| Your mobile is your new wallet
Companies that you’ve heard of and many that you haven’t all want you to start paying for goods with a mobile phone rather than different cards. So whether it’s SBI, YES Bank, brokerages, Visa or FlipKart, there’s a massive amount of money behind the push to replace cash and cards with a mobile.
Earlier in the month, Barclays tried to get ahead of the game with the launch of its PingIt app in the United Kingdom, which links mobile phones directly to bank accounts, rather than to say a PayPal account.
The aim is that sending money by mobile will become as commonplace in the UK as it is in Africa, and that these secure transactions should link up with voucher offers and with personalised, real-time ways to keep track of your spending.
Likewise, in continental Europe, mobile major Orange has brought the whole system to Nice in France already, and is rolling out ‘Quick Tap Treats’, which see British users rewarded for using Near Field Communication (NFC) in the UK.
The real challenge, however, is in convincing people that cash and credit cards are now a thing of the past. In an age where even getting rid of cheques proves too controversial, that’s ambitious at least.
Google’s takeover
Almost every major announcement in Barcelona is set to be based around Google’s Android platform. Only Nokia and Microsoft are set to make major mobile products that are not Android and their market share remains miniature. Many analysts are starting to sense tensions between operators and the company that makes the software.
With Google’s takeover of Motorola now passed by regulators around the world, it seems likely that there will be increasing talk that Google will take the Apple route and start making the hardware and the software. Executive chairman Eric Scmidt is set to give a much-anticipated keynote. Ben Wood, of CCS Insight, says simply: “Any mention of this will be conspicuously absent from the presentation by Schmidt.” Ironically, Apple will not be worried if Google starts to make its own devices.
M2M or designs on your entire lifestyle
A key secondary theme of the MWC 2012 is set to be so-called machine-to-machine, or M2M, communication. This means, phones talking to security systems, for instance, or in one vision, wine bottle corks in a cellar automatically alerting a waiter to put a certain vintage in the fridge. It’s a vision of much more comprehensive automation than we currently see anywhere outside the homes of the very rich, and it’s about rather more than simply an app to turn on the lights.
Interestingly, this is an area where Motorola has been concentrating - their acquisition by Google dovetails neatly with the search giant’s announcement of “Android@home”. The beginning of that is streaming music, but next steps are somewhat more comprehensive. Perhaps in that sense, it doesn’t matter that the MWC’s biggest phone announcements are unlikely to blow readers away - this is an industry that now has designs on your entire lifestyle. ---Matt Warman Daily Telegraph |
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