Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Commenting on PayPal Access, Damon Hougland, general manager of identity & informatics, X.commerce, says: "Results from early adopters show that consumers are more willing to engage with merchants because they can use their PayPal account to check out instead of having to deal with the hassle of entering name, address and payment information. This has huge implications for mobile commerce and merchant sales among new and existing customers."

Separately, PayPal is introducing a series of new relationships with banking technology suppliers as it bids to make it easier for banks to incorporate its services into their offerings. This morning it announced a partnership with NCR and S1 that enables people to make real-time person-to-person payments from cash machines.

Other vendors lined up for the PayPal treatment include mobile outfit mFoundry, account opening specialist MeridienLink, community banking vendor BanVue, and airmiles operator ezRezSoftware. The latter partnership envisages the creation of an application that would enable consumers to convert their airmiles points into cash for spending on the Web.

Dan Schatt, general manager of financial innovations at PayPal, explains: "With this partnership, airline and other reward programme members will have access to the entire 'catalogue' of merchandise the Internet offers by using their rewards anywhere PayPal is accepted."

Set for take-off in 2012, United Airlines' frequent flyer programme, will be the first rewards scheme to allow PayPal account holders to use miles as a currency.

The partners are also looking to add support for loyalty programs and vending machine purchases.

The system is designed to work with an NFC-enabled SIM cards as a secure element, or with Gemalto’s Gemalto’s Upteq N-Flex NFC solution, which can turn standard mobile phones into NFC-enabled devices.

According to Continental, the solution will be particularly useful for car sharing or car rental services, as it enables the provisioning of virtual car keys over the Internet, rather than having to keep track of physical keys.

For example, once the customer has selected a vehicle on the rental website, a temporary digital key from Continental and the driver’s profile is loaded onto the cell phone’s SIM card via a secure data link. At the same time, the cell phone receives the license plate number and the location of the car.

Continental says it is currently working with telecom companies to integrate services like Deutsche Telekom’s “mobile wallet” for storing and organizing the electronic car key in the cell phone. With the addition of mobile wallet technology, drivers may be able to organize their bank account or credit card data and pay for car sharing or car rental services

Turkcell subscribers with a T11 can request a Bank Asya KGS application and upload cash through the Cep-T Cüzdan mobile wallet application on their mobile phones, rather than having to visit a bank or payment point at the turnpikes, according to Turkcell.

Turkcell’s Cep-T Cüzdan NFC-enabled mobile wallet is now being offered by three of Turkey’s leading banks: Yapı Kredi, Garanti and Akbank, and is available on Turkcell’s T20 and T11 smart phones, along with the BlackBerry Bold 9900. 

Gemalto is becoming a major player in the emerging market for TSMs. It has signed a deal to become the TSM for Deutsche Telekom and also Singapore’s nation-wide NFC system. It has also secured TSM deals with Barclaycard and Orange. Sebastian Cano, SVP Telecommucation for Gemalto, said the company has 45 NFC projects underway but the Isis deal would be the largest.

“The secure element will not be an open asset to allow people to write content to it or it will lose the first portion of it birth name,” said Hughes. “Any suggestion that a secure element is an SDK that sits on top of an open OS is a fanciful argument.”

I asked Ryan Hughes, the CMO of Isis, about the situation and he declined to comment on the Verizon situation. But he said that the secure element must be managed by a TSM and the owner of the device, which will be the carriers in the case of Isis. Creating a completely open situation where any company or developer can access the secure element would not be safe or practical, he said.

The deal is interesting because it follows word last week that Google Wallet has not been enabled to run on the Galaxy Nexus, Google’s flagship Android device which is expected to go on sale soon with Verizon. Verizon said it has not blocked the NFC application but is working on commercial talks with Google, which many have interpreted as Verizon holding back the wallet until its own Isis payment tool is available.

That suggests to me that we shouldn’t expect to see Google Wallet instantly enabled on Isis phones. It can still happen eventually and Verizon makes it sound like it’s just a matter of working things out with Google. But each Isis carrier will be able to decide what service provider gets access to their secure element, and it looks like it will not be a free-for-all. That makes sense on some level for security reasons but my hope is that ultimately, Isis members won’t find reasons to keep Google Wallet or other competing applications off their phones for too long. The NFC wallet market is just emerging and it will be good to have competition and options for consumers.

Commissions on those Credits netted Facebook $557 million in revenues in 2011. (Facebook writes in the S-1 that the “other fees” that it designates on the same line as Payments was “immaterial.”)

