MasterCard recently hired Mung-Ki Woo, who was once the Vice President of Mobile Payments at one of Europe’s largest operators, Orange, to lead their newly formed mobile unit. Having worked at Orange since 2005, hosted some of the first trials of near field communication (NFC) technology, and coordinated a huge NFC push that’s due to take place in France this year, Mung-Ki Woo brings enough real world experience and knowledge of the mobile payments sector to MasterCard that it’d be surprising if we didn’t see MasterCard logos on smartphones starting this time next year.
All the things that need to happen to get mobile payments off the ground are finally starting to take place. Last month Samsung shipped the first device to run Google’s new Android 2.3 operating system that adds support for NFC. While the NFC chip in said device isn’t being fully utilized due to the rush to make the holiday shopping season, Google has publicly stated that they’ll be updates coming soon that give Samsung’s Nexus S more NFC functionality. Likewise the American operators who joined together in 2010 to form Isis, a mobile payments platform that works in conjunction with competing payment partner Discover, are expected to launch the fruits of their labor sometime this year.
Will mobile payments actually take off in 2011 however or is it something that’s better left for 2012? We think that the plumbing required to make this stuff work will be installed over the next 12 months, and that users will only start buying supporting devices in 2012. We wish we were wrong, but the mobile industry is notorious for hyping things, failing to deliver, and then bringing their things to market a year or two later than originally anticipated. Once NFC does come out however, we’ll be throwing our wallets straight into the garbage bin!
[Via: mocoNews]
[Image above via this video interview]