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This week brought with it a flurry of activity. We expanded our head quarters, moving the Dev team into a cool new office downstairs. Keep an ear open and an eye out for fresh new developments and updates to the software!

In the coming week, Murdoc is going to tell us all about his holiday trip to Germany, and Chris is going to give us another installment of the Workaround series, this time he’ll be covering coupon items.

And now, as always, some cool stuff we found in the ether:
• Remember Ted Williams? No, not the baseball icon – I’m talking about the homeless man that became an internet sensation a year ago because of his smooth radio voice. Well, evidently life has taken a turn for the better.
• 343 days. 17 countries. 19 planes. 58 buses. 18 boats. 6,327 photographs. One stunning video.
  
• A step in the right direction – Apple outs itself over labor violations in its supply chain.
• ‘OK Go’ has an awesome music video/slash web project with the folks at Play with Chrome.

It’s the end of the year, and like many, we’re looking back on 2011, the highlights, the lowlights, the mediumlights. Our team has doubled in size this year, and with that comes many different influences, no better representation of that is the 2011 MerchantOS MixTape – here for your listening pleasure…

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It’s been kind of a slow holiday week here at MerchantOS with folks in and out on their holiday vacations. In the office it’s been steady, but not too busy. As I mentioned in earlier posts, we’ve been growing a lot, doubling the size of our team just this year. Our growth is starting to stress the capacity of our current offices, and as of the 1st, our Development team will be moving to an office on the floor below us.

On the blog front, there were a couple of cool posts this week. Like a lot of people, we took the opportunity provided by the refreshing of the calendar to take stock and lay out some goals for the coming year in our awesome New Year’s Resolutions post.

Another cool blog post was ‘Doing What We Can’, which detailed our, until now, secret corporate giving program. See, turns out that we’ve been giving away our software and customer support to a bunch of non-profits over the years. So I put together a little showcase of all those great organizations.

Check out those great blog posts, and stay tuned for more! We’ve got some exciting plans for awesome content in the New Year, and we’d love to hear input from you. If you’re a customer, what do you want to hear about? What’s helpful? Drop us a line!

Link Roundup

The end of the year is always fun on the interwebs because it brings a ton of fun ‘Best of’ and ‘Top 10′ content from everywhere. We love this stuff, and I pulled together some of the coolest content I could find for our final Weekly Rewind Link Roundup of 2011. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

• Every year, DJ Earworm’s ‘United State of Pop’ a mashup of the year’s best pop songs is one of the things I look forward to the most.
  
• TechCrunch reported 6.8 million iOS and Android devices activated on Xmas day.
• Steve Jobs, Arab Spring, SOPA… ReadWriteWeb lays out The 10 Biggest Web News Stories of 2011
• Arstechnica feeds the inner nerd with a great layout of all the biggest science stories of the year, and why we’ll still be talking about them next year.
• Not everybody is just looking back, Mashable offers us 5 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012.
• One of my personal favorite sites, the 99%, culled together their best content of the year in their ‘Best of 2011: Our Most Popular Tips, Interviews & Think Pieces’ – which is sure to steal at least three or four hours of my life this weekend!
• If you’re anything like me, you dread the mess that the holidays can bring. Being such a busy time, I often don’t have time to take care of regular stuff, much less all the extra that can manifest. Lifehacker offers some life-saving tips on How to Dig Yourself Out from Your Leftover Holiday Clutter
• Every year at about this time, the New York Times’ David Pogue honors the best tech ideas and innovations of the year. Lots of great stuff this year, as usual. I present you with: The Seventh Annual Pogie Awards

Happy New Year!

Have a safe and fun weekend!

In a recent post – The End of the Wallet As We Know It – I described the current landscape in the ever changing world of mobile payment processing, laying out some of the history and giving a snapshot of where we were, at least as of that day. Well, in the tech world things rapidly change, and just a week later there’s been what could be a major development.

The big four of the credit industry (Visa/Mastercard/Discover/American Express) and the big three of the mobile telecom industry (AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile) have announced that they are joining forces with Isis a Mobile Commerce Platform originally created as a joint venture between the telecom giants.

