Imagine walking into your favorite cafe and instead of waiting in line to place your order for a large iced nonfat latte and handing over your debit card, you submitted your order and authorized payment from your bank account via an application on your phone.

You can’t do that now. But it’s very possible that some day you will. It will be a big leap forward getting banks, credit card companies, retailers, and cell phone makers–not to mention consumers–on board with this idea. But a few companies are beginning to provide digital stepping stones to what someday could be a wallet-less future.

On Thursday, Intuit and Mophie (maker of the JuicePack battery for iPhone) will introduce the Complete Credit Card Solution, which fits over the iPhone 3G and 3GS like the JuicePack and has a credit-card reader that uses Intuit’s 18-month-old GoPayment mobile payment software. It will be available as an iPhone accessory in Apple Stores.

The idea is to allow small businesses or anyone who needs to process payments that doesn’t have a permanent place to plug in a cash register to be able to accept something other than cash on a device many people already have. The hope is consumers would find this more convenient than keeping cash on hand when they want to make a purchase, even from a nontraditional retailer.

While plastic and cash are still the way the vast majority of retailers do business, that could change over the next few years as smartphone usage continues to skyrocket, and more personal finance details are being taken care of online and on the phone. Hardware makers, banks, and payment processors are at least dipping a toe into the water by participating in trials or offering new ways to pay people without using plastic or cash.

The rest of the field
Intuit is not the first to do a smartphone-attached card reader. Verifone developed a card swiper for the iPhone to enable small businesses to accept and process payments on the spot without need for a cash register. Then a smaller company called Square came up with a similar solution to allow everyone from food trucks to Craigslist sellers and other small businesses to offer a legitimate way of accepting payment without the need for large sums of cash to change hands.

Now in a sign that the trend is entering the mainstream, even the big companies are jumping on board. Intuit is the company behind Quicken, QuickBooks, and now Mint.com, and thinks mobile payments are going to be a booming business in the next few years. The numbers they’re looking at are $11 billion in mobile point-of-sale transactions by 2013.

Card readers are just one way of processing mobile payments though. Contactless payments is something that has been tried for years using cards or a clip for keychains and is now starting to be integrated into the smartphone.

DeviceFidelity recently released a case and microSD card for the iPhone that will make Visa charges by waving the phone near a contactless payment terminal.

PayPal, the company that brought online payments into the mainstream, is envisioning a fully digital “mobile wallet” someday, but it will begin with something more like the trial they began recently with BlingNation.

The BlingTag is a sticker that goes on your phone and uses NFC, or near field communication, a technology like USB that can transfer data over very small distances, up to 4 inches. An RFID chip in the sticker authenticates transactions made between the phone and a BlingNation payment console, which a retailer would have to agree to carry.

“NFC is considered the holy grail of getting the mobile phone to [be used in] point-of-sale” transactions, said Todd Ablowitz, president of Double Diamond Group, a payments consultation company in Denver. But it requires an infrastructure to be in place to gain any real traction.

“It takes handset makers, financial institutions, retailers to be on board, with a reader that can read it. The chicken and the egg is…how do you issue payment if no one can accept it?”

There have been baby steps on the part of wireless carriers in this department. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have reportedly teamed up with Discover and Barclays for a pilot program in some U.S. cities where people can use their phones in place of a credit card. If it were to happen, such a partnership could pose a major challenge to Visa and MasterCard.

Forrester mobile analyst Julie Ask says trials like PayPal-Bling Tag and the Discover-carrier partnership are just that and have a long way to go before they become anything more permanent.

“Banks, carriers, handset manufacturers, and retailers with point-of-sale terminals need updated hardware and software,” she said. “A lot of pieces have to come together for that to happen…I don’t see it yet where we get to a point where I leave my wallet at home instead of my phone.”

But, she says, anything could happen if someone came out of left field.

Say, for instance, the maker of one of the most popular mobile devices in the world. Apple recently hired Benjamin Vigier from mFoundry as mobile payments product manager, and there was also word that Apple had outfitted an iPhone with near-field communications chips for testing last week.

