Your next Galaxy S smartphone might also be your Visa card. That’s because Visa and Samsung announced Monday that Visa’s NFC payment system will be built into all future Samsung smartphones.

This is a big win for Visa, Samsung and viability of NFC payments. Visa is one of the leaders in the mobile payments space and Samsung is the world’s biggest smartphone maker. Together, the two have a solid chance of making mobile payments a global reality.

Visa is going to power the secure element that runs on Samsung’s NFC devices. The secure element is what allows a payment processor (such as Visa) to talk to a bank.

Apps and wallets can be developed for any number of payment processors and banks (not just Visa) to work with Visa’s secure element inside Samsung phones. The benefit is that by certifying Samsung devices as able to work with Visa’s existing infrastructure, a big part of the battle for getting NFC payments sorted out is won.

Visa has agreements with lots of mobile payment systems. Visa Europe’s John White told us that the company expects to support more than 40 mobile payment systems in Europe by the end of 2013.

Visa also works with Isis, the mobile-payment consortium backed by U.S. carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. Isis supports payments from Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.

A Big Blow to Google Wallet

Visa getting control of the secure element in Samsung smartphones is a big blow to Google Wallet. Since launching on the Sprint Galaxy Nexus, Google has had a hard time getting widespread adoption of its flavor of NFC.

That’s because a big part of Google’s plan is to keep control of the secure element inside NFC-enabled smartphones. As a result, it’s run into trouble with Verizon, which has blocked Google Wallet from its NFC-enabled Android handsets.

That has put Google in a precarious situation where even its Nexus-branded smartphones on Verizon don’t have Google Wallet.

With Samsung choosing Visa — a company that supports more payment types and has more relationships with banks and carriers — Google Wallet’s chances of success look a lot smaller.

Good News For Mobile Payments

While Visa hooking up with Samsung may be bad news for Google Wallet, the deal has a huge upside for consumers. Essentially this means that someone who buys a Samsung Galaxy S IV anywhere in the world will have a good chance at being able to use NFC payments via Visa with a local payment platform.

This is exactly the sort of boost NFC needs to really take off in the payments space in the U.S. and other regions that have been reluctant to adopt it.

What do you think of Visa and Samsung’s bid for mobile payment domination? Let us know in the comments.

One of our proudest achievements was being selected to be the only mobile marketing company using proximity marketing on the Olympic Park. Ad-pods was used to promote offers and deals in the Olympic Stadiums store in and around the Olympic Park.

With an international audience and high footfall we had great success interacting with tens of thousands of handsets.

One of the UK’s largest gym’s has begun to use Ad-pods to promote there special offers and to recruit more members.

BMI Airlines have begun a campaign using Ad-pods to showcase some of there current deals and to drive traffic to their website.

As one of the best budget airlines in the UK we are pleased to welcome them as a customer who is embracing mobile marketing.

A fantastic campaign has been launched using Ad-pods to help the UK’s homeless. This is being done by a charity called Green Pastures. They are raising awareness of the homeless and seeking donations to put some of the UK’s most vulnerable people back into safe and secure housing.

The UK Governments communications specialist HMGCC have begun using Ad-pods for a recruitment drive to target graduates on campus. They have deployed a team across multiple universities to drive more candidates for open positions.

Thames Valley Police have started using Ad-pods to promote at various events to raise awareness of their recruitment drive for new members of the police force.

Once again proving how local councils and police forces turn to Ad-pods for their mobile marketing campaigns.

The Guardian has become one of the latest clients to use Ad-pods Bluetooth and Wifi marketing systems to promote their Job pages and Culture site online.

The Ad-pods have been successfully deployed at various outdoor events and festivals across the UK.

Danone have started a campaign with Ad-pods using the Ad-pod Plus to send our coupons in Carrefour Supermarkets to promote the Activia Brand. Used in store Danone are sending out coupons to shoppers to encourage redemption of a 10% discount and seeking greater brand engagement and loyalty.