This of course, is a big deal, and it’s sure to cause a stir at Google and PayPal. In an email to Google, I asked for their response to this news. Nate Tyler, from Google’s Global Communications and Public Affairs department, responded by saying that, “Mastercard is still a valuable partner to Google Wallet. The variety of players in this market speaks to the promise of mobile wallets.”

I also asked Nate whether Google Wallet will run on the Isis platform, or if Google will be creating a proprietary network of their own, to which he replied, “Google Wallet is an open commerce ecosystem — meaning we’re open to and can work with any of the carriers, banks and so on. But, we don’t have anything to announce today.”

So, Google seems to be playing it cool as I expected. I can only imagine that this announcement is a motivator for the folks at Google and Paypal to kick it into gear and get their versions of the mobile payment future out in the marketplace.

(PayPal had not yet responded to our inquiries as of press time.)

There are sure to be more exciting developments down the road. Stay tuned!

…Why You Should Feel Fine.

Sides are being drawn.

The bigwigs of the payment industry and the tech industry are gearing up to launch into the mobile payment system field, and all signs point to the possibility of a future without the need for credit cards or cash.

So what are the options, and who is going to come out on top? I’ll try to make some sense of it all for you.

Google Wallet

Google seems to be jumping out of the gate early with Google Wallet, their partnership with Mastercard and the credit giant’s PayPass technology. Additionally they’re working with point of sale companies and retail brands on what they’re calling the SingleTap shopping experience, where with a “single tap” of your Google Wallet you can pay with a credit or gift card, redeem promotions, and earn loyalty points. They have a long list of partners, including big names in retail like Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Foot Locker; and dining like Noah’s Bagels, Subway, and Jamba Juice.

The glaring downside for Google is the limited scope of their product so far. Mastercard is a huge partner for sure, but actually, only people with Citibank Mastercards will be able to use Google Wallet. Additionally, it is only available on the “Gingerbread” smartphone, which is only available from Sprint, the nation’s third largest carrier. So, in order to use Google Wallet you have to own one particular phone, available on only one network (which is the smallest of the big three), and you have to have a Mastercard issued by Citibank. While it’ll undoubtedly grow over time, early adopters are going to be the ones who drive this technology, and a smart company will have as many doors open to their new services as possible. The limited access Google is offering could be a huge liability.

ISIS

Another potential game changer is ISIS – the joint venture (AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon) mobile commerce network. Three huge carriers with multiple phone options could have been a real threat to Google Wallet. However, they’ve recently scaled back from their initial goal of creating an original NFC payment system, to serving as a “mobile wallet” for existing credit card companies. The potential positive with that decision is that the option for consumers to use their phone to make purchases while still using their existing credit accounts could be the bridge needed to warm the market to the idea of making mobile payments at all, especially among consumers who have security concerns.

PayPal

PayPal has a huge footprint in this market and a ton of skin in the game. They’ve already provided payment services for over ten years, have over 100 million active accounts, and are expected to facilitate more than $3 billion in mobile transactions this year alone. They are ambitious, boldly predicting that people will be able to live solely off of mobile payments in just three years time. Paypal MUST be doing something right, as Google is snatching up their former executives to work on Wallet.

Oh, and of course VISA and American Express are each developing their own mobile payment systems, but not being tech companies, I don’t think we should expect much from them. They’ll be looking to recarve their niche in other ways.

Demand?

I also have to mention that I don’t think there’s a ton of demand for this technology, at least not right now. How often have you heard someone (an average consumer – NOT a technophile) express interest in this kind of service? Probably not much, if at all. As I mentioned above, security is a big concern among tech-wary consumers as well.

Really though, only time will tell. After all, millions of people didn’t know they wanted an iPhone until it was released either. If you’re a retailer, just make sure you seek input from your customers before making a big investment on any new technologies in your stores.

No matter what happens, you win!

When it comes down to it, all of this jockeying for position and maneuvering to gain a foothold in this new market will only create more competition, better options, and enhanced technology. We could see Big Credit shaken to it’s core by a brand new payment system standard. We could see lower rates and fees across the board for both retailers and shoppers as traditional credit card companies are forced to actually compete for once in a wide open market against dynamic tech companies and their fresh ideas. It’ll be fun to watch it all play out, and ultimately, when all the dust from The Great Payment System Platform War of the 21st Century finally settles, the real winners will be you and I.