If true, Apple’s entry into mobile payments–perhaps opening up iTunes as a way of paying for things besides music, videos, books, and mobile apps–would quickly push the idea of using a mobile device for payments into the mainstream since what Apple does in the mobile world (see iPhone, iOS, iPad), competitors tend to bend over backward to follow.

But the bigger question to all of this is why. Why would retailers or banks, for whom credit or debit card purchases are working well, want to introduce this?

“You’ve got people doing more things with their mobile phones and you’ve got payment schemes which are looking to capture nonelectric types of commerce,” said Ablowitz of Double Diamond Group. “If you can convert cash to electronic (payments) you’re gaining a lot of share.”

Hurdles
Besides infrastructure and convenience, security is a major concern–especially when companies you’ve never heard of–Bling Tag, for instance–are suddenly dealing with your money. And when seemingly random people–Craigslist sellers, food-truck cashiers, etc.–are suddenly equipped to swipe your credit card.

The Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports, says it’s concerned about this new wave of payment options and that consumers may not be fully protected. Earlier this week, the group issued a statement that urged mobile payment providers and facilitators to “make sure that they are at least as safe for consumers to use as traditional credit card and debit card payments.”

Hardware manufacturers, like Mophie, say that they’ve tried to be extra “paranoid” about security. The Intuit and Mophie system ensures that credit cards swiped on the device are safe by using hardware encryption that does not store credit card numbers on the device or the phone. Once the card is swiped, the iPhone sees only the last four numbers of the card, and the encrypted packed of data is sent to the bank for authorization, according to Ross Howe, vice president of marketing at Mophie.

But even being extra careful isn’t the only concern. Managing for fraud and having the resources to compensate people when it happens (an invariably it’s going to) is tough, as Square discovered and explained to customers earlier this year.

But besides an unknown company trying to get into payment processing, turning phones into credit card readers is likely not the future of mobile payments anyway.

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Google could be ready to turn Gmail into a communications hub by adding the ability to make phone calls from the Google Chat interface.

CNET has learned that Google is testing a Web-based service within Gmail that will allow users to place phone calls from their in-boxes. It’s launched from the Google Chat window on the lower left-hand side of a Gmail page and allows users to place and receive calls from within their contacts through a user interface that strongly resembles the one used in Google Voice.

Google has been edging in this direction for some time. Google Talk was released years ago as a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) desktop client, and it has also spent a lot of time and money evangelizing Google Voice, a service that transcribes voice mails and allows users to have one phone number that rings multiple phones.

But a Web-based VOIP client–which is what the new service appears to be–is another matter entirely. This is the likely culmination of Google’s work to integrate Gizmo5′s similar product, which it acquired late last year, into its arsenal. Hints that such a service was coming first surfaced in June on the Google Operating System blog, which is not affiliated with Google.

It’s not clear if Google Voice will be changing, or whether this new service is a completely separate offering. The user interfaces appear the same–for example, the same icons are used to label missed calls or placed calls–but Google Voice is not a VoIP service. Users of the new chat/phone call service aren’t required to have a Google Voice account, and calls placed to U.S. or Canadian numbers will be free, with discounts on international calls as compared to standard rates.

Skype is the obvious target of such an application, but there are lots of companies that make both desktop-based and Web-based VoIP clients.

“Google is always testing new features and products, but we have nothing specific to announce right now,” a Google representative said.

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It was 15 years ago that Microsoft had one of its most successful launches ever–introducing Windows 95. The company managed to get people to line up for hours to be among the first to get their hands on a copy.

The company paid to treat people to free newspapers in London, lighted the Empire State Building in Windows’ colors, and draped Toronto’s CN Tower with a 300-foot banner–all part of a massive $300 million ad campaign that accompanied the product’s arrival.

