As Expected, Sony, DoCoMo Announce Plans For Payment Service

In the latest in a long line of "least well kept secrets" in the technology world, Sony and DoCoMo have announced plans to create a joint venture to create a system to do payments via mobile phones. We talked about this last week. Sony is basically taking their smart card payment technology and bundling it into mobile phones. Yet another step towards removing the need for a wallet. My question, though, is whether or not it really makes sense to build a joint venture around this, as it may limit Sony's ability to get the solution adopted by others who compete with DoCoMo. Derek's Addendum: Here I go again, but why is the media talking about planned Japanese mobile commerce solutions instead of live solutions commercialized in Korea for over a year? The Moneta Card is a smartchip installed in SK Telecom phones that uses both RFid at subway turnstiles, or InfraRed at retail points of sale to pay for goods and services. There are over 300,000 stores equipped to work with the SKT mobile phone payment chip, which includes P2P, and stored value accounts as well as a Visa card.

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