At this point, Facebook doesn’t take any commission on Credits that are purchased via mobile: that service—which uses the premium SMS channel to send a code to a user to redeem Credits on the main site, and then charges the amount directly to the user’s mobile bill—already has some other parties taking a cut, including the provider (eg Zong or Boku), the mobile carrier and even another processing middleman. Rather, Facebook’s cut comes in the form of a commission on the payments, similar to what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) takes for transactions on its App Store. That fee is 30 percent.

Could Facebook eventually take more control of its payments, and potentially cut out some of those middle people? Probably not soon, in Court’s opinion. “Zong brought something to Facebook that it didn’t know how to do, and it became very deeply integrated,” he said. “I don’t see them starting to do what Zong does, which is connecting hundreds of operators.” Then again, he added, “When they have a worth of $100 billion with $10 billion on the balance sheet they can do pretty much anything they want.”

What’s interesting is that as Facebook starts to expand some of the other functionality on its mobile platform, that will also open up a lot more opportunities in terms of mobile transactions as well.

As Facebook enables and opens APIs to get publishers to build apps for its mobile platforms (via the web and apps), “Facebook will make sure those are monetized,” he said. “I have no doubt Facebook will be making money on mobile games and other content given the engagement and scale on mobile. There is an amazing opening there.” Paying for Credits that will actually get used on the device itself, he said, will be “even more natural.”

Facebook in the S-1 said it had 425 million monthly active users accessing the social network via mobile devices, with that number outpacing the growth of overall subscribers.

“Credits is a wallet that you can top up in all kinds of ways,” he said. “Facebook has created its own currency and has imposed that on anyone offering digital goods on Facebook.” If anything, that currency might have a life outside the platform, to to buy things outside of Facebook.

But even with the opportunity for Credits, Court doesn’t see this eventually overtaking revenues from whatever advertising Facebook plans to put on its mobile services “for a very simple reason,” which is down to how those games are played today. “If you look at Zynga, only between two and three percent of people who play actually pay. The rest play for free. Tt will be the same for Facebook on mobile, with only a fraction spending money,” he predicted. “With advertising, 100 percent of the population is exposed.”

Even though Facebook has listed “no mobile ads” as one of its risks on the S-1, it could be playing its cards very close to its chest: the last few days has been a lot of speculation already about how soon Facebook will launch those mobile ads.

Razorfish (via Digiday) says that it is already working on a pilot for rich-media ads for the social network.

The blog Inside Facebook, meanwhile, has put its money down on sponsored stories to be the “most likely” first stab at mobile advertising on the site, with running a mobile ad network the second-most likely option. (That’s one that we explored a bit yesterday as well.)

Update: Razorfish’s VP of mobile, Paul Gelb, has made a correction on how his comments were portrayed in the Digiday story (via Twitter): his agency is not working on any mobile ad buying with Facebook. “In the interview I was referring to rich media featured stories, not paid ads,” he said.

A Facebook spokesperson, via email, added the following: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform.”

Much has been made of the mobile risks that Facebook laid out in its S-1 IPO filing earlier this week. Essentially, it’s seeing/pushing massive growth in mobile, but it still hasn’t tried out advertising, its most effective route to revenues, on this platform. That’s not to say it won’t. But meanwhile, there is another area where Facebook is already making money through mobile.

In addition to enabling mobile payments, Isis would also let consumers redeem coupons at the point of sale. Isis has built partnerships with the top credit card firms — Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express — to make that possible. The service is expected to roll out sometime in 2012.

Meanwhile, Google unveiled Google Wallet in May. A range of merchants, including CVS, Petco and 7-Eleven now accept Google Wallet for payment.

With Tapit, however, the idea is to leverage NFC for use in marketing campaigns by working with agencies, brands, handset manufacturers and carriers. Its marketing services include mobile commerce, coupon distribution, ticketing, surveys and reviews, content delivery, competitions and social community building (e.g. tap here to “like” us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter).

Says Tapit CEO Jamie Conyngham, “the speed in which this round was closed is an endorsement of the Tapit team and the business models we have created around our unique NFC enabled technology. Everyone we meet loves the idea of Tapit, it’s addictive.”

NFC, indeed, would be a step up from the now-ubiquitous barcode scanning technology, which involves using smartphone apps to scan QR codes via the phone’s camera. Unfortunately, NFC generally requires an accompanying chip built into the phone itself. Due to this requirement, it’s currently being held back by the limited availability of supported handsets.

Still, analysts are bullish on NFC’s future, with ABI predicting over 35 million supported handsets by 2012 and Frost & Sullivan estimating around 868 million by 2015.

Terms of Tapit’s seed investment were not disclosed, but the Sydney Angels Sidecar Fund typically invests between $100K – $500K in its portfolio companies.