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.