There has been a lot of fuss about new Mobile Payment solutions and many unsuccessful attempts to get a pie of normal payment solutions. Many have built solutions and applications that need special software to be installed on mobiles and some applications are just waiting for mobiles go internet.

I have been insisting that mobile solutions first must capitalize on the current infrastructure like SMS to make advances in to Mobile applications, in this case mobile Payments rather than targetting for 2 years down the line handsets and usage patterns.

Here is one solution that does exactly that. Simple Mobile Payment solution using SMS.

FEED by Feedtribes is a hot new mobile cash service currently being trialled in Boulder, CO, and in San Francisco.

FEED was initially developed to provide high school and college students with a cool way to pay their favorite retailers while keeping a handle on their finances. “FEED is a prepaid account that is linked to your cell phone. To make a purchase, simply text message your PIN number to the FEED 5-digit short code. A few seconds later you will receive a unique 4-digit numeric transaction code and your up-to-the-second account balance. Simply give the transaction code to the retailer who enters the code and the amount of sale into their POS terminal. The terminal authorizes the transaction against your account and returns an approval code to the POS, which prints a receipt. It’s that simple!”

Source: FEED: The cool new way to pay? at New Ideas In Mobile

Very interesting Cellular Life Styles, that are adding real value to People around the world in quite unexpected ways.

Shared Phone Use

Much of the growth in the telecommunications industry is coming from emerging markets - places like India and Africa and for many new consumers their first mobile phone experience is a shared one. This essay uses the term sharing in the sense of primary usage orientated around borrowing and lending rather than ‘let me show you the photos I took at last night’s party’. Mobile phone sharing is not just limited to personal use - from the streets of Cairo to Kampala kiosks are springing up with little more than a mobile phone and a sign advertising call rates. What happens when people share an object that is inherently designed for personal use? And based on how and why people share in what ways can devices and services be redesigned to optimise the shared user experiences? Indeed, should they be re-designed?

A summary of this essay appears here and a presentation that compliments this essay entitled Shared Phone Practices: Exploratory Field Research from Uganda and Beyond can be downloaded from the resesarch dot Nokia dot com site here [7MB, PowerPoint]. In time, related posts on Power Up: Street Charging Services in Kampala, Rural Charging Services, Community Address Books & Call Logs and the Village Phone, Uganda will be listed here.

Source: Jan Chipchase - Future PerfectShared Mobile Phone Practices

Latest M:Metrics report on usage of User Generated Content and Social Networking indicates that Teens are taking Mobile Content to a new level. Figures mentioned for All Mobile Subscribers are also very encouraging. I expect these number to grow substantially during holidays in Nov and Dec.

M:Metrics examined the usage of photo messaging, video messaging, IM, chat, dating and usercreated content, including video content and ringtones, among mobile subscribers age 13-17 and 18-24 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

User-Generated Content and Social Networking Application* Usage: October 2006

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2006. Survey of mobile subscribers.

Source: M:Metrics News