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extensive field trials have to be conducted to make sure phones with NFC (near-field communications) technology work properly with merchant terminals and back-end payment-processing systems before any of this can hit the mainstream.

somebody needs to convince the average consumer why paying with their phone is easier, safer or more rewarding than pulling out cash or a credit card.

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.

“Cellular wasn’t that popular a year and a half ago,” says Killian, “but that’s changed a lot with utilities and water/wastewater, in particular. Cellular technology is enabling users to monitor things that weren’t easily monitored in the past. On the wired side of things, I’ve heard of water districts wanting to run cable networks because Comcast can drop in broadband. So now they want hardened routers so they can run wired or wireless—and this is from guys who just recently were using dial-up 9600-baud modems. But with the access they now have to 3G, they’re getting onboard with what they can do with it. New technologies tend to force the use of better networking technologies.”

peer run or top down

you don't need much technology or money to implement a badging system--or, at least, that is another of the goals of this Competition.

Individuals can earn badges from multiple organizations, some certifying human skills such as collaboration or even helpfulness, that mean as much to future employers as skills and experience and credentials from traditional institutions.   And an individual can choose to reveal or not reveal an e-portfolio.  YOU own your portfolio.

inspire learning and collaboration, and so ownership is key.

The point is to thing big, think new, think change. 

If you contribute, you can have a record of that contribution.   That’s the beauty of digital badge systems or eportfolios such as Top Coders where you can actually click on the badge and see all the specific contributions or skills of a person that were recognized by peers in the form of a badge.

Badging helps one developer to know how much they can trust some unknown contributor and then, if the project goes well, one participant in the virtual team can recognize the skills, collaborative attributes, and other technical as well as social collaborative skills of another.

Another inspiring aspect of open badges for lifelong learning:  they recognize achievement and contribution, not reputation or credentials. 

Businesses have successfully applied gamification principles to achieving goals like reducing travel expenses (Google) and improving cashier checkout performance (Target). The Google example is interesting because it "actually got people talking about how to save money on travel," whereas the more traditional corporate water cooler conversation would be about how to cheat the system, Zimmerman said.

"Gamification by Design" largely focuses on the psychology of engagement and ways it can be applied to business applications.

Gamifying an application doesn't necessarily mean adding fancy graphics and sound effects, but often it does mean keeping score and letting "players" see how they rank on a leader board--the equivalent of the high scores screen on a video game. In a business context, that might mean letting salespeople see how they rank and how close they are to achieving a goal or securing a bonus as a way of getting the competitive juices flowing.

On the other hand, in a traditional loyalty program you might award one point for every dollar a user spends. In a gamified system, you might want to instead provide variable, unpredictable reinforcement where participants can hit the jackpot. This is the design principle that keeps slot machine players glued to their chairs, even though they ought to know the house always wins.

Indeed, Stump says only one thing is 100 percent certain when it comes to the cloud: "You always have to architect your systems under an assumption of failure."

“The point system has dramatically improved engagement + contribution on Moz. We’ve grown community content 200%+ in the past 24 months.”

Step 1: You need points.

But points are meaningless without a leader board.

Step 2: You need a leaderboard to get people’s competitive spirit out and allow them to compare and be compared against others.

Salesforce does the same with Nitro by gamifying real life. Sales guys get stats to see what they’re doing well, awards them with points and badges but it also lets them compare to others.

We can also use game mechanics to help people learn how to use our products – Richard mentions Ribbon Hero 2 where clippy teaches you how to use Microsoft Office products. Rather than having him jump up when it thinks you need help (as was the case back in the day) you have challenges to help clippy fix his CV, etc. Your userbase is having fun and you’re helping them learn about your product.

Encourage users to hand over data - it makes us smarter marketers.

Who does this? LinkedIn with the goals and “profile completeness” – SEOmoz does the same thing.

Badges?

Rich doesn’t know that Foursquare should work but the beauty of it is that does. Rich thinks this has to do with velocity and the fact that it makes quite boring stuff exciting and PR worthy – not knowing when a reward is coming and the fact that they come almost at random is what Rich feels makes this work.

Virtual Currency/Goods

If you have a crappy product it really doesn’t matter.

