You could possibly Pay for Everything Along with your iPhone and iTunes Account Soon [Rumor]

Near-field communication is old-hat technology to seamlessly pay for stuff with phones in Europe and Asia. Now, it could finally take off here. First, Google and now, in step with Bloomberg , Apple’s building NFC payment systems for iPhone and iPad.

Richard Doherty, director of the consulting firm Envisioneering Group, says that Apple’s planning to assist you to use iPhones and iPads to buy stuff using NFC, which he says shall be embedded within the next iPhone and iPad. His info comes from ” engineers who are working on hardware for the Apple project.” Apparently, Apple’s already prototyped ” a payment terminal that small businesses, comparable to hairdressers and mom-and-pop stores, could use to scan NFC-enabled iPhones and iPads,” which it should ” heavily subsidize” or divulge to retailers. (Giving freely the machines, combined with the most recent system for debit card fees mandated by the Durbin amendment would make it relatively painless for shops to will let you use your iPhone to pay for stuff.)

I was somewhat skeptical about Google’s efforts to push NFC within the Nexus S succeeding on a broader scale, provided that they’d NFC in a single phone-notably, none of the recent whizbang Android phones from CES appear to have NFC powers-but Google is seemingly going full-bore on NFC payment systems . If Apple also pushes NFC for payment systems just as hard, or perhaps harder than Google-particularly given its magical ability to get partners like Starbucks to just accept new systems of things-NFC might actually stand a raffle here.

It’s a no-brainer that mobile payments are one of the vital next Big Things, like location. (See, for example, all of the hype over Square , Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments startup. Or PayPal quickly looking to move into the gap. Or Starbucks new iPhone app payments . One wonders what an Apple and Google push into mobile payments means for all of this stuff, though.)

Given the manner Apple already acts like a type of middle man, handling payments for things like music and software with iTunes and the App Store, why not grab a slice of payments inside the real world too? Imagine using your iTunes account to pay for basically everything. I’ll believe all of this for reals once I see it happen, for sure, but the probabilities are both very real and extremely wild. [ Bloomberg ]

Source

This post is tagged: durbin amendment, field communication, magical ability, mobile payments, payment terminal, Richard Doherty