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If PayPal tracks the data on peer-to-peer for trends (location, time of day, how much is being transferred, how far away are they) then the NFC rollout could be the first steps to tracking where, when and how to implement a possible NFC solution for smartphones.

We can imagine a dozen scenarios where independent merchants could use NFC payments. It comes back down to our well-worn farmer's market scenario - a farmer could use a NFC phone to accept PayPal payments from other PayPal Android users with NFC. While that seems cool, think of the limiting factors - both parties need NFC, Android, PayPal and a desire to do business. Finding two matching parties with those particular attributes right now is a niche within a niche.

The app also includes traditional and social sharing capabilities. You can the send ecards as well as holiday offers from Starbucks, among other things.

The object, says Alexandra Wheeler, vp-global digital marketing for Starbucks, is to “surprise and delight” customers during the holiday season.

Although Starbucks experimented with an AR app years ago in an ad, Wheeler says this is the first major AR push by the company. The effort follows some other recent AR programs from marketers including an app from Nivea featuring Rihanna and an Amazon app that lets you point your phone at objects and then buy them.

Cup Magic, created by Blast Radius, caps off a year of successful mobile implementations by Starbucks. The brand launched a mobile payment app in January that has been used in more than 20 million transactions and a QR code program designed, like Starbucks Cup Magic, to enhance the in-store brand experience.

Consumers use the service to check in to locations as well as to share tips, photos and comments. The system also automatically sends this information to a number of social networking platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook as well as local networks, so that friends and followers are notified whenever a Jiepang user checks in to a particular merchant.

Jiepang provides its fast growing network of merchant partners with a self-service platform they can use to provide offers to Jiepang users who check in to their locations, Leo Lee, Jiepang's marketing and business development manager in Hong Kong, has told NFC World.

The platform allows merchants to both choose the type of offer they wish to provide and set their offers so that rewards are triggered according to the kind of user actions they want to see. A reward can be offered, for example, each time a user checks in or only when they have checked in, say, three times during a set period of time.

Jiepang doesn't charge merchants for using the platform, and it doesn't plan to change this in the future, Lee added. The company's revenues, instead, come from partnerships Jiepang has established with brands such as Starbucks, McDonald's, Nike, Louis Vuitton and nearly 300 others. These enable the brands to use Jiepang "to reach, engage, and learn about their customers in both the offline and online worlds."

NFC offers a number of advantages over GPS to both users and merchants, Lee told NFC World. "NFC is a lot easier and convenient" for users, he says, and merchant partners can be sure that, when a user checks in, they really are present at their store. "GPS is not 100% accurate, you can be a few streets away," explains Lee.

The new service means that NFC phone users will be able to simply touch their phone to a window sticker in order to check in to a location and register their eligibility for a reward. Then, once they have fulfilled the criteria for a given reward, a mobile coupon for that merchant will be delivered to their phone. Jiepang users then simply show the coupon to the merchant in order to redeem it. Once accepted, the merchant voids the coupon by pressing an on-screen 'void' button on the customers' phone.

"NFC has a lot of possibilities for mobile commerce," says Lee. "We want to help small, medium and local merchants to use our platforms."