Mobile Payments, Commerce Big in 2012?

There's an unusual finding in Chetan Sharma's most-recent survey of 150 mobile service provider and suppler executives looking at what will be hot in mobile in 2012. The respondents believe mobile payments and mobile commerce will be more popular consumer applications than location services and music, and will be only modestly less popular than messaging.

That is almost shocking. The only way to make sense of the findings is that "commerce" is broadly defined to include checking product availability and prices from a mobile, browsing shopping sites on a mobile device, or looking for a particular store.

The clue is that there appear to have been separate questions asked about use of near field communications, for example. Still, the fact that mobile payments and mobile commerce are considered the second most popular consumer application of 2012 is instructive, even if most observers might agree that the bulk of that activity will take the form of commerce rather than payments.

The other noteworthy finding is that many of the executives expect Amazon will enter the mobile market in a more-direct way in 2012. Mobile executives views on 2012