Tech Thursday: Mobile Credit Accounts

Our tech savvy co-author Scott has referred me to the following Bloomberg article, titled by Bloomberg BW as Scott "Smartphones May Replace Credit Cards".

The article discusses an initiative headed up by the phone companies, but also confirms that the credit card companies themselves are working on mobile phone payment solutions. Between the two groups it sounds like this functionality will definitely arrive at some point. Hopefully the competition will lead to good deals for the consumer.

Haiti and the Emergence of Mobile Payments

First: we here at FIWK send our thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by the earthquake that struck Haiti a few days back.

I wanted to use this space to bring up a topic we've already discussed twice here a FIWK (here and here): mobile commerce. We spent a good bit of time last week discussing the craziness that is the current technology sector, and what we thought the Telecom landscape might look like in 2020. However, I don't believe we once noted mobile payments - a concept that has blown up surrounding The Red Cross' relief efforts in Haiti (to the tune of $2M). The company responsible for the technology used by the Red Cross is mGive, and it's CEO noted that their Haiti effort could be a tipping point for mobile giving.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Americans are more likely to use such a service for normal payments now that they've seen how easy the process is?

Twitpay for your newspaper

We have discussed the concept of Twitpay before, and Scott noted the possibilities of creating a platform for making quick and easy payments even from phones.

An easy, comprehensive service like Twitpay makes more and more sense the more I think about it. For example, take Mark Cuban's "Note to Newspapers" ideas and consider that in order to pay the LA Times or whoever you could use your existing Twitpay (or PayPal) account and just zap them the $0.50 for the in-depth article you want to read, or the $1.99 for today's paper online, or even the $50 for your yearly subscription, or whatever the amount comes to. The main point of Cuban's that I completely agree with is that people use Amazon all the time because it's super easy - they have one-click payments, remember all your info, keep your queue, make recommendations, etc. The ease-of-use features that make Amazon great drive more sales than obtuse systems for payment, shipping, and all that.

I was also surprised to see that iTunes leads online marketplaces in number of active users with 100 million, compared to Amazon's 94 million and PayPal's 75 million. Do you think that if a service like Twitpay or PayPal became a more comprehensive platform for easy online transactions, it would grow its market share versus that of iTunes or Amazon? Or do you think those two existing marketplaces will instead grow their services into arenas like the one Cuban talks about?