RFID iPhone's iMoney plan sets stage for growth

Those RFID-reading iPhone stories just keep spinning around, boosted by news that Apple staff now wield iPod touch-based payment taking systems. It’s pretty clear Apple’s headed in a direction which includes payment processing systems through its devices, a direction competing company, Nokia, has tried - and failed - to take for years.

iPhone won’t be the only mobile payment system, but it might be the best - after all - will you truly be ready to entrust your bank details to Google’s more openly-developed Android OS? Certainly not until it has proven itself more widely in the open market.

These payment technologies (NFC, Near Field Communications) are likely to proliferate in the months ahead, and will be built into one in six phones by 2014, generating total transactions in excess of $110 billion (Juniper Research).

“NFC is poised to enter an operational build up phase culminating in mass service rollouts across many countries, typically in metro areas driven by transport ticketing,” predicted Juniper Research analyst, Howard Wilcox.

Rumours that Cupertino has been showing interest in these technologies have percolated since soon after release of the original iPhone. These were boosted by our revelations last week of prototype iPhones blessed with RFID readers which are expected to reach market next year.

Near Field Communications (NFC) is a two-way standard for low-power-short-range radio communication. Apple has previously submitted a patents describing implementations in which the iPhone is enabled to read RFID tags.

We also know developers are already looking at solutions which enable use of the device as a payment processing tool. Representatives from the venture capital fund handling the $100 million iPhone developer ‘iFund’, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, took a look at yet another such solution, which is being developed by Billing Solutions last year.

Apple’s secret sauce will be its understanding and control of a computer platform beyond the mobile device and its huge installed iTunes user base. As the Register notes, “Nokia has been pushing NFC for years, so why could Apple succeed where Nokia has failed, and more importantly, why might it choose not to?”