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“I thought someone would be able to change the way people shop, but I didn’t think it would be a startup because this will happen quickly and you also need brands that people trust. And PayPal is one of them. It takes the combination of a trusted payment company and the cooperation with great brands that people trust to change how people shop. I thought I would be able to convince all the major retailers all around the world because I have had  relationships with them for 30 years,” Kingsborough said.

Even with the departure of PayPal’s president Scott Thompson, who is now Yahoo’s new CEO, PayPal hasn’t missed a beat and is executing on its vision, Kingsborough said.

Solving consumer and merchants needs Kingsborough came in and honed the in-store payment initiative, which was underway well before Kingborough arrived. He focused on appealing first to consumers and making it simple for them to grasp, before ensuring the merchants could be able to understand the value of the system. Then he went about getting the cooperation of merchants, criss-crossing the country to call upon retailers and payment infrastructure companies to get them on board. Along the way, he helped PayPal pick up necessary components like location-based service WHERE, whose CEO Walt Doyle was personally persuaded to sell by Kingsborough. The plan is now to start rolling out the payment system in the second quarter though the first U.S. trials have already begun with Home Depot.

Kingsborough said he was drawn to PayPal’s approach to payments because it was aimed at solving deep consumer and merchant needs. He said competitors who focus on near field communication and other alternative payment systems are too often preoccupied with the capabilities of their technology, but they’re not addressing the pressing needs of users.

“Competitors think they’ll solve how easy it is to pay at retail, but that’s not a consumer problem. Their problem is how do they become masters of shopping and use their money smartly and organize their efforts to shop online, in-store and on mobile,” said Kingsborough. “We have a holistic approach. We ask the consumers [what they] want to do. They want to save money, save time and feel important in stores.”

NFC: a feature, not a solution That’s partly why he thinks NFC in particular isn’t ready for prime time. He said it’s going to take a while for it to proliferate in stores and on handsets. But more fundamentally, it doesn’t make consumer’s lives better.

“Do I think NFC will work someday? Maybe. But to me, NFC is a feature, not a solution that solves problems. If your strategy is NFC today, you need a new strategy,” Kingsborough.

Google and Isis, the carrier consortium including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, are pushing hard on NFC and are angling to become the go-to mobile wallet for users, who will be able to pay at point-of-sale terminals with a tap of their phone. Many of the pieces for NFC fell into place for the technology in 2011, though there are still many hurdles ahead toward a broad rollout (subscription required) and mass consumer adoption.

PayPal’s approach bypasses many of the hardware constraints of NFC and pushes a two-pronged approach to in-store payments. Users can either use a PayPal Access card connected to their account, or more intriguingly, enter their phone number and PIN at a POS terminal and access their PayPal account. PayPal takes a user’s identification and turns it into a token, which is authenticated in the cloud, so no actual credit card numbers or financial data travels back and forth.

What it takes to win Kingsborough said the companies that win will be comprehensive and ubiquitous, allowing consumers to conduct transactions wherever they want to. By going with a software-based approach, PayPal can address about 8.2 million of the 10 million point of sale terminals with its payment system, without forcing retailers to buy new hardware. Then it’s up to PayPal to convince retailers to jump on board. It’s doing some critical work by signing deals with payment infrastructure companies like AJB Software Designs, which helps connect the point of sale terminals at many tier-one retailers to payment processors and financial institutions. Merchants that use AJB will have an easy path in enabling PayPal payments in store. PayPal is talking to other point of sale companies such as Verifone.

Merchants won’t just be getting a potentially cheaper alternative to credit cards. In PayPal’s vision, they’ll also be getting a way to push out offers to consumers, both in-store and nearby. Kingsborough said PayPal is working through its mobile app to address a variety of needs of merchants, from helping them manage online, mobile and in-store sales to improving loyalty and offering targeted discounts to users. Those additional tools will be rolled out over time in the next year or two. Google has outlined early plans to also provide coupons and offers to consumers using Google Offers in conjunction with Google Wallet.

