More than half of all U.S. adults own a smartphone. But using them as a replacement for paper tickets and wallets still hasn’t found a home in the mainstream — see the slow adoption of Google Wallet as an example. While this shift will happen eventually, in some industries, it’s a little slower than many would like. Many airlines still don’t take mobile boarding passes. Amtrak, which sees tens of thousands of riders each day, didn’t start scanning mobile train tickets until this summer. And when it comes to showing tickets at sporting events, it’s very hit and miss.

Many companies are chomping at the bit for anything that will drive customers to their mobile apps or sites. The appeal for movies, travel and sports is clear: When you arrive at the venue attached to your ticket, the location-aware iPhone will pop the pass right up on your screen for easy access and scanning — no paper required. For businesses this means faster, more convenient transactions, better data about customer behavior, and more accurate management of empty seats or cancelled tickets.

Early Passbook adopters

Fandango worked with Apple on Passbook before launch. Fandango is the biggest brand in online movie tickets, and it’s also been at this mobile ticketing thing for a year. While there are 2,600 theaters in the U.S. that can accept mobile Fandango ticket, the number of moviegoers redeeming tickets via a mobile device is still pretty low: only around one-third of those theaters see as much as half of tickets scanned via mobile device.

In other words, there’s much room to grow for mobile tickets at movie theaters, a place visited by two out of every three people in the U.S. and Canada, according to the MPAA. So Apple basically endorsing mobile tickets is encouraging to companies like Fandango. ”Passbook is interesting because it brings this to the forefront,” Jessica Yi, chief product officer at Fandango, told me.

An industry that’s not nearly as far along as movie theaters is sports.The folks at StubHub, the online and mobile marketplace for event ticket resellers, sound even more hopeful about the impact Passbook will have on their transition to mobile. The market for reselling tickets is valued at about $10 billion a year, and half of that is being done online through services like StubHub. Still, only 20 percent of their business is on mobile, said Mehdi Ghazizadeh, StubHub’s senior director of software engineering, in a phone call.

“We’ve gone from zero to 20 percent of traffic being generated from mobile in two years,” he said. The big thing holding a fuller transition to redeemed tickets via scanned barcode is inconsistently deployed technology at venues. Attendees, meanwhile, have been pushing for the convenience of mobile ticketing.

“The fans are demanding it, and this is going to be the catalyst, the driver by which venues will finally accept they have to accept this technology at the gates,” Ghazizadeh said of Passbook.

A boarding pass made with Tello’s PassTools service

As if to prove this point, when StubHub’s Passbook integration goes live in a few weeks, it’s starting with just two partners: the University of Texas and Purdue University. Tickets to events at those schools, which are outfitted with the appropriate barcode ticket scanners, will be the pilot program before StubHub’s Passbook option rolls out more broadly to other sports venues between now and early next year.

Outsourcing Passbook integration

Not every company has the in-house development teams that can build Passbook-ready tickets. Enter companies like Tello, which is planning to offer its services for airlines, venues, or any brand that want tickets or passes to work with Apple’s app. Tello’s product is called PassTools, is a WYSIYG-style tool that lets any company build a single pass or thousands of tickets in just a few minutes.

Tello is charging $99 per month for up to 1,000 passes issued each month, $999 per month for up to 20,000 passes. For businesses requiring more, they’ll negotiate. Tello isn’t the only company trying to build a business off of creating Passbook passes — there’s PassKit and PassSource too.

Like StubHub, Fandango and others, these companies see Passbook as an easy way to push the mobile industry forward.

“Eveyrone realizes if Apple does this well, this could be in the hands of millions of consumers very quickly. So they’re asking, ‘How do we particpate in this?’ I think you’ll see pretty rapid adoption later this year, early next year,” said Joe Beninato, founder and CEO of Tello. “Most large companies will be figuring out their Passbook strategy at that point. Some already are.”

Disclosure: Tello is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Koinz already works with the rewards portals for airlines, hotels and banks to allow users to redeem rewards points for digital goods and services like Netflix, Skype and Fandango. Diesel told me a catalog of only 200 titles will be available (the press release had said 500,000), out of Diesel’s larger catalog of around 3 million titles.

