Mobile Payments

The Future is Mobile, and it is already here. We just need to look east… Far East.

Imagine a world in which you had a magic device, say a magic wand of sorts, lightweight and svelte, easy on the eye and reflective of your personal style and superior prosumer choice-making. Imagine a device that one could carry that knows where one is, knows what time it is and actually helps one keep track of time. Imagine this wand also carried with it the power to inform, translate, locate, compare, contrast, capture and review your fondest memories, stories, places, events, things and places and loved ones. It even has your favorite music, your favorite books, movies, games, pictures, and maps of every place you have ever been, and everywhere you want to be. Naturally, you can chat with friends, actually talk to people, video conference with a group of your colleagues, tweet, wiki or blog about what’s new, read the news, get the latest scores, check the market, find out what’s playing next and where you should go for that next bite to eat. Hey, I’m low on cash (as in have none) so where’s the nearest ATM?

Who carries that anyways these days, you ask? Well, apparently a lot of people still, since not everyone’s gone digitally native, yet… Anyway, I digress. You quickly find the nearest ATM and impress me with your amazing grasp of geospatiotemporal localizability.  After all, that’s what your magic wand gives you -- Incredible fidelity and awareness of one’s surroundings.

Your mobile phone is finally powerful and secure enough to free you from the tyranny of multiple swatches of plastic, fiber or card-like magnetically encoded strips and embedded radio-frequency emitters and other techno-wizardry and performs its job as any sufficiently advanced technology should…

“poof”

…like magic.

Look East! Far East for what the western future of mobile commerce looks like.

Geospatiotemporal What?

• Geospatio refers to “where” in space.
• Temporal refers to “when” in time.
• Localizability refers to the translation of that when and where into a meaningful context like:

In my cube, at the office on the 3^rd floor of our main campus, at 3:57pm in the afternoon (Eastern Daylight Savings Time) of October 14, 2008.

In fact, so much INformation, it borders on what the Nordic scientist Joergen called EXformation.  That is, all of that other data that is usually discarded or not INcluded in the record of what’s happening because it has been historically too expensive, too cumbersome or otherwise impractical to capture.  As Chris Anderson explained in The Long Tail, encoding information as bits effectively moves their storage and transmission costs so low as to almost be incalcualably “free” (or as Products become “digitized” the storage and transmission costs trend towards Zero).