Providing value But the other important winning determinant will be providing valuable, relevant and easy-to-use services to consumers, becoming the one mobile wallet they turn to, said Kingsborough. He said using tools like WHERE’s targeting and location technology will allow merchants to not just push out deals but deliver very context-aware content. For example, he said a clothes retailers might be able to message a nearby customer, letting them know they’ll earn $5 in their PayPal account that day if they buy jeans that they’ve purchased in the past. And, with the right permissions, the merchant may also be able to know the customer is with two friends and offer a group discount.

“It’s not just the capabilities of location-based services or understanding what a person just did; but it’s about being highly relevant to the person using the services,” Kingsborough said

He said in the battle to become the preferred digital wallet, PayPal will be the simplest for people to use, allowing people to link their credit, debit and loyalty cards, even potentially their drivers license. Just as people stick primarily to one browser, he said consumers will want to rely on primarily one wallet and he believes that PayPal will be that provider.

“Ours to lose” Kingsborough said it’s the whole offering that makes PayPal’s approach a winner. It’s a trusted name with more than 100 million users worldwide and it’s focused on providing value to both consumers and merchants with an easy path to ubiquity. “This is ours to lose,” he said. “I’m very confident about that. Otherwise, I’d be golfing right now in Hawaii.”

With the Lianlian Group, AmEx gets access to a company that has partnered with 3 of the largest carriers in China, and served one-third of all Chinese mobile users through payments network infrastructure, he explains. So a Chinese consumer who was paying cash to get minutes can now load the Serve-powered Lianlian digital wallet and have the choice of digital commerce, paying bills via their mobile wallet, send peer-to-peer payments, buying more minutes and ringtones and more, says Schulman.

Another area where we’ll see Serve expand is on data. As Harshul Sanghi, American Express’ VP of Enterprise Growth Group, told us recently, the personalized experience is going to be key in providing the digital wallet that consumers flock to. Intent data, structured data and unstructured data will all play a part of delivering a personalized payments experience for Serve.

Founded in 2004, Lianlian Group has served approximately 300 million mobile phone accounts. It operates a network of over 300,000 small business agents across China where customers can buy additional top up minutes on their mobile phones. A portion of that network also allows customers to purchase airline tickets, video gaming credits and utility bills.

Amex has entered into an operating agreement with Lianlian Group which will allow Lianlian to license and use Serve in products and services it develops for its consumer and business customers in China. The Serve platform will help power a new Lianlian Group digital wallet that consumers can use to top up mobile phone minutes, pay bills and purchase products or services online.

For background, Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card. AmEx has landed a number of lucrative carrier partner deals for Serve in the U.S. but this is the first step towards expanding Serve’s technology into one of the fastest growing consumer markets in the world.

With the mobile penetration in China, it’s no surprise that AmEx chose the market as its first global opportunity to expand Serve. AliPay is also playing in the space.

In terms of financial companies, American Express has been at the forefront of trying to expand their mobile and digital offerings beyond the credit card business. Besides carrier partnerships for Serve, AmEx has announced a number of recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. The company has also been acquiring payments technologies and will be doing more investing in the space with a new $100 million fund.

2012 will be the year of "NFC training wheels."

NFC smartphones will outnumber deployment targets.

Carriers will deploy NFC faster than consortiums.

Nayar says the developers involved actually reached out to PayPal to see if the integration would make sense. He adds that over the next few months PayPal will be ‘many’ different proximity-based payments technologies (including NFC) and exploring numerous partnership opportunities.

“PayPal isn’t betting the farm on NFC,” he explains. But he says that the payments giant is interested in using the technology as one option for in-store payments. As we’ve reported in the past, PayPal is dabbling in NFC but still believes mass adoption is years away.

solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said

Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

For higher credit card processing volume (recommended for more than a $1,000 per month), Intuit is continuing to charge a $12.95 monthly fee but has dropped the set transaction charge of $0.30. The per transaction percentage remains at 1.7 percent for cards swiped; and 2.7 percent for key entered.

