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The number of consumers paying for items via their mobile devices will shoot past 141 million this year, says new data out today from Gartner.

That figure is a 38.2 percent increase over 2010, when mobile-payment users hit 102.1 million. The amount of money generated via mobile payments is expected to reach $86.1 billion this year, up almost 76 percent from the $48.9 million seen last year.

The surge in mobile payments will come despite the slow adoption of mobile-payment technologies.

The mobile, retail, and financial industries have been rushing to roll out near-field communication (NFC) … Read more

ISIS, the joint venture between three of the national wireless carriers designed to spur the development of a wide-reaching mobile-payment system, said today it had formed a partnership with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

In addition to an existing relationship with Discover, ISIS is the first to strike a deal with all four major credit card issuers. That marks a significant milestone for the venture, which has been slower to deploy its mobile-payment system.

"By working with the nation's payment networks--Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express--we significantly advance the vision of an open and secure platform that provides … Read more

The mobile world moves at a breakneck pace, and it's difficult to keep up--even without the technical jargon most industry insiders throw around. And they do love to toss those terms about.

Whether it's the difference between CDMA and GSM, the importance of backhaul to the speed of your connection, or what metering means, it's easy to have information blow over your head when reading about this field.

So for some light Saturday reading, we thought it would be nice to explain what exactly telecom experts are talking about when they use these terms they assume everyone … Read more

Blaze Mobile said today it had been awarded a patent for its mobile wallet and a sticker that lets consumers to wave their phones in front of a checkout reader to pay for goods.

Blaze was one of the early proponents of mobile payments, which has taken hold thanks to a strong push by the likes of Google, credit card issuers, handset manufacturers, and carriers. Blaze was also one of the first to embrace near-field communications technology, which enables tap-and-pay capability.

Blaze has sold an NFC sticker that would attach to the back of the phone and work in conjunction … Read more

PayPal on Wednesday showed off the ability to transfer money and pay by tapping two phones together as it looks to secure its role in the burgeoning mobile-payments area.

PayPal's senior director of mobile operations, Laura Chambers, demonstrated the tap-and-pay move at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco by placing together two Nexus S smartphones (see video below). The phones are equipped with a near-field communications, or NFC chip, which allows for a quick transmission of information--in this case data about the amount of money transferred. The transfer happens through a special PayPal widget.

The demonstration shows PayPal is … Read more

You carry your car keys everywhere, so you may as well put them to work. NXP Semiconductor launched KeyLink Lite, a near field communications-enabled car key that can do a lot more than just unlock doors and start the car.

The KeyLink Lite transfers data between a vehicle and mobile devices or computers. Based on NFC standards and utilizing the 13.56MHz frequency and cryptography, the multifunction car key lets users wave the smart key over an NFC-enabled device to access data. The KeyLink Lite securely stores sensitive data, such as the car's GPS coordinates or destination directions, and … Read more

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is bullish on the growth of mobile payments in the coming year.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity today, Schmidt said he believes one-third of all restaurants and retail outlets will allow for mobile payments within the next year, the Financial Times reports him as saying. He reportedly told those in attendance that that number should be enough for widespread adoption of mobile payments.

"I judge that based on how long I think it takes, because the terminals are available now, the software is available now or this summer," the … Read more

All mobile phones have microphones and speakers. Hardly any have near-field communications chips. At least for now. And that's what a new company, Naratte, is planning on leveraging as it launches a technology that allows fast, secure, short-range, point-to-point communication over ultrasonic sound waves.

Compared with other device-to-device communication technology, its Zoosh tech is about as fast as NFC (the tap-to-communicate technology Google and other companies are pushing), but slower than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. However, like NFC, the "setup time" for communication is extremely fast--there's no waiting around for a handshake to be established between devices.

Naratte CEO Brett Paulson says, "We built an acoustic baseband in software," and he points to two big benefits to doing communication this way. First, it's cheap, since there's no additional hardware required on mobile devices. Big point-of-sale terminals, he says, can be retrofitted with microphones and speakers for about a dollar (they already have the input ports on their motherboards); smaller credit-card terminals might need a bit more hardware, but they can piggyback on the input ports that exist for barcode scanners.

The other big benefit: Paulson showed a Zoosh demo using Java on a currently available feature phone. In other words, this NFC competitor can be rolled out to the world as a download on pretty much every mobile handset there is. NFC requires new phones (or for people to put stickers on their existing phones.)

… Read more

Three of the top wireless providers in the U.K. are joining forces to speed up the deployment of mobile payments that will allow shoppers to pay for things with their cell phones, according to Reuters.

Thursday the news service reported that Everything Everywhere, the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone and Telefonica's O2 have agreed to create a mobile commerce system that would bring together retailers, banks and advertisers.

For years, there's been talk that consumers would be able to use their phones to buy things using a technology called Near Field Communications, which allows very … Read more