Gadgets, Mobile Payment | featured news

Mobile money may seem like a hot concept, but consumers aren't warming to it. At the world's largest cellphone trade show, here in Barcelona this week, the 70,000 attendees are encouraged to use their cellphones -instead their keycards- to get past the turnstiles at the door. But very few people took the chance to do that. The process of setting up the phone to act as a keycard proved too much of a hassle.

A bevy of big-name retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best-Buy Co. and Target Corp., are teaming up to create a company that will give customers another way to make purchases: with their cellphones.

As technology enables smartphones to function like cash, lawmakers seek answers to questions about competing systems for mobile payments and their security and privacy. When Abraham Lincoln allowed the Treasury to print money for the first time in the depths of the Civil War, it was a major innovation born of a pressing reality.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced features of its upcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile OS, including built-in turn-by-turn navigation, a secure "wallet" system, a new, faster browser and live tiles that can be custom sized to better fit the Start screen. Perhaps most importantly, the company revealed that the next wave of Windows Phones will really be Windows Phones, because when Windows Phone 8 comes out, it will share a "common core" of software with Windows 8.

This is a guest post by Caribou Honig, a partner with QED Investors in Alexandria, Va. In a prior post on the topic of mobile payments, I made the case that the mobile wallet will become the foundation of a new, disruptive "payment Operating System."

CTIA Wireless, the U.S. cellphone phone industry's annual trade show that starts Tuesday, is drawing heavy participation not just from the cellphone industry, but from MasterCard, Visa, and other companies in the business of moving money around.

Verizon and Intuit announced Thursday that they are teaming up to introduce a mobile payment system that will let customers swipe their credit cards with their smartphones. Verizon will sell the Intuit Reader smartphone accessory in its retail stores. The Reader plugs into the audio jack of most Android phones, BlackBerrys, the iPhone and the iPad.
The product rollout is intended to make it easy for small-business owners and others to process mobile payments, likely boosting sales of smartphones.

In the past year, mobile payment systems have picked up steam and are now becoming mainstream. Could our wallets be replaced one day soon by our smartphones?

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile formed a joint venture to allow their customers to pay for goods and services with their cellphones. Google's CEO said the next version of Android would allow phones to work as digital wallets.