Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

ABI Research Senior analyst Mark Beccue said North American mobile commerce totaled about $346 million last year and is expected to hit $577 million this year. "Then, you're going to get a big jump by year-end 2010, reaching $2.09 billion," Beccue said. The analyst pointed out that even if it doubles in size as predicted, mobile commerce will remain a drop in the bucket compared to all types of E-Commerce. He said E-Commerce in North America alone was a $204 billion industry last year.Read more...

The adoption of contactless by a retailer of Carrefour's size "is one of the largest victories so far" and a "very positive win" for contactless technology, said Forrester Research Analyst Ed Kountz. "It's looking like we are going to see more deployments in Europe. It's also being done well in Turkey, of all places, and Asia really remains the number one market for contactless payments."Read more...

As mobile payments try to pick up steam in the United States—an economy that today can be described as remarkably steam-free—retailers are mixed about whether mobile payments are indeed viable. But one vendor is trying a new tactic: bypassing telecom carriers by directly using Bluetooth for transactions.

A nice piece in the American Banker details the ways that Bluetooth could be easier to deploy than near field communication (NFC). Much of the problem in the United States is financial and working out compensation plans that please telecom carriers, phone manufacturers, credit card companies and retailers. Getting even two of those groups to cooperate is difficult enough.…

Some are questioning, though, whether the chain's lower priced approach might limit the number of consumer phones that can access the related content. Read more...

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

But several major cellphone carriers are preparing to bundle the 2-D barcode software with phones as they ship. Will that make a difference? Read more...

The key argument of the report is that none of the three groups of companies involved—the card brands, the issuing banks and key retailers—is spending the dollars to create true incentives to make contactless payment work, said lead report author Bruce Cundiff, who is Javelin's director of payments research. "There is no effective value proposition for merchants and for wireless carriers," Cundiff said. Read more...

This week brings the news that American Express is halting its ExpressPay keyfob, some six years after the payment giant started offering it. The program is expected to deactivate the last of its fobs by July. There are many reasons the fob may have died, but at least Amex—with six years of fob effort under its payment belt—can't be accused of not giving the fob enough time to work.Read more...

You don't address security concerns by pretending they don't exist. You acknowledge that everything is relative and that weaknesses are there but there are advantages, too. Read more...

"We need to do a little more training," said Michael Verdesca, the chain's VP for systems development. Read more...

Taking some cabs in New York City this month, I was thrilled to see the contactless devices in the backseat, only to be told by three different cabbies to not use them because customers were complaining about getting double-billed. This week, visiting three different grocery chains in New Jersey, tried unsuccessfully to use my contactless card there. The first time, a cashier looked at me as I asked about using my contactless card.Read more...

But, for better or for worse, that's not a long-term situation. Like the presidential candidates who had to fly South for the winter (or fly the coop entirely), these compliance salesfolk have a limited lifespan. Within the next year or so, retailers are going to shift from trying to become PCI compliant to having to maintain PCI compliance. Read more...

The trial with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuters started Tuesday and is expected to continue for four months, said Mohammad Khan, the CEO of Vivotech, which is one of the technology vendors involved in the trial. Sprint is also a key partner in the project. Read more...

The biggest current concern—which is also likely to be the most short-lived—is that the service is available on a relatively few number of phones in the U.S.. That concern—a shortage of supported phones—was mentioned by a Sears manager involved in the trial. Read more...

The Discover Card people have launched a 1,000-person trial with Motorola to try mobile phone payments via the Discover Network in Chicago and Salt Lake City.

The near-field communications (NFC) trial will initially allow participants to check card balances and payment history in addition to making purchases—all solely using their cellphone. The pilot uses Motorola phones and its “M-Wallet” software and is designed to test the entire infrastructure associated with accessing real time account information over the air.…

When it comes to the meat-and-potatoes of the RFID retail business—the tagging of pallets and cases—2006 is going to go down as a very disappointing year. A new report out of London from IDTechEx paints a sad but realistic portrait of frustrated suppliers and very isolated pockets of ROI examples. It does, however, hold out hope for a somewhat brighter 2007.

"The pallet/case market for RFID tags became the nearest thing to a black hole in the RFID universe in 2006," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das, who attributed the problems to "reluctant mandated customers, technical problems and pricing for volumes that never came despite retailers reporting excellent paybacks. Tagging the display unit is very different from tagging the pallet and cases."Read more...

Is a standard cellphone format for contactless payment in the offing? Unlikely, but some major players are going to make a lot of noise trying. Sony and NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors) on Monday announced that they will work together to–by mid-year 2007–“plan, develop, produce and market a secure chip that will include both Mifare and Felica operating systems and applications, as well as other contactless card operating systems and applications.”

That’s quite an undertaking. The pair officially got the backing of the GSM Association, a major telco organization representing 14 mobile network operators: Bouygues Telecom, China Mobile, Cingular Wireless, KPN, Mobilkom Austria, Orange, SFR, SK Telecom, Telefonica Móviles España, Telenor, TeliaSonera, TIM, Vodafone and 3. The Sony/NXP objective, according to a joint statement the companies issued, is to combine what they will create with an NFC chip to create a universal contactless IC platform for cellphones.

To be fair, these kinds of relationships are essential for truly interoperable mobile payments systems to be deployed. But the hurdles on doing something like globally are huge. Then again, so are the incentives.…

Accusations that RFID-based contactless credit cards can be easily read by thieves are nothing new, but this time, a group of scientists at the Univ. of Mass. has gone quite far to try and prove it.

The group tested about 20 samples from various contactless credit cards and concluded that "the cardholder's name and often credit card number and expiration are leaked in plaintext to unauthenticated readers" and "our homemade device costing around $150 effectively clones one type of skimmed cards." Perhaps of greatest concern is the report's conclusion that "RFID-enabled credit cards are susceptible in various degrees to a range of other traditional RFID attacks such as skimming and relaying." To read the full story,

Fresh from its merger talks with Siemens, Nokia is announcing a major smartcard company, the first large-scale mobile payment trial in China and the killing of its CDMA deal with Sanyo.

On Tuesday (June 27), it announced a deal with Giesecke & Devrient, the world's second largest producer of smart cards, to form a company that will " provide services to the NFC ecosystem by enabling consumer applications, such as credit cards or transport tickets, to be securely and easily downloaded over-the-air to NFC enabled mobile devices."Read more...

One key part of a CIO's job is to protect company information. That forces a healthy amount of paranoia, as the exec must anticipate the unlikely and envision the impossible. Maybe we should call CIOs Chief Imagination Officers? Perhaps a Stephen King-like imagination. Read more...