Mobile payments is a competitive space and it’s hard not to notice some of the attention Square has been getting from both Visa and Apple. Because of this, companies like Intuit have to up the ante to remain competitive and attract businesses. For example, Intuit recently extended the offer of a free version of its GoPayment reader indefinitely. Square’s readers have been free for some time now.

Chris Hylen, VP and general manager of Intuit Payment Solutions said this explaining this change in pricing: We started simplifying GoPayment pricing back in January when we eliminated the monthly fee. Now we’re removing transaction fees. As we continue to evaluate the market and talk with customers, we believe that making our pricing even more affordable is the best way to give more people an easy way to process credit cards on their mobile devices.

While Square is growing fast, as more and more businesses are looking for innovative, inexpensive and painless ways to accept credit cards, Intuit’s reader does offer a compelling product. The company reports that it has seen a nearly 700% increase in the number of people signing up for GoPayment each week compared to the beginning of the year (driven in large part its free swiper offering). Intuit declined to reveal exactly how many users are signing up per day vs. a year ago.

And GoPayment users are  processing in excess of $15 million a week using GoPayment and related services. These services also include payments from the Web and through QuickBooks using a GoPayment merchant account, so it’s unclear how much of that $15 million is coming through the readers themselves. Intuit says GoPayment users have processed more than $3 million in a single day over the past month as well.

For basis of comparison, Square just revealed that it is processing $2 million in transactions per day and $66 million for the first quarter, but COO Keith Rabois says forecasts that this number will triple in Q2.

The other competitor in the space, VeriFone, has yet to eliminate the set transaction fees ($0.17) associated with its payment product. But with pressure from both Square and Intuit, that may change soon.

Sony's Xperia S will initially be available with the 2.3.7 version of Android Gingerbread OS at launch, with users being able to upgrade to Android platform 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) during the second quarter of 2012. For reasons unknown, it will be joining an exclusive group of devices which only use a microSIM card, such as the Nokia Lumia 800 and Motorola Razr. This follows the original trendsetters Apple, and their devices. Also, there is no microSD slot; a feature, or lack there of, that many of the newly released handsets are keen to adopt.

As we saw with the marketing strategy of the Xperia Arc and Arc S, the company will probably be positioning the Xperia S just below the top devices, aiming to fill the niche right underneath the flagship products of Apple, HTC and Samsung. The ‘S' certainly packs some heavy hardware without overwhelming technical spec, and we believe the price will validate this theory.

The Xperia S will arrive PlayStation certified, with access to the PlayStation store and a fast-growing library of music and videos. Despite this, the real benefit of the phone are its ability to take high-resolution photos and videos, whilst being able to view them on the device itself. The idea is to better integrate smart devices, and for them to communicate intelligently.

Perhaps a tenuous example of this is the wrist watch worn by the spokesman for Sony Ericsson at CES, who could remotely control the camera and view messages on a tiny screen. It's therefore no surprise that the Xperia S comes with a built-in TV out function, where you can connect via HDMI and enjoy both pictures and videos on the big screen, and in glorious high definition.

This will be the inaugural handset, in the batch of the new Xperia NXT series - which stands for NeXT generation of smartphones. The Sony Xperia S has enjoyed no privacy since pictures were leaked back in early December, but it has now been confirmed that it runs from a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 12MP camera and a 4.3-inch screen that uses Sony's mobile Bravia engine.

Variants of the Xperia S are also set for launch in the springtime, when the Xperia ion, Xperia NX and Xperia acro HD will be released. The Acro HD will hit the Japanese market with specific features such as infrared port data exchange, mobile wallet and mobile TV.

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.

the region’s most connected country as the Informa announcement explains: Nigeria will continue to be Africa’s biggest mobile market by subscriptions, with a forecasted 152.09 million subscriptions at end-2016. Egypt will hold onto its position as Africa’s second-biggest mobile market, with a forecasted 118.03 million subscriptions at end-2016. South Africa, the continent’s third largest mobile market, will have 80.56 million mobile subscriptions at end-2016.