We’re about to enter a world where there are more tablets and smart phones than PCs. If you’re in the mobile advertising business, your rocket ship takes off in five, four, three …

This is the dawn of the smartphone age. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at mobile advertising spend. Last week in this space, Derek Thompson showed that consumers are spending 10% of their media attention on their mobile devices while the medium only commands a mere 1% of total ad-spend. Comparatively, the quickly “dying” print medium attracts only about 7% of media-time, but still captures an astonishing 25% of the total U.S. ad-spend, with print receiving 25-times more ad money than mobile.

The disparity between the two mediums gives a strong indication as to how much room mobile still has to grow.

While industry analysts have become increasingly bullish on the growth of the mobile medium and industry behemoths like Facebook are building out their mobile capabilities with the recent acquisitions of Instagram, Glancee, and Karma, it is perfectly clear that advertisers have avoided chasing consumers’ eyeballs into this medium. While the ad-spend numbers don’t quite match the perceived growth, a closer look shows us that we are actually beginning to enter the golden age of mobile and that the advertising spending will follow. To fully understand this trend, let’s examine the features that characterize the rise of mobile today: its diversity, quality, innovation, experimentation, and cultural influence on society.

The diversity of tactics in the mobile medium is astounding. Advertisers now have an extremely robust palette of mobile tools to choose from to connect their messages and experiences with their desired audiences thanks to advancements in mobile ad units, mobile search, mobile apps, mobile websites, and SMS. Each of these mobile tactics is now being successfully embraced by advertisers to drive brand awareness, consideration, purchases, and loyalty.

The quality of the work is at an all-time high. As a judge at the recent 2012 D&AD (Design and Art Direction) Awards, I received a strong overview of where the industry is heading and it’s clear that some of the best creative and technical minds have finally shifted over to the mobile medium. Brands like Nike and their recent Nike+ Fuelband product shows just how far the quality of the work has come where the Nike+ Fuelband app leverages social platform design, Bluetooth integration, and 3D animations. This is a far cry from when mobile ad units were a brand’s main mobile advertising option. The recent addition of the Mobile Lions to the Cannes Advertising Festival will also continue to accelerate this shift in talent and drive up the quality of mobile work in the upcoming years.

Innovation has accelerated. Recently, each innovative mobile product or service seems to beget the next one as the boundaries of the mobile medium continue to be stretched. In the past year, mobile has seen breakthroughs from the likes of Uber, Clear, Path, and Figure as mobile designers look to leverage location information, gestures, and UI advancements to reduce complexity and provide for more compelling services. In the near future, we’ll also start to see more designers attempt to add voice control and personalization to improve users’ experience on mobile.

Experimentation leads to advances. Recently, the apps, Highlight and Sonar were released at SXSW with much fanfare. Both are considered social discovery apps, which help to monitor your location in the physical world and alert you when “similar” people are in close proximity to you. While, both of those apps have had difficulties gaining traction and overcoming the “creepy” label attached to them, they have fueled the imagination of what is now possible using a combination of GPS, open graph technologies, and the social web to find commonalities between people that were not always immediately obvious. Social discovery apps are leading the experimentation charge as the web evolves to become the ‘personal web’, a web rebuilt around individuals.

Cultural Influence on society. More than 2/3 of our time on mobile phones is now used for non-communication activities with the average American spending 94 minutes per day utilizing mobile apps vs. 72 minutes of web-based consumption. Mobile is poised to surpass television as the dominant consumer access point for all media. How we experience life, relationships, entertainment, education, exercise, and work have been completely transformed (for better or worse) because of mobile.

It’s Still Only the First Inning. Despite mobile’s progress and momentum, we’re still only at the beginning of the golden age of mobile. There is still a huge gap between the rapid adoption of mobile and the budgets assigned to it. Brands will need to more than quadruple their mobile budgets to begin catching up to the level at which consumers are embracing the channel. Statistics also show that globally “dumb-phone” users still outnumber smartphone users 5.6 billion to 835 million, meaning that the “upgrade cycle” to smartphones is still in the early stages.

Imagine a world in the next 2-3 years, where smart phones are in the hands of every consumer and tablet sales will exceed PCs. It will be a world where global internet users will double, led by mobile usage. At that time, mobile will no longer be a support medium, it will be THE medium. Today, we’ve already seen apps disrupt multi-billion dollar industries – gaming, retail, media, publishing, small business, photography, and travel.

