Curious to hear what happened to your “entrepreneur who is just in a funding round at the moment who has a much better system – it really is as easy as using cash or a credit card and thus has the Buckley seal of approval”

Your 2007 predicitions are pretty hard on mobile payments penetration in the west, so I’m guessing the Buckley seal of approval wasn’t enough to get this entrepreneur off the ground?

I like your blog and I like what you guys are doing at admob.

I believe this is a technology play – the investment is used to develop the technology. It may not be a market play at all ..

As a technology – I dont know who the competitors are – but see my post for global developments in the NFC space ..

Not sure if there is a US NFC player .. If not, this is a winner – purely from a tech standpoint.

Assessing this company from the market development standpoint is only half the picture.

I have been following NFC for sometime now – NFC = mcommerce – very soon – if it executes right

Yeah I did see the NFC thing and I agree with your overall market assessment. However, if the Mobile Lime team could launch such a shockingly bad service first time round, I don’t frankly have much expectation of them doing better next time.

In addition, $10 million is nowhere near enough to launch a credible NFC offering, in my view, as you need to install a hell of a lot of hardware to make it viable. The small merchants they have on board aren’t going to make that kind of investment, which means that they’ll end up paying for the hardware installation and run through $10 million quicker than a quick thing on Planet Quick.

“Change or die” is still appropriate however you want to cut it.

Russell

I blogged about the significance of NFC before
http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2005/12/nfc_-_the_answe.html

In my view, mobile payments will become NFC based(as is already happening in Japan etc)
Kind rgds
Ajit

When I looked at Mobile Lime myself at the beginning I thought the same: strange usability.
However looking deeper it occurred to me that this is not a company whose main focus is mobile payments, but targeted advertising.
See here: https://www.mobilelime.com/mobilelime/home.do?action=marketing

As such I believe that the ‘mobile payment’ part is just a means to get access to mobile phone numbers and purchasing behaviors.

With the business being mobile advertising, obviously the story changes (as well to the VC’s).

However I still think that this might not be the right approach as:
a) this business is a bit deceiving to the end user
b) still has a usability problem
c) assumes that you can send messages to consumers who’s number you collected without permission.

And I think that c) is a serious issue: All advertising pushed to a phone HAS to be in the context of a permission. Otherwise there will be a consumer backlash, if unwanted messages arrive just because you once used Mobile Lime (or any other service for that matter).

Thanks, Robert.