Windows 95, which was separate from the company’s business-oriented Windows NT product, added a number of features over its predecessors including better network support, the ability to send faxes (yes, there was a time when that was a big deal) along with basic audio recording, audio playback, and video playback tools. Features now thought of as core parts of Windows, such as the start menu and taskbar, also made their debut with Windows 95. Plus, it just looked a whole lot better graphically and was far more stable than past consumer versions of Windows.

Internet Explorer debuted around the same time, but was sold separately as part of Microsoft’s Plus Pack for Windows 95. It was eventually bundled in directly with the operating system in an update to Windows 95 released the following year.

By the time Windows 95 was finally ushered off the market in 2001, it had become a fixture on computer desktops around the world.

“If you look at Windows 95, it was a quantum leap in difference in technological capability and stability,” Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald said at that time.

A decade and a half after Windows 95 hit the market, though, one question looms large for Windows? Are all its best days in the past?

Clearly it was a different time and Microsoft might be hard pressed to capture that kind of consumer attention no matter what it did. But, never mind the long lines, will Microsoft be able to continue to sell Windows at the price and volume it has?

It’s one of the most important questions facing Microsoft as a company. While the company has expanded far beyond its Windows roots, Windows and Office remain the engine driving the vast majority of the company’s profits even as it looks to cell phones, search, and online services to augment its mainstay businesses.

At the moment, the Windows business is doing quite well, with Windows 7 selling at an impressive clip. Indeed Windows 7 is selling far faster than Windows 95 did in its early days, though that’s as much a testament to how large the PC market is as anything else.

The longer-term question is whether Windows can outpace what I call the generic Web experience. In the coming years, smartbooks, tablets, cell phones, Netbooks and shapes we probably haven’t thought of will all be capable of delivering the Web, which is for many people their main use of a PC.

For Windows to be as relevant on Windows 95′s 20th anniversary as it is today, the company will have had to manage to evolve the operating system significantly.

I see a few ways this can happen, but none is a sure thing.

First, Microsoft (or a third-party software maker) can develop a new killer app that only runs on Windows. It’s been a long time since this happened, but certainly it’s not impossible. New user interfaces can also be added. Touch is already there, as is voice control to some degree, but gesture recognition such as that found in Kinect could pave the way for new uses.

Second, it could evolve Windows and Windows Live to offer a dramatically better way of doing the same tasks that most people do on the Web. Sure, we can manage our photos and music on the Web today and that is getting easier. However, tapping local storage and graphics, Microsoft has the potential to offer a better way and, with the latest version of Windows Live, is trying to do so.

Third, Microsoft could enhance the value of Windows by having a browser that is demonstrably superior to non-Windows rivals. This appears to be a tall order, given that Internet Explorer, while still leading in market share, has been well behind rivals when it comes to being seen as the technical leader.

For the record, this challenge is not just the one facing Microsoft. It’s also the one facing Apple’s Mac business. And while Microsoft must justify the $100 or so premium that it charges for Windows, Apple commands an even higher premium when comparing the Mac to one of these “generic Web” devices.

But Apple also has another entrant in the game–a viable alternative Web experience delivered in the form of the iPad. Microsoft, at least so far, appears to have only Windows, in its various flavors.

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Because it is based on the established iOS mobile operating system — and because it is relatively cheap and increases productivity — the iPad has found uncharacteristically quick approval from many information-technology managers at U.S. corporations.

Highlighting the success of the iPad in the business world, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday noted that while many companies would not approve the iPhone for corporate use when it debuted in 2007, the iPad has quickly found acceptance with IT departments at companies. Part of that is because the iOS mobile operating system, previously only available for the iPhone and iPod touch, has been updated with business-friendly features such as Exchange e-mail and remote erase capabilities.

“Apple has addressed these and other issues, including the ability for companies to encrypt information on iPhones and set up secure ways for employees to connect to corporate networks,” author Ben Worthen wrote. “The latest version of the operating system used by the iPhone and iPad adds features that make the devices easier for a tech department to manage, including the ability for businesses to distribute internally developed apps without going through Apple’s App Store.”

