone or tablet to provide stability support to keep the reader from moving or spinning when swiping a card.

Intuit says that without the stability, the readers spin on the audio jack, causing misreads of the credit card and requiring the user to need to hold the product in place while swiping. Intuit has also improved the swipe channel of the device to read cards accurately the first time by putting it on an angle, beveling it and making it longer.

Chris Hylen, vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Payment Solutions division, says of the news today, “This is part of our strategy to offer GoPayment internationally and to innovate in ways that make it easier for our customers, in all markets, to never miss a sale.”

For Intuit, being the first to market in Canada is a big win for the mobile payments device. Navigating international markets is tricky for mobile payments companies because each country has different cards and payments infrastructure. We know Square also has ambitions of international expansion in 2012.

As for the native competitors in Canada, Kudos is a mobile card reader that is currently available in the country. VerFone’s PayWare mobile reader has also been available in Canada for some time. But considering the massive growth both Intuit and Square have seen among small businesses, the readers should see traction outside of the U.S.

The new question is: if your house is on fire what do you grab, your wallet or your phone?

I bet the answer is an overwhelming "phone", since we do almost everything with our mobile devices and very soon we won't be needing a wallet.

Our vision at Seconds is to make it easier for merchants and customers to interact and transact.  This is no more apparent than when looking at our latest innovations on the mobile payment front: Pay by Text.

Okay, here's a great one.... how about anything to do with hospitality?  Already, when you check in to a hotel they ask for your contact information, namely a cell phone number.  By running on the Seconds platform the can now open a quick and easy channel for you to text and pay for room service, any and all products... not to mention your room.  Or what about on a Vegas Casino floor....

Here's how it works: Once a mobile user sets up a Seconds account and attaches a payment card, they now can simply pay for the desired product with a one word text to the merchant's Seconds number, in this case it would be the word "Sandwich".  The resulting text a few seconds later will inform the user they indeed have been successfully charged X amount.  Done.

We are currently one month into a pilot program with a customer testing the functionality and perfecting the process.   Each week we are seeing more and more mobile transactions through Pay by Text, and if things keep going the way they are now this could become the default payment method outside simple food offerings.

Roll with me for a moment.  Imagine going to a movie and rather than waiting in line for the teller to give you a ticket you just simply text "Mission Impossible 4" to the box office and the next thing you know you have paid for the movie and are sent the secret code to enter via text.

Or how about the next time to your favorite band is in town.... do we really have to deal with the whole Ticketmaster ordeal?  Why can't I send a text to the concert organizer with a simple "Said Band Name" and pay for the price of admission.

Important Note: This is not carrier billing, where you place the transaction onto your cell phone bill.  Seconds is completely separate from the carrier and a stand alone mobile payment system.

So, what about NFC? The problem with NFC technology is you actually have to be in physical proximity for the transaction to work.  The whole point of "Near Field Communication" is touching or swiping your device on a reader which will result in a transaction.  But what happens if I want to pay for something when I am not actually at the specific location or can't get within a few inches of the reader?  What if it's ecommerce, which will become more prevalent as time goes on?  Although it might have its place, it looks as if NFC  underwhelms and under-delivers.

That is why we are very excited about our Pay by Text technology, we see a whole new world of payments when you disassociate proximity with transaction.  It's going well right now and the future is looking very bright for Seconds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

he company said it is now on pace to do $3 billion in mobile payments this year though much of that is person-to-person transfers using the PayPal app, which don’t yield much revenue for PayPal. Users do not have to pay a transaction fee when payments pull from bank accounts or an existing PayPal balance.

In many ways, this is similar to personal transfers PayPal has previously enabled through its mobile app using Bump Technologies. Users are able to send money back and forth by bumping their phones together, a solution that doesn’t rely on NFC. It’s unclear how much of that may have happened through bump payments, so I don’t know how significant person-to-person NFC payments will be. It’s nice to be able to make a payment to someone by just touching phones but, again, it’s not like many PayPal users don’t have that ability now.