What could we do/take away from this?

Gamification for Good – IMOK, a checkin platform for kids. Connected just from one phone to the other and checking in lets the parent know they’re ok.

Reward with Status- top contributors in Webmaster forums will get flown out to Google and learn all sorts of things.

Create signups/sales with loss aversion

Help people drive their business

Generate Reviews- badge and point system for heavy users?

Increase signups

Reward for Gifting

Reward for Uplaoding Content

Generate links

Increase social shares

Motivate internally to do the same - get your inhouse team to answer FAQ type questions and reward them for their interaction and points.

San Francisco announced earlier this week it was partnering with PayByPhone to enable 30,000 parking meters with NFC support. 

Intel and MasterCard have teamed up to enable future Intel-powered laptops to work with PayPass enabled MasterCard credit cards.

Personal contact and content sharing has become one of the emerging uses for NFC.

Access card maker HID Global announced a trial with Arizona State University in September in which students were provided NFC-enabled phones, enabling them to gain physical access to buildings.

The Museum of London and its sister institution, the Museum of London Docklands launched a project in August that allows visitors to tap their NFC-enabled phone at exhibits and gain more information, buy tickets to future exhibits or check in, follow or “like” the museums on social services.

T-Mobile partnered with Meridian Health and iMPak Health in October on a new SleepTrak sleep monitoring system, a wearable device with an NFC-equipped card.

Many of these things can be done through QR codes, bumping, Bluetooth or other methods, but NFC provides a very simple and often elegant way to get through the process.

We’re still very early in the NFC game and the phones are just now trickling out in the U.S. But there’s going to be a much bigger flow of NFC-equipped phones starting next year. It’ll be these broader applications that might convince users that the technology has merit.

For more information about YaCy, see here.

Home electronics makers themselves look well placed. Samsung, LG (SEO: 066570), Panasonic and their ilk, including Sony, are already preferring to ship their own smart TV interfaces with their TVs. Samsung TV already has almost 1,000 apps for its Smart TV system.

To summarise - in six months’ time, Android will be trumping iOS for apps and will be the dominant smart TV platform, Schmidt suggested.

Purpose and Intent Much hype surrounds the topic of gamification. Often seen as a technique to add engagement to existing tasks, projects, marketing campaigns, and initiatives, the term gamification unfortunately lacks the seriousness it deserves. This report seeks to change the point of view and demonstrate where gamification plays a role in the enterprise. More importantly, executives will discover how gamification can drive behavior and outcomes through both monetary and non-monetary incentives in enterprise class settings.

Some highlights of the report include: Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise The three pillars of enterprise gamification The six elements of sustainable engagement Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)

Designing your gamification models?  What enterprise business processes will you gamify first? next?   Ready to turbo charge your next generation customer experience?  Have you tested out iActionable, CrowdTwist or the 3B’s (i.e. Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball?  Ready to here how you can apply the white arts of the 7 Virtues to work?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

The FLORA has built-in USB support. Built in USB means you plug it in to program it, it just shows up. No additional purchases are needed! Works with Mac, Windows, Linux, any USB cable works great. Currently the PCB comes with a mini B connector but future versions may change to microUSB. Either will work great. The FLORA has USB HID support, so it can act like a mouse, keyboard, MIDI, etc. to attach directly to cellphones. Our iPhone/iPad/Android app coming soon. The FLORA’s modules include: Bluetooth, GPS, 3-axis accelerometer, compass module, flex sensor, piezo, IR LED, push button, embroidered + capacitive keypad, OLED and more. The FLORA has a small but easy to use onboard reset button to reboot the system.

The FLORA is fabric friendly. The FLORA does not use FTDI headers (built in USB support) headers of any kind sticking out can grab and tear fabric. The FLORA has an onboard 3.3v 100mA regulator with protection schottky diode and USB fuse so that power is consistent and can power common 3.3v modules and sensors.

The FLORA has onboard polarized 2 JST battery connector with protection schottky diode for use with external battery packs from 3.5v to 16v DC in. Can be used with LiIon/LiPoly, LiFe, alkaline or rechargeable NiMh/NiCad batteries of any size.

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.