Mobile Payments Won't Save Consumers Money, Says Consumer Reports

In many cases, consumers using their mobile devices to pay for purchases will not find they are saving money, Consumer Reports argues. In most cases, retailers won't be saving money, either.

Most of the new electronic payment options are tied to credit and debit cards, so whatever costs consumers or retailers normally incur when using their plastic will find the same charges are incurred in a "pay by mobile phone" context as well.

Google Wallet merchant transaction fees are the same as those charged on plastic payments, and the same is expected to be true for Visa's digital wallet. Square and PayPal Mobile charge merchants even more than the average big bank fee, 2.75 and 2.9 percent of the transaction amount, respectively.

Among payment processors Consumer Reports looked at, only Obopay charges consumers (not merchants) an explicit flat 50-cent fee for payments over $10. You can transfer funds to your Obopay account from a bank account at no cost, but if you link a transaction to a debit or credit card, you'll pay a 1.5 percent fee. So on a $100 payment, fees can run from 50 cents to $2.

That should raise an immediate question: what's the value to end users of paying by mobile phone instead of credit or debit card? The answer will be obvious in a few cases, but more obscure in most cases. Paying for public transportation is one of the scenarios where the ability to simply waive a phone near a terminal will provide value by saving consumers the time spent waiting in line to buy tickets or recharge current fare cards.

In other cases one might argue consumers can save a bit of time checking out by "swiping a phone" instead of a card. But many will find that a minor value, if a value at all. That's one reason interest in "wallet" approaches that use the mobile to store credentials and target offers of value to users seems to be growing. Getting a discount or other incentive provides the "value."

Consumer Reports Finds Hidden Costs in Mobile Payment Services

Amazon Getting into Social Shopping

Social shopping sites (mobile coupons, group offers or deal of the day services) have proliferated since Groupon started getting traction. Now Amazon.com has launched its own deal-of-the-day service in Chicago, the Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon Getting into Social Shopping (subscription required).

Google has started slowly rolling out its own Groupon-like offerings see Google Offers.

Social couponing, or social shopping, sometimes called "deal of the day," is becoming a serious business, but it also is easy to dismiss. It's just coupons, right? Maybe not. The coupon is the tactic used to aggregate buyers. It is a rival channel to alternative coupon channels and other forms of local advertising and promotion.

The group-buying industry is expected to grow 138 percent to $2.66 billion in 2011. The business is highly fragmented at the moment, with some estimating there are about 439 daily deal email programs serving the U.S. market in the first quarter of 2011.

Nor is social shopping just a nice or interesting stand-alone business. Many believe it will increasingly be integrated with mobile payments, mobile loyalty mechanisms and other targeted forms of advertising and promotion. Read more here.

AT&T Purchase of T-Mobile USA "Highly Likely" to be Approved

In the end, the U.S. Government is highly-likely to approve the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, despite the significant opposition, because of three over-riding realities: 1) market/financial realities, 2)DOJ legal/precedent realities, and 3) FCC public-interest realities, argues Scott Cleland of the Precursor Group. 

http://goo.gl/Op9GH

iPhone 5 to Come With Mobile Payment? With PayPal?

Apple's iPhone 5 not only will include mobile payments and near field communications capabilities, but also will feature a service offered in conjunction with PayPal, argues. Rod Farmer, co-founder of Mobile Experience.

PayPal has already extended its NFC support to Google’s Android while Google has already entered into an alliance with MasterCard and Citi for its Google Wallet service. PayPal has been talking more, of late, about the importance of retail mobile payments as a driver of its future growth.

iPhone 5 to Come With Mobile Payment, Working with PayPal?

Steve Perlman’s white paper explains “impossible” wireless tech | VentureBeat

With the caveat that when a talented engineer says something is "impossible," it means the speaker honestly believes something cannot be done, because "we cannot, with our known technology, do so." That might not be the same thing as saying "nobody else can do this." That might be the case for a new mobile bandwidth grooming approach championed by

Steve Perlman, who believes a different approach to bandwidth management could exceed "Shannon's Law" by about an order of magnitude.

Shannon’s Law is a rule of thumb about the theoretical capacity of any communications channel. But some might quip that "Shannon was wrong."

Perlman’s “distributed input distributed output” technology allows each wireless user on a network to use the full data capacity of shared spectrum, simultaneously with a bunch of other users. It claims to do so by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum.

Critics will say it violates the laws of physics. But some of us have heard the best engineers in a field say such things in the past, only to be proven wrong. I was once at a meeting of top engineers from the broadcast and cable TV industry hear a proposal from Telecommunications Inc. (TCI) that would allow delivery of high-definition television in 6 megahertz of bandwidth. The room essentially exploded into disbelief, as the current proposals then in circulation suggested it would take 20 MHz to deliver HDTV.

As it turned out, TCI was right, and HDTV now is delivered in 6 MHz.

On another occasion, I was quietly informed by some very senior Bell Laboratories engineers that an analog fiber optic access network "could not" deliver 40 cable TV signals, as cable industry engineers were saying was a minimum requirement for cable network fiber optic access systems. The reason for the belief was that lasers capable of doing so could not be produced.

As it turns out, it was entirely possible to produce lasers with characteristics that would allow delivery of 40 channels of analog TV on a single laser, at reasonable distances. When those engineers said "it could not be done," what they meant was that "we cannot do so."

That doesn't mean that all such "impossible feats" actually result in commercially-significant deployments. But one has to translate. When somebody says "something cannot be done," that sometimes only means "we cannot do that." There's a big difference. Sometimes, the smart guys just aren't aware that somebody else might be able to do something formerly regarded as "impossible" or a violation of the laws of physics.

Steve Perlman’s white paper explains “impossible” wireless tech

PayPal: 12M monthly users are paying for Facebook games

More than 12 million unique users pay for games each month on Facebook, according to data released for the first time today by digital payments vendor PayPal. That’s about 1.6 percent of the 750 million users on Facebook, but it’s enough to create a big social game industry with giants such as Zynga, which generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per quarter.

PayPal: 12M monthly users are paying for Facebook games

Apple Lawsuit Delays Samsung Galaxy Tab Launch in Australia

Apple and Samsung are battling it out in court in several jurisdictions, including the United States, South Korea and now, Australia, over claims that certain Samsung devices, such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, violate a number of Apple patents. 

Samsung has agreed to hold off bringing the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Australia until it resolves its patent lawsuit with Apple. Given the time it typically takes to resolve such disputes, and the limited time any particular device or software load can be sold in any market, it is conceivable that the unresolved lawsuit could mean only subsequent generations of the device will be available in Australia or other markets.

No matter what the ultimate outcome, the lawsuit already is delaying Samsung product launches. Patent infringement lawsuits are a weapon of business warfare in several ways. Long term, such lawsuits can create revenue streams for one set of contestants, while raising manufacturing costs for rivals. In the short term, the lawsuits can upset product launch plans, and impede or destroy revenue prospects for a device, or generation of software.

Apple Lawsuit Delays Samsung Galaxy Tab Launch in Australia