Archive for the ‘Mobile Technology’ Category

Simon Hill examines the past, present, and future of NFC and mobile payments.

Mobile payments. NFC. RFID. Digital Wallets. We’ve been hearing about these buzzwords for years. Entire companies have thrown their weight behind various mobile payment systems on many occasions, including Google. Yet, despite the attention the space has got, mainstream adoption remains elusive. According to a Gartner forecast back in May, there will be 448 million mobile payment users transacting $617 billion worth of business by 2016. That could be the case, but there are some important questions that remain unanswered.

Tech guru Jean-Louis Gasse says the smartphone is a terrible place to advertise, at least using conventional display ad formats. 
For one thing, the screen is tiny. For another, the ads can be highly intrusive and annoying. (Not an emotion a smart advertiser wants to trigger in a potential customer.)

And he dismisses those who say the medium is still young. Mobile advertising is not “in its infancy”, he says, it’s now 17 years old.

And the smartphone version of it – the far more promising version – is now five years old and five years is a long time.”If it was going to work it would have done so by now,” said Henry Blodget on Business Insider.

Will QR codes top the list of tech ideas that never caught on?

A QR (quick response) code is a bar code that can be read by a smartphone. The square of smaller black and white boxes is read by an app that reveals content or directs the uses to a website.

The aim is to simply allow would-be customers to click the image on their smartphone without having the need to take down contact details or urls.

Sounds good. But where are they? How often do you see QR codes and how often have you actually used one?

By Dan Rowinski

Is the world ready for mobile payments? Not quite, according to a global survey released by MasterCard. There are a variety of factors that will lead to mobile payments adoption across the planet, from infrastructure deployment to consumer willingness to make payments with a mobile device. The mobile payments revolution hasn’t arrived just yet, but if MasterCard can be believed, we are not far away.

MasterCard released its Mobile Payments Readiness Index (MPRI) to gauge the readiness of 34 countries across the globe for mobile payments. MasterCard defines mobile payments in three different categories: peer-to-peer, mobile commerce (mCommerce) and at the point of sale (POS).

As the common denominator behind surging interest in cloud software, social networks and mobile shopping are the likes of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, it is little wonder mobility tops the chat charts when it comes to business technology.

“When you ponder all the different trends driving technology decisions, the common denominator comes down to this question: Does the technology you are considering enable you and your team to get the job done job from any place, at any time, no matter which computing device they happen to have at hand?,” said Heather Clancy on znet.com.