Shimone Samuel, Product Experience Manager for PayPal Mobile, however, said the NFC solution has fewer steps than bump payments and can be activated even when only one person has launched their widget. Bump payments require both people to have their PayPal mobile app open. He said PayPal turned to NFC because it simplifies P2P payments.

“What I’m looking for is what is simplest and easiest for customers and NFC is the simplest way to request money,” he said.

The bigger opportunity is in enabling real-world payments as retail and local merchants, something PayPal is still set to unveil later this year. That will be a much bigger deal because it will signal how PayPal will counter moves by Google and its NFC payments initiative, as well as other challengers like Square and the carrier consortium, Isis project. Samuel declined to comment on how PayPal will use NFC specifically at point of sale but he said the company takes every opportunity to learn from its products.

PayPal needs to figure out how to tap that market for offline purchases, which is much bigger than than pure online transactions where it’s excelled. So it’s nice that PayPal has enabled some P2P NFC payments, and it’s showing that it’s getting up to speed on NFC. But we’re still waiting to see the real fireworks.

No bank card is needed and the customer is emailed a receipt for the goods.

A blog post from eBay said the system also works using a plastic card issued by PayPal that works like a credit card.

PayPal’s mobile payment system is an interesting experiment, but one that is likely to be overshadowed by NFC technology.

Mobile phone companies and banks are pushing hard to make contactless payments the norm. Last week, Visa certified smartphones from LG, Samsung and RIM as safe to use its NFC payment system.

NFC is far simpler and quicker than PayPal’s system as you simply need to touch your card on the reader without entering any codes.

That said, NFC payments have a limit of £15 to £20 so there is potential for a mobile payment system for more expensive items.

Whether PayPal can take advantage of that market is unclear. Issuing customers who already own a Visa card with an NFC-enabled credit card is a relatively simple operation, but persuading people to fundamentally alter the way people they use PayPal by taking it offline is a much harder sell.

Also, PayPal has 106m active accounts, but there are more than 1bn Visa cardholders worldwide.

PayPal also announced that mobile payment volume reached $4bn in 2011, more than five times the volume in 2010.

Its revenue increase 28% year-on-year, and net total payment volume grew 24% to $33.4bn in Q4 compared to the same period the year before.

eBay achieved revenue of $3.4bn in Q4 2011, a 35% increase on the same period in 2010.

For the full year revenue increased 27% to $11.7bn.

Square, one of the most recognisable, is a small, square dongle that plugs into the headphone jack on an iOS or Android device, and lets the merchant swipe a customer's magnetic stripe card, converting their account data to an audio signal.

The corresponding app software encrypts it and sends it to Square's servers, which communicate with the card-processing companies to complete a transaction. The customer signs their name with a dash of their finger on the touchscreen, and they're able to have a receipt sent to them over email or SMS text message.

The main advantage to using the headphone jack rather than the iPhone's 30-pin dock connector is that the dock connector is only on iOS devices, while every mobile has a headphone jack. This meant Square could roll out its system to Android by simply writing compatible software.

But you won't see Square - or its many competitors, including the GoPayment, Intuit Credit Card Reader, Mophie Marketplace, VeriFone's PAYware Mobile, the MagTek iDynamo and others - in use at your local pub, since the UK, as well as all of Europe and most of Asia, has moved to using Chip and PIN.

Chip and PIN (also called EMV for Europay, MasterCard, Visa) is more secure, since magnetic stripes are more easily read and cloned by black-market devices, and signatures can be forged. The chips in these cards are much more difficult to clone, and even if a card is lost or stolen, it can't be used without the matching PIN. It's been standard in the UK since 2004, but it isn't widespread in the USA, with both banks and merchants reluctant to invest in the new hardware required.

But one iPhone-based card reader does support Chip and PIN transactions: the iZettle, a free EMV chip card reader with accompanying app that connects to an iPhone or iPad's 30-pin dock connector.

New company Card.io is even offering mobile developers a new way to accept card payments within their apps without needing a scanner at all. Users take a photo of their card and the account number is read and captured by the software.

In "Thoughts on Flash", an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short."New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."