In the past few months and weeks we are increasingly hearing concrete steps taken to bring mobile payments to the main stream retail. Chains like McD and Starbucks trying to work with Paypal and Square respectively to launch mpayments across their outlets. The promising thing is that we are now seeing serious big players getting involved rather than small SMB merchants. It would give the necessary push for the mpayment services since these companies would help in doing the required marketing and customer education for mpayment services.

The key challenge now is the standardization of the various technologies. Hope the lack of standardization does not cannibalization the market by individual players using their own technologies and approach that will act as a major hindrance in adoption of this technologies.

McD/Paypal Initiative in News : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408640,00.asp

Starbucks / Square Relationship : http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/08/retail-payments