Bye Bye Cash/Credit... Hello Cell Phone??

On an unusually hot San Francisco morning in mid-September, a customer walked into a Peet’s Coffee location, bought a cup of brew and paid for it by waving their Samsung Nexus cellphone at a receiver, and became one of the first people to use a so-called mobile wallet in North America.
Such cellphone payments have been common in Japan, South America and Europe for years, but they're only just getting off the ground in Canada and the United States. Internet search giant Google launched Google Wallet last month and a crush of others are expected to follow.
The advent of the mobile wallet is made possible by the deployment of near-field communication, or NFC. It's a technology that lets devices exchange data when they're in close proximity, requiring far less power and time to configure than the Bluetooth protocol.
Google estimates half of all smartphones will have built-in NFC by 2014. Many devices already possess the chips, including Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Bold 9900 and Curve 9350 series, and the Samsung Nexus S 4G.
But mobile wallets are just one part of the explosive growth of mobile commerce. Besides online shopping, which has been around since the last millennium, customers are now also using smartphones to scan barcodes and comparison shop in-store, read product reviews, collect digital coupons and even transfer funds to settle bills in restaurants between friends.
Worldwide payments using mobile devices hit $170 billion in 2010 and are expected to reach $670 billion by 2015, according to telecom analysts Juniper Research. Of that, $100 billion is forecast to come from digital wallets — customers waving their cellphone at a payment terminal.
And though Google Wallet won’t have its trial run in Canada until early next year, Canadian retailers who put off exploring their mobile commerce options do so at their own risk, according to trend-watchers.
“Canadians have one of the highest latent demands for mobile wallets,” said Ron Caughlin, vice-president at the Canadian branch of global market-research firm TNS.
While only 11 per cent of Canadians are currently using mobile devices to make payments or do banking, 41 per cent want to, according to TNS’s 2011 Mobile Life study, which surveyed 1,000 people in Canada and 34,000 worldwide.

WOW CANADA IS AHEAD OF THE CURVE!!!!

SOURCE!!!