Technology, Mobile Payment | featured news

CNN's Tom Foreman reports on Dwolla, an app that delivers fast and inexpensive electronic cash transfers all over the U.S.

Mobile money may seem like a hot concept, but consumers aren't warming to it. At the world's largest cellphone trade show, here in Barcelona this week, the 70,000 attendees are encouraged to use their cellphones -instead their keycards- to get past the turnstiles at the door. But very few people took the chance to do that. The process of setting up the phone to act as a keycard proved too much of a hassle.

The idea behind mobile payments currently holds more appeal than the reality does. Can Google change that? Retailer support for mobile payments is hard to find outside major metropolitan areas, and even then, the gaggle of tap-to-pay options means your favorite NFC-friendly store may not accept your preferred mobile wallet technology. If a new leak proves true, Google may have worked its way around the hurdle, albeit in an NFC-free manner.

A bevy of big-name retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best-Buy Co. and Target Corp., are teaming up to create a company that will give customers another way to make purchases: with their cellphones.

As technology enables smartphones to function like cash, lawmakers seek answers to questions about competing systems for mobile payments and their security and privacy. When Abraham Lincoln allowed the Treasury to print money for the first time in the depths of the Civil War, it was a major innovation born of a pressing reality.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced features of its upcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile OS, including built-in turn-by-turn navigation, a secure "wallet" system, a new, faster browser and live tiles that can be custom sized to better fit the Start screen. Perhaps most importantly, the company revealed that the next wave of Windows Phones will really be Windows Phones, because when Windows Phone 8 comes out, it will share a "common core" of software with Windows 8.

This is a guest post by Caribou Honig, a partner with QED Investors in Alexandria, Va. In a prior post on the topic of mobile payments, I made the case that the mobile wallet will become the foundation of a new, disruptive "payment Operating System."

CTIA Wireless, the U.S. cellphone phone industry's annual trade show that starts Tuesday, is drawing heavy participation not just from the cellphone industry, but from MasterCard, Visa, and other companies in the business of moving money around.

J.P. Morgan, Capital One and Barclays plan to let customers use a mobile-payments service being developed by wireless carriers as part of a trial set to begin this summer.

Following a nearly four-month trial period, Google is taking its mobile commerce application, Google Wallet, nationwide. In a blog post announcing the news, the search giant said it needed the time to extensively test the app, which lets users pay for goods by tapping their smartphones against special wireless readers, which are powered by MasterCard’s contactless “PayPass” technology.