Amazon and PayPal have both announced aggressive efforts to persuade developers to use their payment technologies. Each has opened up a gateway into their payment platforms. They are providing developers with tools for writing applications that use their payment technologies. And they are “evangelizing” their payment platforms to encourage lots of developers […]

The application wars in the mobile phone business are heating up. They will result in significant threats and opportunities for the payments biz.
Just recently the Apple iPhone topped more than 100,000 apps. It was just two years ago, on October 17th, that Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to allow third-party developers to build […]

The NYTimes had an article yesterday about how investors are pouring (and have poured) tens of millions of dollars into payments on mobile phones since that is the next payments frontier. It talks about turning phones into “virtual credit cards” that enable “click and buy” commerce. Then it proceeds to describe the complexity […]

Welcome to the 171st version of the Carnival of the Mobilists, hosted by The Catalyst Code.
With competition in the Smartphone space getting so fierce, so fast, Mobile Stance thought it would be a good idea to take a step back and take a hard look as to whether App World has real legs or not, […]

I had the opportunity a month or so ago to moderate a CTIA panel of really neat people who wanted to talk about mobile social networking. Panelists ranged from execs from online gaming companies to those who operate online walled gardens (around dating and gaming and just general networking) to a company that aggregates […]

Last week, Connor Mulcahey, 13, downloaded Bump onto his iPhone. Bump let’s you trade contact info and other stuff like photos on your iPhone to a nearby iPhone. Using an internet connection you select what you want to share with your chum and then you bump your phones together or wave them nearby. […]

Nokia and Obopay just hooked up. Nokia, of course, is the handset giant at least outside of the US. And Obopay is a pioneer in mobile phone technology for doing person-to-person payments.
Nokia just bought a piece of Obopay. In announcing the transaction, Nokia’s director of strategic partnerships suggested that doing payments on mobile […]

As I was cleaning out files the other day, I got to wondering if folks around the country are cleaning out their files like I am right now. A long-time friend of mine in the consulting business is reducing her number of offices from 7 to 3 and was cleaning out files over the past […]

An article in yesterday’s New York Times describes the on-going saga of mobile phones as wallets. It concluded two things that we have been saying for quite some time: the business model of NFC-enabled mobile wallets is lacking and it is unlikely that Americans will be using their cell phones at checkouts in the next […]

Fierce Wireless issued a bunch of mobile predictions this week, and this one relating to mobile commerce piqued my interest. It (boldly) states that 2009 is the year that mobile commerce will finally take off. What I found fascinating about this prediction and the examples the author cites is the absence of two key players […]