At this point, not having a mobile strategy / roadmap in place for your brand is a recipe for disruption. The golden age of mobile is here and will be here for years.

Ad-Pods have been successfully used to promote major artists by giving away free music downloads such as mp3′s, wallpapers and has been used to promote artists websites at some of the biggest UK music festivals such as Glastonbury, V-Festival, Reading and Leeds Festival, O2 Wireless, T in the Park and the Download Festival to name a few. Ad-Pods have also been used on Tour with major artists to promote the sale of ringtones and music direct to the fans mobile phones.

At the 2010 Virgin V-Festival in conjunction with Essex Police Ad-pods was the official crime prevention bluetooth tool and the success of the campaign was fantastic with 15,622 phones downloading the crime awareness police adverts! This worked out to be 14% of the total festival visitors downloading these adverts.

CrimeStoppers are running several successful campaigns to reduce crime and raise awareness using Ad-pods Mobile Marketing Systems.

Some really successful campaigns have been at the Super Bikes Championship where they saw the first ever year of ZERO crime at the event. The same formula was used at the Formula 1 and various other huge outdoor events.

They also run consistent and ongoing crime alerts and awareness campaigns in high streets, shopping centres and various UK events.

We are privileged to be a part of this ongoing awareness campaign and it is great to see the technology used for the power of good.

American Express are using Ad-pods to promote their latest credit card offers. Again this is another example of how mobile marketing is going main stream. Large corporations are realizing that the ability to send digital coupons to mobile phones is extremely powerful and should be part of every companies marketing mix.

British Gas the UK’s largest utilities company is using Ad-pods to help with engineer recruitment. They are using our portable bluetooth marketing systems in the engineers vans while out on jobs to raise awareness of engineering vacancies.

This is an innovative and cost effective way to recruit as well as being eco friendly.

Londis is one of the UK’s largest Convenience store groups with over 1800 stores. Londis are now using Ad-pods to send mobile marketing messages to the public for daily deals and in store promotions.

Mobile Marketing makes sense in the retail business because it allows the retailer the opportunity to build more loyalty and convert more passers by into actual buyers instantly.

One of the UK’s Largest Supermarket Chains the Co-op are using Ad-pods for all their new store launches. With their ongoing expansion plan the Co-op use Ad-pods to send messages to the public encouraging them to redeem offers and use the home delivery service.

Once again we are working in conjunction with UK police forces and councils to help raise public awareness on serious issues. Watch this video and see how National Campaign To Drink Responsibly…. One Punch Could Cost You Everything

We are proud to announce that easyHotel part of the Easy Group has come on board as a client for NFC Smart Posters and are also utilizing the Ad-pod Plus for Bluetooth and Wifi guest information. What we particularly liked about their approach to using our products was that they had no interest in selling additional services. They simply wanted to use the products to give their customers a better experience.

Personally i think this shows incredible forward thinking on their part and it will no doubt lead to increased loyalty and redemption in their brand.

Easy Hotel

Honda have started using the Ad-pod Plus to promote at the UK’s largest Westfield Shopping Malls. Honda being the forward thinking company they are have chosen to embrace mobile marketing via bluetooth and wifi to engage new customers and enhance the customer journey.

Working in Conjunction with one of the UK’s most innovative agencies Tiger Red this has been a great step forward into the world of mobile engagement.

Ad-pods have a long running association with many of the UK Police Forces and a recent campaign in conjunction with the Chelmsford Partnership was for the promotion of a Drink Aware campaign. This campaign was designed to be used in busy town and city centre bars and night clubs to create awareness and reduce drink related theft, crime and injury.

The betting giant William Hill have started using Ad-pods to recruit new staff.
As one of the UK’s largest betting chains they are always looking to recruit high level programming staff and have chosen to use Ad-pods to gain additional exposure at the events they attend and exhibit.

A New patent filed by apple suggests the new iPhone 5 will be NFC enabled and this will kick start the NFC handset market into orbit.

If this happens as is expected then the NFC handset market by Easter 2013 will have millions of NFC enabled phones that can be used for smart poster interactions such as coupon downloads and mobile payments.

Read the full article here http://mashable.com/2012/03/09/iwallet-apple-patent-iphone/

Sky News Has just reported this which shows the growth and power of mobile and internet advertising…..

