Significant m-commerce trials are underway in Germany, Finland and France.  Then there’s the trial involving the popular “Oyster Card,” which is a contactless card used to pay for passage in the London underground. Some 500 participants are testing O2 Wallet installed on the Nokia 6131 NFC handset, Nierinck wrote in a recent report. The handset, like a normal wallet, will hold several cards, but in virtual form, she wrote. (The participants include Barclaycard, Nokia, O2, Transport for London; TranSys and Visa Europe.)

But technology is just part of the challenge. Nierinck wrote that success for a mobile payment system “depends upon a business model that provides mutual bene-fits” to all the players: mobile operators, financial institutions, payment infrastructure providers and, of course, the ultimate provider of the service that consumer wants – the public train system, for example, or a retail outlet. “In practice,” she noted, “such cooperative relationships can prove difficult to sustain.” A prime example, she pointed out, was Simpay – a partnership of cell phone pro-viders in Europe that was born in 2003 but fizzled in 2005.

Simpay’s creators were T-Mobile International, Vodafone Group, Orange and Telefónica Moviles. “Simpay was meant to pro-vide a single platform to deal with the routing, clearing and settling of payments made with mobile phones,” the International Herald Tribune reported. “The service was destined to be used mostly for small purchases of less than €10, or $12, but could have been used for more expensive acquisitions.”

When T-Mobile decided to opt out, Simpay dissolved. “Its collapse highlights the difficulties that rivals in any industry have in coming together to promote a service or a standard that could potentially benefit all sides,” the Herald Tribune reported at the time.

There are plenty of success stories, though, and in places that might be considered surprising. Such innovation is being tested and used in the Third World, where weak traditional infrastructure makes creative solutions a necessity, not a luxury.

“Ironically, the developed world has fallen behind in adopting new technologies precisely because its existing systems work well,” New Dehli-based journalist Jeremy Kahn wrote recently in a Boston Globe story. “Mobile banking is less attractive in a world where there are plentiful bank branches and ATMS, not to mention Internet access for online banking.”