The report noted that more than 500 of the more than 11,000 applications currently available for the iPad are business-oriented. One free application from Citrix, which allows employees to access corporate programs on the iPad, has seen more than 145,000 downloads.

Other advantages to the iPad: its $499 starting price makes it less expensive than a traditional business laptop, and more functional for activities like working standing up or giving a presentation.

The paper recalled that Mercedes-Benz dealers have been equipping employees with iPads to help them sell cars. The car maker began using the iPad at 40 dealerships in May, and earlier this summer said it was considering using the iPad at all 350 of its U.S. locations.

Other specific corporate uses of the iPad mentioned in the Journal’s report include:

• Baush & Lomb Inc., maker of eye-care products, had about 50 employees using an iPad soon after its launch. The company built its own application for salespeople. The company likes the fact that the device starts quickly and has a long battery life.
• Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland, Calif., health-care organization, has been testing the iPad in a 37,000-square-foot technology lab for viewing medical images such as X-rays and CT scans.
• Though Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP banned the iPhone when it first came out, it preordered 10 iPads before it was released. The company now has more than 50 attorneys equipped with iPads, and plans to issue them as an alternative to laptops next year.

Earlier this summer, Apple revealed that the iPad is at use in more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Companies such as SAP and Wells Fargo.

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Hewlett’s Hunger For Acquisitions

Mark Hurd turned out to be a man of hearty appetites — including one for deals. Before resigning as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive this month under a cloud, Mr. Hurd led a mergers and acquisitions tear that included the purchases of 3Com, Palm, and Electronic Data Systems. But any bankers worried that the tech group’s lust for deals might wane after his departure can breathe easier.

H.P.’s unsolicited bid for 3Par, announced on Monday, could even be taken as a sign the company’s takeover libido has been given a boost. If that were to prove sustainably the case, though, shareholders might find it troubling.

A single $1.6 billion offer by a company with a $90 billion market value is, literally, no big deal. And H.P. says 3Par’s data storage technology fits perfectly into its product portfolio in the arena of cloud computing. Moreover, the tech giant can point to early successes from its 3Com purchase.

But 3Par has been on the block for some time. So it’s surprising suddenly to see an unsolicited offer just a week after Dell, H.P.’s archrival, agreed to a friendly deal at the end of a competitive auction.

And there’s the question of price. Dell agreed to buy 3Par for $18 a share. To make 3Par think again, H.P. is throwing down $24 a share — more than seven times its target’s sales, and nearly two-and-a-half times what 3Par was worth before it went on sale. H.P.’s delayed reaction also means 3Par must pay Dell $54 million if it wants to go with H.P. instead.

Companies often wait to see their competitors’ cards before moving. But H.P.’s comportment in this process is curious. Perhaps unfairly, it leaves the impression that under Mr. Hurd the company was less eager to pay up for 3Par, but that with the penny-pinching boss gone, more spendthrift voices are being heard.

That would be a concern for shareholders. And it could explain why muscling in on 3Par, a small and strategically reasonable deal, albeit at a generous price, wiped nearly $2 billion off H.P.’s market cap.

A Tax on Mining

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Australia needn’t. The country’s first hung Parliament in 70 years should not frighten investors. The bad news is that a proposed “supertax” on mining, despite its appealing logic, may not survive the political wrangling.

Two days after votes were cast, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s incumbent Labor Party looks likely to emerge three seats short of a majority in the 150-seat lower house. Australia’s benchmark index has barely budged, and the Aussie dollar has risen slightly. The reason? The economy needs little work. Unemployment is probably as low as it can go, and debt is a meager 6 percent of gross domestic product.

Ms. Gillard must now woo the stragglers, likely to include one Green lawmaker and three independents. With little to play for in terms of economic policy, the bulk of the horse trading will revolve around secondary issues like broadband access in rural areas, water usage and carbon trading.

