Mobile Phones Morph Into Credit Cards

"Beginning in March, mobile-telecommunication company Vodafone Group will offer its U.K. customers the ability to use their mobile phones as a type of mobile credit card for making small purchases online. Users can use the m-pay bill service to buy items priced from $0.07 to $7 over the Internet or using a WAP phone, Vodafone spokesperson Janine Young says. The service will charge the purchases to users' phone bills or deduct the charges from their prepaid accounts, Young says....

Payment is authorized by a user name and password for Internet purchases and a PIN number for WAP purchases, the companies say. When users make purchases on the Internet, they do not need to have their mobile phones with them, Vodafone says.... When Vodafone launches its m-pay service in March it will have competition from Paybox.net, which began in Germany in May 2000 and is now operational in the U.K., Austria, Spain, and Sweden." [PC World]

Definitely a big step towards viable micropayments, and yes I know they've had this in Scandinavia for some time now. Can anyone tell me if any libraries in the U.K. or Scandinavia are - or will be - signed on to this service in order to allow patrons to pay for fines, printouts, registrations, etc., this way?

BusinessWeek has what looks to be a very interesting "Special Report" about the cellular industry titled Crisis Mode. It's got the standard hyperbolic headlines, many of which echo the NY Times articles from last week, but these are the articles that I plan to read tonight when I have more time:

• Who'll Survive the Cellular Crisis?
• A Slow Climb from Wireless' Dark Ages
• Here Come the Souped-Up Cell Phones
• No Hiding from a Cell Phone
• Talk 'n' Toss Cell Phones? (SLS folks, these are the phones I talk about in my Information Shifting presentation!)
• Mobile Commerce Is Coming--Modestly, Eventually
• It's a Phone, It's a Handheld, It's...