Is Apple sniffing around m-payments with iTunes tweak?

It is certainly a happy day for those that set up MIG – I love the sound of money being trousered somewhere out there in telemedia land. I remember when the guys left O2 and set MIG up. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so it proved. Good enough for Velti to stump up the readies and build it in to its burgeoning portfolio.

And with the whiff of nostalgia swirling around me as MIG sort of leaves home, I turn my attention once again to mobile payments. Things really are hotting up and again NFC doesn’t figure. Last week I marveled at how Starbuck’s was doing 20million mobile transactions through its payment app over the pond. This week, I am drawn to look at a minor tweak Apple has made to iTunes that may yet be the beginnings of the company’s foray into mobile payments. And, love them or loathe them, what ever Apple does has the potential to reshape a market. Or even define it.

Its latest wheeze is this. As part of its upgrade to the Apple Store app, Apple introduced a new service called EasyPay. The service itself is simple enough: it lets a user photograph a barcode and then look up information about the product based on that barcode. It then lets a user charge that product to his iTunes account.

EasyPay is still a very limited service: it is currently only working in the US and only works for in-store purchases of “select accessories” sold in Apple’s own retail operation. That does not even include the purchase of big-ticket items like computers or phones. And according to this article in the New York Times, doesn’t look like it will add them in the future.

And yet, and yet… Apple has 225million iTunes account holders (as of June, and since then at the very least my wife as also signed up); it is a very powerful proposition getting them to use iTunes to start to buy things, even if it is with barcode scanning.

What I like about this is what I like about Starbucks’ approach: it is simple and effective and doesn’t involve too much fancy pants technology being retrofitted. It also fits in to what people already do.

The threat to the telemedia industry is that its billing tools get shut out of the loop, but Apple won’t run the mobile payment world – it may pioneer some interesting aspects of it, possibly even things we haven’t yet thought of – what this does do however is start to get people paying with mobile and, perhaps more importantly, getting brands and retailers thinking about how to use mobile payments and not be put off by all the guff about NFC.

The retail industry is still wrestling with how to use mobile and closing the circle with payments is a key to not just getting people shopping on mobile, but the retailers themselves thinking mobile. And once that happens then the opportunities for telemedia services and telemedia billing are enormous.

Starbucks bucks the m-payments trend – to the tune of 20million payments

As 2011 draws to a close – well there are only seven weeks until Christmas, eight until 2012 – I am already ready to dub this year the year of mobile payments. In reality, I should be calling it the year that everyone started seriously talking about mobile as a key payments channel for online, on mobile and retail payments as we are still waiting for many of the mobile payment tools launched this year to become mass market.

But while the world and his dog have been postulating how mobile payments will work, coffee giant Starbucks has quietly turned its app into a very successful mobile payment tool.

I wrote about this in this esteemed organ back in January when Buckies launched th payment app in the US and, to blow my own trumpet, I did say how significant it was. And so it has proven to be. As of the end of October, Starbucks has processed 20million payments through its mobile payments tool. That's pretty impressive.

While many people have been (over) excited by NFC as a payment enabler and while the arguments over how to power various kinds of mobile payment, Starbucks has snuck a simple barcode based system into its loyalty app and, latterly, it's ordinary app. And people have been using it with alacrity.

So what does this mean for the Telemedia space? Well, I think it offers a massive opportunity. For sure, eventually we will be using mobile as a means of paying direct from our bank accounts, probably over NFC, but for the short term at least, brands should be looking at how they can make their apps and m-web sites and mobile-based loyalty schemes transactional. Not transactional in the sense of being ale to by something from a site, but in using them to pay in stores.

Starbucks has the advantage that it's loyalty scheme works by storing up points on a card that can be used to get money off, so they sort of had the plan in place already. Even so, the coffee company has made a simple way to get its customers using mobile to pay - 20 million times in 10 months.

For Telemedia companies, the opportunity lies in convincing other brands -- particularly in the retail sector, but not exclusively -- that the kind of tools on offer around Payforit, pSMS, PRS and the many alternative billing tools available can sit behind apps that allow consumers to pay for things with mobile.

It is a stop gap, but it is potentially a huge one that is really where the mass market for Telemedia payments exists.

This Christmas will be a mobile one in the retail space, with customers researching what they want to buy, being marketed to by people wanting to sell them things, people comparing prices while in stores and, in my case, sitting on the sofa late at night, a glass of wine on the go, and actually doing the entire christmas shop via an iPad.

I will be using Amazon, where possible, so will be paying by one click (so a kind of mobile payment). Next year, assuming the collapse of the Eurozone leaves us with more than just some sticks and a cart full of manky turnips to eat, many people will be using their mobiles to pay for things. Many of them will have been using NFC enabled Droid phones running Google wallet for months by then, but there will still be a Telemedia opportunity, so go grab some of the action.

And I am doing my bit: my book -- M-commerce -- is aimed at explaining how mobile can change how all businesses operate, and payments is a big part of that. Buy it here in good old fashioned paperback or, if you are thoroughly modern, get the electronic version here – it'll make a great real or virtual stocking filler!