Google's NFC mobile wallet

This year is really getting off to a big start with telematics, the internet of things and NFC for payments, the mobile wallet. Businessweek has a story about Google’s plans to roll out a contactless payment platform.

“It’s a land grab,” says Jaymee Johnson, a spokesman for Isis. “Folks are sort of jockeying for position.”

Land grab or land war in Asia? I tended to agree with Gigaom’s prediction that 2011 would not be the year of the mobile wallet.

The article points out that eBay’s Paypal is considering starting a NFC payment service in the second half of 2011. It has a couple more zinger quotes:

“You’ll be able to walk in a store and do commerce,” says Google’s Eric Schmidt. “You’d bump for everything and eventually replace credit cards”

“NFC could displace the cash register,” says Charles Walton, chief operating officer for NFC chipmaker Inside Secure. “This is going to come superfast.”

I guess this is all stemming from the Google purchase of Zetawire last year. That in addition to the Google Places push and the Nexus S phone would seem to indicate that Google is in fact going to make a big push for NFC payments, now.

To me the biggest hurdle after any psychological end user fear is replacing the point of sales systems.  I know that the Google Places program is a way to accomplish that and that Google has street cred in the local business directory category but there are so many systems to replace or augment and will one NFC system work for all of the NFC solutions coming out? Can your Apple iPhone’s NFC payment app work across a Google Places business device?  I mean I hope so but not much past history would support that assumption.

Looking at the side bar in the Businessweek article and wow, they have a ton of mobile payment articles and media. The last media link is to a video of a VISA representative that for some reason I can’t get to embed, but its a really good video and is very bullish on NFC in 2011.