Mobile Payment Magazine

Top Smartphones for the Holidays

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Smartphone reviews and top smartphone models available by carrier. If you’re upgrading your smartphone for 2011, here’s a list of the hottest smart phones for the holidays.

Aaccording to research firm Gartner, Android made up 25.5 percent of smartphone sales to end users in the third quarter, up from 3.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. Another theme is the emergence of the tablet as a hot device for the holidays. Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad is currently dominating the market, and is now available at both AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) and Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ). However, Samsung plans to make a big push as well, and will have its Android-powered GalaxyTab available from all four Tier 1 carriers this season. Finally, Microsoft also hopes its Windows Phone 7 platform catches fire amid the crowded market.

Tyfone Receives Patent for Mobile Wallet Technology

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Over the next two years, analysts forecast contactless payment transactions via MicroSD technology will be used by more than 20 million people in North America alone, at thousands of contactless payment terminals already in place. According to a Sept. 2009 forecast by Juniper Research, near-field communications (NFC) contactless payment global gross transaction value is expected to exceed $30 billion by 2012.

Tyfone  has recently been awarded a patent for its new mobile electronic wallet technology. The technology enables the use of a mobile phone having a memory card slot and a memory card compatible with the memory card slot to transmit transaction data to a reader device. The memory card includes circuitry used to produce a time-varying magnetic field that enables a contactless transaction. The circuitry used to produce a time-varying magnetic field may include smartcard circuitry.

Tyfone, based in Portland, OR and Bangalore, India, is a global provider of unified mobile money and secure transaction infrastructure for mobile banking, mobile identity management, and mobile contactless NFC payments

“Tyfone recognizes the value of this intellectual property and the hard work that it has taken to continue developing innovative solutions, confirmed by this patent issuance. This patent will uniquely enable solutions that will allow consumers to benefit from the convergence of money and mobility,” said Dr. Siva Narendra, chief technology officer at Tyfone. “Our innovations allow financial institutions to provide secure, convenient and holistic solutions, therefore enable a value driven user experience to multiple generations of consumers, whose needs and usage models differ widely. Tyfone’s neutral secure commerce solutions are easily implemented and scalable by financial institutions, merchants, account issuers, or network operators. Ensuring security and a positive consumer experience are our guiding principles.”

“As recent news from major financial, mobility and computing brands demonstrate, all the stakeholders in financial services and commerce are converging on mobile,” said Dr. Narendra. “The NFC and contactless market is heating up now more than ever as handset manufacturers, OS developers, network operators, payment card networks and financial institutions all race to secure a stake in this technology and its direction. Tyfone’s innovations include a secure end-to-end mobile money and transaction platform that also provides neutral contactless NFC solutions.

Unlike software-only technologies that refer to their application as an electronic wallet and are limited in functionality and security, Tyfone’s platform includes the SideTap™ neutral secure element — thereby creating a digital container and functionality, unavailable in software-only solutions, for securely storing content for a true electronic “wallet.” This solution enables any stakeholder to securely manage multiple consumer credit, debit, pre-paid, loyalty, identification, and transportation accounts for use in a wide range of payment and other secure transactions, while maintaining the storage capabilities of existing memory cards that consumers have grown accustomed to.

In the growing contactless payment marketplace, Tyfone’s patents, SideTap memory card product, and u4ia (pronounced euphoria) mobile money and secure transaction platform enable any commerce stakeholder to bring immediate scale by converting most existing handsets to be NFC ready.

Source: Tyfone

Phone-Based Authentication Sees Strong Adoption in 2010

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Usage of PhoneFactor’s products offer a good insight into adoption of phone-based authentication. The company offers phone-based two-factor authentication solutions to companies worldwide–users simply respond to a phone call or SMS text message from PhoneFactor to authenticate.

The company has more than doubled its user base in the first three quarters of this year with key sales in Banking, Government, Healthcare, and Enterprise. This, combined with the recent announcement by Google that it will be adding support for phone-based authentication to its Google Apps platform, validates a shift in the authentication market which has been expected for some time.

“I think it is great news for the market as it shows that a major player with massive influence is adopting the technology,” said Alan Goode of Goode Intelligence. Goode’s firm published a report on “The Mobile Phone as an Authentication Device – Analysis and Forecasts 2010 – 2014” which forecast significant growth in the phone-based authentication market.

“Our research shows that the introduction of mobile phone-based two-factor authentication will not only result in phone-based two-factor solutions taking market share from the previously dominant hardware token solutions, but also that new markets will be opened up as a direct result,” said Goode. “Strong authentication is no longer the preserve of an enterprise or corporate banking user; everyone who owns a mobile phone can now benefit from strong, agile authentication that is cost-effective and quick to deploy.”

“A new paradigm for user authentication, which reflects evolving standards for security and scalability, is driving adoption of phone-based authentication to unprecedented levels,” said Steve Dispensa, PhoneFactor CTO and co-founder. Single factor authentication based on user names and passwords has proven ineffective against today’s threats, yet multi-factor systems based on security tokens and smart cards have failed to become ubiquitous. The resulting gap is being filled by phone-based authentication methods.

“We’ve been seeing this shift on the banking and enterprise side over the last 12-18 months,” said Dispensa. “The demands of an increasingly mobile workforce, shift toward cloud computing models, and evolving threat landscape are forcing organizations to rethink their current authentication practices.”

Phone-based authentication can be quickly and cost-effectively enabled for large numbers of geographically diverse users, with out-of-band solutions offering protection against malware, such as keystroke loggers, and MITM/MITB attacks which have become prevalent in particularly high risk industries like banking.

Source: PhoneFactor

Paybox 3rd Generation “Mobiliser” Product Goes Live

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Paybox, a provider of mobile payment enterprise solutions, announced the paybox Mobiliser products, which allow mobile operators and financial service providers worldwide successful market entry into mobile payment and mobile commerce.

In developed markets, paybox — beyond mobile person-to-person payments — enables the creation of open, national standards for any kind of mobile payment. With paybox Mobiliser products, banks and operators in emerging markets can create low cost, financial services for the unbanked.

Eckhard Ortwein, co-founder and CEO states: “The paybox Mobiliser products coupled with our expertise enable customers to rapidly deploy, easily launch, successfully market and efficiently operate m-payment and m-commerce solutions”.

The Austrian operators A1 Vodafone and One have become leading players in m-commerce by creating a national standard based on paybox.

Paybox offers its customers following solutions:

  • paybox TopUp Mobiliser — topping up airtime or other credit accounts via handset, paying electronically or cash-based through a low-cost distribution network.
  • paybox Money Mobiliser — transferring money at home and cross-border, do highly secure online shopping, pay at the POS, pay bills and execute bank services with their mobile phone
  • paybox Brand Mobiliser — allowing companies with premium brands to act as an MVNO or VoIP-Provider
  • paybox Content Mobiliser — enabling end customers to buy content, gamble, shop, park, buy tickets for public transportation or events, pay at vending machines, track fleets

The paybox Mobiliser products are built on the patented paybox Mobiliser platform which has been developed since 1999 covering services required for transaction and payment processing in a mobilised world, namely: Authentication, authorization and reporting.

Source: PRNewswire