Online and mobile advertising reached a new high of nearly £5bn last year, helped by a massive increase in video and social media adverts.

Internet advertising leapt by 14.4% in 2011, to reach £4.8bn – a £687m rise on the previous year, according to the report from the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB), conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

It was the biggest increase in internet advertising in five years.

Video advertising saw particularly strong growth and now accounts for 10% of all online display advertising.

Expenditure on online video doubled to £109m in 2011, up from £54m the previous year.

The format has grown more than eight-fold since 2008, when video spend was £12m.

To read the full article click the link below

http://news.sky.com/home/business/article/16201613

We have been at the forefront of the mobile marketing industry for years and we see on a weekly basis the huge uptake of mobile marketing via bluetooth and wifi. Just take a glance below at our client list and you will see some of the biggest agencies and brands in the world that have used our technology for marketing campaigns.
 

With the Ad-pod plus you can now send messages to over 95% of the worlds mobile phones either via bluetooth or wifi. This opens up a whole world of possibilities for how you can market your business promotions and events.

The combination of the bluetooth and wifi is an integrated marketing system that cann allow you to gain more online leads and even more app downloads.

See the video below for more information on how this can work for you.

Google Demands Payment Through Google Wallet for Conference …

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — If you want to attend Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, you’d better be prepared to use the company’s technology to secure a spot.

Publish Date: 03/29/2012 0:47

http://fox8.com/2012/03/28/google-demands-payment-through-google-wallet-for-conference/

Google thinking of sharing Google Wallet revenue with Verizon and …

But Google didn’t get to where it is now by not thinking ahead. The company has a back-up plan and if the carriers refuse to join the Google Wallet team, Google will forget about them and instead, put up payment terminals …

Publish Date: 03/25/2012 0:53

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-thinking-of-sharing-Google-Wallet-revenue-with-Verizon-and-AT-T_id28403

Google Wallet teams up with Sprint and Samsung to showcase …

The Next Web first got a peek at Google Wallet back in May, and the NFC-driven wallet went live in September. And in a blog post earlier today, Keren Michelson, Product Marketing at Google Wallet, announced it was teaming …

Publish Date: 10/31/2011 15:52

http://www.mobilesocialhub.com/2011/10/google-wallet-teams-up-with-sprint-and-samsung-to-showcase-service-in-store/

We bring you advertising glass the brightest and most impressive screen display technology that is 80% transparent and is bright and visible in daylight.

Below see a great post from ebay how they are making windows interactive.

Interactive shop window for Give-A-Toy Store

Interactive shop window for Give-A-Toy Store. Jan 18, 2012 by admin. Interactive shop window for Give-A-Toy Store. eBay and Toys for Tots together recently launched the Give-A-Toy Store. For this, they placed an interactive window display …

Publish Date: 01/18/2012 9:24

http://linkbuilding-blog.info/interactive-shop-window-give-a-toy-store/

The Mobile App Market is evolving at such a pace and the stats are through the roof for constant and ongoing growth.

Below is our Video for App Creation and App Delivery this will give you an insight into the app market and how best to market an app.

See some of the latest industry news in the app world…..

Social networking mobile app usage explodes by 240% | TG Daily

There are nearly two-and-a-half times as many people using mobile Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace apps than there were last year, confirming it as the dominatingly largest growth area for the industry. According to the latest …

Publish Date: 06/04/2010 4:19

http://www.tgdaily.com/entertainment/50074-social-networking-mobile-app-usage-explodes-by-240

Mobile App Usage Further Dominates Web, Spurred by Facebook

Mobile app usage further distances web usage. Key app categories set the battleground for Apple, Google and Facebook over the consumer relationship.

Publish Date: 01/09/2012 15:15

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Dominates-Web-Spurred-by-Facebook

Mobile Apps Have Outdone Web Usage! ADOGO

It is interesting to see how the new generation is turning to their mobile device to surf the Internet and perform a myriad of other activities. According to a report by the app analytics company, Flurry, U.S. mobile apps usage …

Publish Date: 03/12/2012 15:10

http://www.adogo.us/mobile-apps-have-outdone-web-usage/