But the biggest bargaining chip looks to be the proposed mining tax, which would raise an estimated 10.5 billion Australian dollars ($8.94 billion) in two years by applying a levy to mining profits. The opposition National Liberal Coalition is unambiguously against the tax. Labor is in favor, though Ms. Gillard has already watered down the proposal inherited from her ousted predecessor, Kevin Rudd, by cutting the headline rate to 30 percent from 40 percent.

Taxing mining profits rather than levying fixed rents on production, as happens now, is a good idea. It would make the good times less good, but the bad times less bad. It would also capture some of the gains that commodity producers have earned as a result of easy money disgorged by governments, which has helped to push up prices.

While it is too early to call, the odds of independent candidates, who represent rural areas, backing the tax as it stands look slim. That would be a shame. Mining’s contribution to Australia’s economy is easy to overstate — it generates 6.7 percent of the country’s G.D.P. but accounts for just 3 percent of jobs. Yet measured by gross profit margins, it is by far the country’s most profitable industry. If the tax is dumped, the mine operators — not Australia — will have won.

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Worldwide PC processor sales were higher than usual in the second quarter, but signs of a weakening market could lead to a slower second half of the year, a market research firm said Friday.

When compared to the first quarter, unit shipments of microprocessors rose 3.6%, while revenues were up 6.2%, IDC said. The increases were much higher than the average sequential change in a calendar year between the first and second quarters. The average is a 1.6% rise in shipments and a 2.8% decrease in revenue.

The modest rise in revenue pointed to an increase in average selling prices, as computer makers bought more and higher-priced PC processors, IDC said. Specifically, system makers bought more mobile processors and more server processors, while sales of desktop chips remained flat.

IDC predicts worldwide processor shipments to increase 19.8% this year from 2009. However, the analyst firm saw a weakness in demand during the second quarter and said it expected that softness to continue in August.

“Major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) cut PC build orders with their contract manufacturers who, in turn, have cut orders for commodity components,” IDC analyst Shane Rau said in a statement. “While the PC processor vendors re-iterated their solid outlook during their most recent earnings calls, the softness we’ve seen ultimately makes us concerned for end demand’s pull on processors.”

Indeed, for the current calendar quarter, Intel has forecast revenue of $11.6 billion, plus or minus $400 million. In the second quarter, Intel’s best quarter ever, the chipmaker reported a 34% increase in revenue year over year to $10.8 billion, with profit soaring 175% to $2.9 billion.

But IDC said that while the second half of the year is likely to follow seasonal patterns of higher PC sales due to back-to-school and the holiday shopping seasons, the analyst firm said it expected year-over-year growth in the second half of the year to be less than the first half.

“2011 remains a wildcard in terms of sustainable unit growth,” Rau said.

In looking at the major vendors in the second quarter, IDC found only small changes in market share in terms of shipments. Intel ended the quarter with an 80.7% share, a loss of 0.3%; AMD earned 19%, a gain of 0.2%; and VIA Technologies had 0.3% of the market.

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Microsoft today announced that the next version of Office for the Mac will include a pair of key features that debuted in the Windows edition of Office 2010 earlier this year.

Office for Mac 2011, which is slated for an October launch, will offer “Sparklines,” cell-sized Excel charts, and in-app image editing tools, two features that first appeared in Office 2010, the more popular Windows edition that hit the retail market last May.

Microsoft touted the new features as part of its attempt to boost compatibility between the Mac and Windows versions of the suite.

“What we’ve been able to do in Office for Mac 2011 is to bring a lot of power to bear to produce a professional-looking document that’s still compatible with Office for Windows,” said Kurt Schmucker, an evangelist with Microsoft’s Mac team, in a video the group released Wednesday.

Sparklines, which Computerworld reviewer Preston Gralla called the ”most useful” among the changes to Excel 2010 on Windows, lets users drop in bite-sized charts or graphs into individual cells.

Microsoft pitched Sparklines and improvements to Excel’s PivotTables as compatibility wins for Mac users who need to share spreadsheet documents with co-workers running the Windows version of Office.

