Authentic opportunity? Enabling the audience to avoid counterfeit products could mean real big business.

Related story: REAL FINE WINES GET RFID CONNECTED >>

KEY MOBILE TRENDS: NFC, counterfeiting, RFID, internet of things, logistics, big data.


Currency, clothes, Converse, cosmetics, and car parts. Airplane brakes, batteries, baby formula, and watches. DVDs, pocketbooks, toothpaste, pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, and toys. If it gets bought, it gets faked, and even some of the world's most reputable retailers have found counterfeit goods in their inventory, and are often victims of fake returns and low-life distributors.

So, could all this fakery be a genuine opportunity for smartphone vendors, components makers, security firms, and developers? Yes.

According to some stats, the counterfeit economy is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Add in the monetary value of reputation-killing headlines like exploding phone batteries and electrocuting chargers and it's clear that brands around the world have every incentive to fight the fakes. But perhaps now it's time to enable the consumer to protect themselves.

In the wireless world, we've been talking about the real opportunities in checking authenticity for years. But now the technology enablers are really falling into place: well-connected devices, NFC, RFID, low-cost components. And the incentives are huge.

Here's one interesting use case for the implementation of connected anti-counterfeiting technologies: fine wines. Expensive wines, as well as other high-end spirits, are sometimes consumed years after purchase, and far removed from the original point-of-sale. Selinko, a firm specializing in end-to-end authentication solutions, is working with distillers to digitally certify bottles using RFID tags which allow retailers and consumers to authenticate the items via NFC-enabled smartphones (apparently only Android-based devices at the moment). As the secure RFID tags provide a unique identity to each bottle, this goes beyond barcode scanning.

Systems such as this also provide consumers, retailers, distributors, and manufacturers with more detailed information about the products and their flow via the logistics chain. Educating the audience about the wide problems of counterfeits could drive the creation of a new service industry and a smartphone upgrade cycle or two.

So, for smartphone vendors looking for opportunities to complement shrinking margins, this could be the real thing.

Blacksocks scandal? At $19 a pair, do socks really need RFID, or is this just abuse of available technology?

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I don't mean to knocks this great idea for socks.

For $190 you get a box that is filled with smart black socks.

And with these smart black socks comes a little black box.

This little black box can help you sort your special dark black socks.

But what if you lose your dark black box before you can sort your smart black socks?

Perhaps it's me and I'm a bit over the hill,
But is this the sort of thing that is technology overkill?

Will Swedish Swish be a slam dunk? This new Nordic mobile banking service enables immediate money transfers among individuals.

Swish website (in Swedish) >>

The best defense is a good offense.

A group of Scandinavian banks have just introduced a mobile person-to-person finance service in Sweden called "Swish." Cool name. Will it score with consumers?

Swish enables individuals to transfer money to other Swish users in real time. Swish uses bank accounts together with mobile numbers as user identifiers, which should make the service secure. One use case shown several times on Swish's website is payment for second-hand items: a bike, a chair, etc. Rather than bringing cash to pay for such items, an immediate bank transfer can be made between the buyer and seller. The Swish website also proposes its service as a convenient way to borrow money and repay loans among friends and family.

Most of the major Swedish banks are partners in Swish: Danske Bank (Sverige), Handelsbanken, Länsförsäkringar, Nordea, SEB, Swedbank, och Sparbankerna, yet some large banks are still missing as are regional banks. Swish offers its app for the iPhone and Android-based smartphones. (Windows Phone, Symbian, and BlackBerry devices continue to be left out in the cold and could give Swedish consumers one more reason not to avoid those platforms.) The service goes live autumn of 2012.

To be clear, Swish is certainly not unprecedented and in some ways shows how banks have fallen behind in innovation as services such as Bump and PayPal among others have taken the imagination initiative. And many developing markets have now leap-frogged Western markets when it comes to mobile finance.

There are no details given on the pricing of the service other than a note that each bank will price it as they see fit. Swish is a solution for a very marginal problem, and the fact that it can't be used to make payments at any commercial locations means that the only right price for the service is free.

Services like Swish brings us no closer to the mobile wallet. That's still a long-term wish.

Nice intentions. But will services like Swish be a slam dunk?

Google Wallet. The cards are in it.

Back in the year 2000, I saw a great presentation about the potential of the mobile wallet. The presenter was working with the world's largest handset maker at the time, and he gave a convincing mobile finance pitch: he pulled out his wallet and began pulling out one plastic card after another after another after another. The use case was clear: this mess would be cleaned up with an electronic wallet embedded in our handsets. The presenter assured the audience that within a few years, this would be the case.

So, here we are, almost a dozen years later, and such concepts of convenience haven't gotten very far. At least until today. Google has just rolled out its "Google Wallet" service together with U.S. operator Sprint via the Nexus S smartphone. The Nexus S is a vanilla Android phone, but Google did have the foresight to NFC enable the device, thus making it a good technology demo machine for mobile finance.

Eventually, a MasterCard, Visa, American Express and/or Discover card could be embedded in your device as well as many loyalty cards to be used at payWave- or PayPass-enabled point-of-sale terminals.

Will Google Wallet succeed? One thing is for sure: Google's timing is very good: the cost of NFC has come down considerably, and we can expect most mid- to high-end smartphones coming out over the next few years to be NFC enabled. And Android's critical mass could be the key driver: around 50% of new smartphones shipped run Android. But success is a double-edged sword, and the other major U.S. operators aren't so keen to give up this business development opportunity. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile have their own mobile payment partnership project, ISIS. And Apple will likely give Google and the operators a run for their money with the iPhone 5.

So who will spark the mobile finance market for real? My money is on Google. They have the global reach, critical mass, adjacent services, and name recognition to pull this thing off. It's in the cards.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsaJMhcLm_A