Russel as usual has a great article about payment options for mobile commerce.

He links the obvious ones, but also some of the less obvious but defacto systems such as Handango.

A day or so ago, I posted about the success of DoCoMo’s iMode and how the content providers were making money. Well, the reason they’re making money is because iMode provided a way for them to get paid right from the start. This in my opinion is what’s lacking right now in the Western world and why this new group is so interesting. Without a standard, your ability to attract paying customers is limited.

I was always fascinated with the DoCoMo model. Super simple yet impossible to integrate into the GSM model. Which brings me to one of the reasons that DoCoMo was so successful in this department and at least the first few iterations of Mobile Internet on GSM werent.

DoCoMo came in with a software company mentality. They didn’t create any revolutionary new standards, as a matter a fact since they started trying to do new stuff they’ve not been doing to well.

GSM was designed by comitte. It was designed by Telecoms Standards engineers, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean GSM works and it works well. However they never tried to think of it as being anything but a telecommunications standard. Where DoCoMo where thinking as a Software Platform, the GSM Engineers were thinking, we need to communicate and charge per minute like we’ve always done.

Now the 4 largest carriers are planning a system that can be billed to the users mobile phones. I think its a great idea. We’ll see if they can work it out.
I’m guessing once all the phones have Java VM’s and gprs we will see some interesting new payment systems.

My old Pals at E-Gold have had a wap based interface to their payment system for years, which at least used to work quite well.
One of my future plans for NeuClear is either a book entry payment system using Digital Signatures or a Digital Cash wallet using Lucrative or similar all based on Mobile Java.