Previously, Microsoft has made much of the debut of a ribbon-style interfacein Office for Mac 2011, another feature borrowed from the Windows edition.

Office for Mac 2011 will go on sale at the end of October; Microsoft has not yet set a definite date. however. Customers who purchase Office for Mac 2008 through Nov. 30 will be able to download a free copy of 2011 when it’s available.

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Apple has applied for a patent on a method to differentiate between authorized and unauthorized users of a particular iOS device. Once an unauthorized user is detected, the device can then automatically disable certain features or send notifications to Twitter or other services.

The patent, titled “Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device,” describes several ways a device could sense who is using an iPhone or iPad. Among the methods considered are voice print analysis, photo analysis, heartbeat analysis (!), hacking attempts, or even “noting particular activities that can indicate suspicious behavior.”

If the various analyses detect someone who is not authorized to use the device, it could set off a number of automated features designed to protect the device’s data, suss out the offending party, and alert the device owner. Sensitive data could be backed up to a remote server and the device could be wiped. The device could automatically snap pictures of the unauthorized user and record the GPS coordinates of the device, as well as log keystrokes, phone calls, or other activity. That information could be sent along with an alert to any useful service, such as e-mail, voicemail, Twitter, Facebook, or a “cloud service” like MobileMe.

As AppleInsider notes, Apple apparently experimented with enabling the iPad to recognize different authorized users and automatically change some settings for that particular user. Such a feature could be somewhat useful on iPads, which are sometimes shared among family members in homes and among several users in schools and businesses.

This proposed patent takes the capability one step further, by effectively locking out snoopers and thieves altogether, and alerting the device user of possible improprieties. The features would no doubt be welcome to enterprise users, who need safeguards around data that may be on a mobile device.

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Search strings using Diaz’s name have a one-in-ten chance of coming up with a site infected with or spreading malware, said DaveMarcus, McAfee’s director of security research and communication. Search for “Cameron Diaz and screensavers,” and the risk doubles, Marcus added.

As it has for the last three years, McAfee compiled search phrases that contained names of prominent celebrities, professional athletes, politicians and other newsmakers, then calculated the percentage of the resulting sites tagged as dangerous by the company’s SiteAdvisor software.

SiteAdvisor is a free plug-in for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox that flags risky sites — those serving up malware, adware, spyware and the like — in a search result list.

Diaz replaced Jessica Biel, last year’s top name bait. Biel fell two spots to third on McAfee’s list this year.

Actress Julia Roberts placed second on the Most Dangerous list, while supermodel Gisele Buendchen took fourth. Brad Pitt, the highest ranking man on the list and one of only two on the top 10, held the fifth spot.

“It’s a simple fact. The bad guys read the same news as the good guys,” said Marcus as he explained why some celebrities ranked higher than others. He attributed Diaz’s prominence to the fact that McAfee’s list was composed around the time when she was in two currently-showing films, “Knight and Day” and “Shrek Forever After.”

Attackers and scammers trade on the names of prominent people and topical events to dupe users into visiting malicious sites, to open malicious e-mails, and to click on malicious links embedded in Twitter messages, said Marcus.

“Dangerous searches relate to the news of the day,” he said. “In 2008, politicians like President Obama and [former Governor] Sarah Palin were the most abused. We expect politicians to be abused in the future.”

Obama was at No. 49 on McAfee’s list this year, while Palin was right behind the president at No. 50.

Others on the dangerous list included tennis player Andy Roddick (No. 14), and singers Lady Gaga (No. 37) and teenager Justin Bieber (No. 46).

“We’re not saying stay away from searching for celebrities like Cameron Diaz,” said Marcus. “We’re saying be aware of the broad use of their names, and know that criminals are looking for a way to social engineer you, and this is the type of attack they’ll use.”

McAfee released the fourth annual most-dangerous celebrity list Thursday just minutes before it announced Intel was buying the company for nearly $8 billion . Before the interview with Marcus, a McAfee spokeswoman made it clear he would not take any questions about the acquisition.

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