10 mobile trends: Should you care?

4. M-payments

If mobile payments are to take off, they will doubtless affect those in the retail sector first and foremost, with some retailers potentially needing to install new infrastructure and security practices to deal with the new payment method.

With few handsets available and fewer retailers involved, it's unlikely that NFC - as attached to a mobile - will become a pressing issue within the next couple of years for corporates. However, NFC used for contactless payments with debit or credit is likely to be writ larger in enterprise thinking - Barclays and Visa are currently trialling a scheme which may yet give the tech the kick-start it needs to become as popular in the UK as it is in places like the US and Japan.

With that in mind, retail and financial sector CIOs may need to start planning for the advent of the technology and how it will affect their infrastructure. However, analysts believe it is unlikely to be a question that bothers even retail CIOs within the next few years.

Ten mobile trends

1. FMC
2. Salesforce automation
3. VoIP
4. Payments
5. 3.5G - HSDPA
6. Location-based services
7. TV
8. Device management
9. M2M
10. Antivirus

Chris Coffman, senior research analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said: "Whether you're the CIO of someone who needs to buy all this stuff or even a company like Fujitsu who do point of sale systems, I wouldn't be too concerned about integrating it all - it's a little ways out. You'll know which direction momentum is coming from as it will be coming from one specific application."

He added a possible kick-start to NFC could come if a scheme was built around Transport for London's (TfL) Oyster card, in the same way successful deployment in Hong Kong has been based around the country's swipe-and-pay transport card, Octopus.

While TfL and its partners did consider such a scheme, it eventually came to nothing and NFC cheerleading was officially taken over by BarclayCard and Visa, who are experimenting with a contactless card with debit card and Oyster functionality built in.

Coffman said: "It's more likely you'll see the scale of specific applications get larger and eventually it may snowball. When people get attached to one form of payment, they start to want to use it for other things."

RATING: 2/5 - though more like 4/5 for those in retail and financial services.