Shopping Via Cell Phones Loses Interest

"Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they would like to use their phones to purchase small items using m-cash. Pepsi and Coke have both teamed up with mobile phone makers for trials in Japan and Scandinavia that will let people point their phones at a vending machine, press a few buttons and charge a soda to their phone bills. However, less than 2 percent of cell phone users have actually tried this....

Meanwhile, SMS continues to gain satisfied customers. The feature is being used at least once a month by 80 percent of mobile phone users in some European countries, according to the survey. Twenty-five percent of respondents in Europe said they used "texting" more than once a day, as did 24 percent of respondents in Asia.

The United States still lags; 89 percent of U.S. respondents have never sent a text message.

Still, SMS is the most popular in the fastest-growing category of cell phone users: those under 25. Fifty percent of people in that group surveyed globally said they use SMS at least once a day. That should help adoption grow rapidly, according to the report." [News.com]

Does any carrier in the U.S. provide any kind of micro-payment system? I think they're too busy defending the four corners that make their box. Do you have any idea how much money the soda machine vendor at my office would make if I could just point my phone at their machine and get a Coke?

And sitting in my workshop today, I thought about how convenient it would be to have IM or SMS available on my cell phone. Checking in with the office, a quick question about what we were doing for dinner tonight, etc.