Isis earmarks $100 Million for Mobile Wallet Venture

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T- Mobile USA plan to invest $100 million in their Isis mobile wallet venture, Bloomberg reports. The amount of funding depends on how successful Isis is at attracting banks and merchants. $100M for Isis

But transaction-processing networks, while participating in mobile wallet and mobile payment initiatives, also are taking steps to increase the value of traditional credit card and debit card transactions as well, in ways that lower retailer cost of using the traditional mechanisms. If that seems to you like playing both offense and defense, you would be right.

Separately, Visa is encouraging U.S. retailers to shift to retail checkout systems that let consumers pay using their mobile phones. Visa says it will let merchants that switch to credit-card readers supporting EMV technology to forego costly annual security certifications.

EMV is an open standards set of specifications for smart card payments and acceptance devices. The EMV specifications were developed to define a set of requirements to ensure interoperability between chip-based payment cards and terminals. EMV actually could extend the use of card-based payments, as well as play a role in mobile payment capabilities as well.

Starting in 2015, it will also stop requiring banks to reimburse most merchants for some types of credit-card fraud, which can be prevented by using EMV systems, Visa says. Both moves will save retailers money on their transaction support operations. Visa ncourages retailers to adopt EMV

Dwolla Adds SMS Payments

Dwolla has added a new feature that allows users to send money to people using text messaging on Apple iOS devices. Dwolla also supports the ability to send payments using Facebook, Twitter and email.

In order to send money to someone using their phone number, all a user has to do is log in, click the “Send Money” button and then type the phone number of the person to whom you want to send money in the “Send to” box.

Since Dwolla IDs have the same number of digits as a phone number in the U.S., there might be some concern that you are sending a payment to the wrong person. If Dwolla determines that you have entered a number that is potentially conflicting, it will prompt you to confirm whether you want to send the payment to a phone number or a Dwolla ID.

Dwolla: Send Money To Phone Number Using SMS

Mobile money in Afghanistan

Mobile money, or mobile banking or mobile payments, depending on how one approaches the subject, is convenient in many settings, but can be a basic infrastructure capability in others. That tends to be the case in many parts of the world where banking services are not well developed. Turning a mobile phone into a payment device has obvious appeal for "financial inclusion" advocates, mobile service suppliers, banks and consumers alike.

What made Steve Jobs a giant?

As Tim Wu chronicles it in his book, "The Master Switch," (http://timwu.org/) the telephone, radio and movie industries started out as an open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of incompatible standards, crummy technology and entrepreneurs.

The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came when a charismatic figure arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher production vaues and greater ease of use.

With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system, Jobs is one of those kids of people.

What made Steve Jobs a giant?

66% of Smart Phone Owners have Shopped from Device

With a million smart phones being sold every month in the U.S. market, L.E.K. Consulting predicts that more than half of U.S. consumers will be using mobile devices regularly for shopping within the next five years.

In fact, a recent L.E.K. survey of 1,600 U.S. consumers found that 66 percent of smart phone owners have used their devices to make purchases. That doesn’t necessarily mean they paid using their mobile phone, but that they used information retrieved from the device, though 39 percent do report making purchases every month, not including purchases of music and video downloads every month.

Within the past six months, more than half of active mobile consumers surveyed reported using at least one mobile coupon app, nearly a third checked a pricing comparison tool and 29 percent
used a loyalty or similar tool, often while standing in store aisles.

One implication some will draw from the data is that social shopping, mobile coupons and offers are well suited for broader mobile wallet services, as “providing information in exchange for offers” seems to resonate with many users.

The other noteworthy finding was that consumers are bypassing traditional marketing
campaigns and often are highly influenced by the reviews and other posts from members of their social networks.

Mobile commerce on the rise

Time Warner Cable is Right About Cord Cutting, For Now

Time Warner Cable executives are right to point out that people really do want to watch professionally-produced video. TWC executives also are almost certainly right that abandonment of video subscriptions specifically for the purpose of consuming professional content online is not happening, much.

The real issue is what happens down the road as the subscription video business clearly demonstrates it has passed the peak of its product life cycle. At that point, content producers are going to start looking a lot harder at alternatives. And that's when cord cutting is going to be a bigger problem.

It isn't a big problem today. And there is a reasonable chance it might not be for quite some time, if video subscription services are able to strike the right deals with content owners and allow video subscribers to watch the content they've subscribed for on their other devices, at other locations. The issue is value and price. If users have to pay just a little for that feature, one set of behaviors can be predicted.

If the cost of the "TV everywhere" feature is deemed to be "too much" for the incremental value, consumer resistance is certain. Given the steadily increasing prices for subscription TV, one would have to guess that there already is latent demand for a more flexible, possibly a la carte alternative. There just isn't any obvious way for consumers to vote with their wallets, yet.

Odds of AT&T Getting Regulatory Clearance to Buy T-Mobile USA Now 50-50?

Analyst sentiment that the AT&T purchase of T-Mobile USA will win regulatory clearance have dropped, at least among 32 analysts polled by Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analysts Rebecca Arbogast and David Kaut.

The observers rated their expectation for approval on a scale of 0-to-100 percent, and the average of their answers fell to 49.5 percent in August from 54.7 percent in July, the analysts said.

Eight of those who think approval is unlikely deepened their conviction, and six of those who expect approval expressed less certainty.

Doubts Rise about AT&T T-Mobile USA Bid