This workshop looks enticing... See some of the position papers...

PayCircle

PayCircle® is a vendor-independent non-profit organization. Its main focus is to accelerate the use of payment technology and develop or adopt open payment APIs (uniform Application Programming Interfaces) based on XML, SOAP, Java and other Internet languages.

Via Or, how mobile phones can break the money monopoly

ABI Research Sees Crucial Contactless Payment Pieces Falling into Place

Payment processing companies, credit card issuers, banks, retailers and the all-consuming public will soon begin experiencing a payment paradigm shift as the final pieces fall into place for secure "contactless payments."

The recent joint announcement by electronics giant Philips and payment transaction software creator ViVOtech, of a partnership marrying Philips' near-field communications (NFC) technologies with ViVOtech's readers and processing software, takes contactless payment one big step closer to reality. Armed with an NFC-equipped mobile phone (or some other device, but all bets are on the phone as top choice), a consumer at a checkout or cashier need only wave it near a "reader" to have a credit transaction automatically initiated and carried out.

Via Developing RFID-Enabled Phones

DVD TO MOBILE (Nokia Edition)

Now you can convert your DVDs to your Nokia, Siemens and other brand mobile phone and watch them in great quality, with excellent sound and in full screen landscape mode*. A memorycard as small as 128 Mb is sufficient to store a full length feature film, up to a hundred minutes. Take your DVDs on the plane, train or automobile, watch them on vacation, at work or at school. With only two clicks, this PC software converts the content of your DVD to a super small movie file, which will play on any Symbian Series 60 device, such as Nokia 6600/7610/6630/6260, Siemens SX-1, Sendo X, etc. on a postage stamp size memory card. You can use a headset or the built-in speaker to listen to the sound. Subtitled and foreign language DVDs are also supported. You wil have to see the quality to believe it, using supreme MPEG4 encoding, feature films look crisp and sharp on your cellular phone and still fit on a relatively small multimediacard.

Via Bernhard's del.icio.us

NOVELS DELIVERED TO YOUR PHONE

Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan. This technology has now led to the emergence of a new and unexpected phenomenon: people reading entire novels on their mobile phones. The growing population of readers consists mainly of young people in their late teens and early twenties, the first generation to have grown up with e-mail. One novel that achieved popularity through this new medium went on to be published in print and became a million-copy bestseller. The fact that the novel is now being made into a movie illustrates just how far this phenomenon has come.

Here is an interview with the first cellphone author Yoshi.

Yellowarrow Project

YELLOWARROW [NOUN] A COLLECTIVE SYMBOL FOR PERSONAL COMMUNICATION. [VERB] TO LEAVE AND DISCOVER MESSAGES POINTING OUT WHAT COUNTS.

Via Ben

Video telephony, the service believed to be the key differentiator for 3G seems to have a lot of problems on the Asian market.

Speaking at the 3GSM World Congress Asia in Singapore at the end of September, Jan Nilsson, president of Taiwan cellco Far EasTone, said he "was not convinced" that mobile video telephony would become a strong revenue generator. "To have two types of phone and set up a video call is still very difficult," he points out. "We are testing and testing and testing these handsets and getting more and more desperate the more we are testing."

Figures from Japan, however, indicate FET’s endless testing could be fruitless. Gerhard Fasol, president and CEO of Eurotechnology Japan, told 3G Mobile that he estimates mobile video telephony usage accounts for less than a half-percent of revenues. "It is not a big service for NTT DoCoMo and is more or less irrelevant for 3G," he said.

Via 3G Mobile, Volume 6, Number 19, October 3, 2004, p. 4