Google’s next Android OS, Gingerbread, will support NFC(Near Field Communication) based services. Especially, Eric Schmidt told that Google will cooperate with payment processing companies rather than compete with them.
NFC is de facto standard of a mobile payment service. But because of distributing mobile infra, it has not been widely used except some countries including Japan. But if Gingerbread supports this function, it would trigger developers making applications based on NFC. Google has already changed a navigation industry via Google maps connected to GPS-embedded smartphone.
And mobile commerce market is growing rapidly. Especially location based social shopping services such as Groupon are successfully appealing to young people. If these kinds of mobile commerce services connect with mobile payments, it would be easy to spread the mobile card without installment of offline infra.
Maybe NFC payment may mean the new paradigm of commerce lifestyle.