“We invested in a new platform a year ago with the idea that these types of channels were going to be key markets in the future and it’s great to see this playing out,” Diesel said in a press release.

Diesel, which launched in 2004, aims to be an open e-book platform that allows readers to read their e-books on any device, usually through the Diesel Reader apps. The store has struggled to gain market share against larger players like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. This deal could help, but Diesel’s titles can’t be read on e-ink Kindles, only through a sideloaded app on the Kindle Fire. Since Kindle is by far the most popular e-reading platform, that limits the number of users who will actually be able to redeem points for e-books.

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According to Fandango, its service accounted for 22 percent of all tickets for “The Hunger Games” this weekend. That tops the prior record-holder, 2011′s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,” at 19 percent of all ticket sales. Over the weekend, Fandango peaked at 17 ticket sales per second for “The Hunger Games” and on Sunday morning, the movie still accounted for 90 percent of all Fandango sales.

Mobile sales were at an all time high; not just because of the movie’s popularity, but also because Fandango’s mobile app is widely supported on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, in addition to the web and SMS. The company noted that last Friday was the single highest day of mobile ticket sales yet. I was busy running a half-marathon and missed the movie, so I’ll just wait to rent it… on my smartphone or tablet, of course.

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According to product manager Austin Haugen, since opening up the Timeline platform this January over 3,000 Timeline apps have been launched, and their implementation has generated huge growth for brands. Two examples that Haugen gave were Pinterest (whose daily active user base has grown by 60 percent since launching its Timeline app) and Goodreads (which has increased daily traffic by 77 percent).

App makers were frequently asked by event attendees “What’s your verb?” — referring to the word defining the app’s updates on Facebook, from “Watch” to “Read” to “Listen,” that group the updates according to category. For apps like the fashion-focused Pose or epicurist Foodspotting, updates link users back to the original sites for in-depth details about the food or fashion being shared.

The potential for Timeline apps is just being discovered by many of the brands. For example, Fandango’s current implementation just allows users to share their movie-watching decisions, but representatives said that future iterations could include the ability to coordinate film-going with friends.

The Onion‘s Timeline app, just launched yesterday, updates the user’s profile with the articles they’ve read and videos they’ve watched, and also now includes The Onion’s “Our Dumb Readers” feature. “Our Dumb Readers” feature highlights what content individual friends are consuming at the top of the site, and also allows users to curate the Onion home page to show just the stories and videos being consumed by their friends.

But while the name of the Timeline app game might be sharing, many of the apps, including Fandango and Vevo, also enable users to turn off the sharing function, which will be important for those users who perhaps don’t want to broadcast how many times they’ve watched the same Taylor Swift video.

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Nuance developed the speech recognition and natural language technology that powers Siri and many other voice assistant services, but it also maintains its own consumer-facing applications under the Dragon banner. Earlier Monday at CES, Nuance announced Dragon TV, a voice interface platform for televisions and set-top boxes. Dragon Go, however, is hardly an exact approximation of Siri. It can’t integrate with the device’s on-board apps and features, but when it comes to searching for content off the device it can match, if not beat, Siri’s capabilities.

Nuance has a stable of 200 content providers ranging from Dictionary.com to Fandango, to which Dragon Go directs queries once Nuance’s network-based natural-language interpretation engine infers the searcher’s intent. For instance, you could tell Dragon Go to play a particular song by a favorite artist and it would either take you to Spotify, where the song would immediately start playing if you were a premium user, or to Pandora, which would play a preset station of that artist.

Asking Dragon Go for show times for a movie, and it would take you to Fandango, where the nearest theaters and their movies schedules would be listed, giving you the option to immediately by tickets. Like Siri, Dragon Go can access Wolfram Alpha to provide answers to scientific or technical questions. For more general trivia or current events questions, it links to Ask.com.

Launching on Android is a bit different than on iOS since Nuance has to test its app for each iteration of the OS. While Nuance said Dragon Go should work on any Android phone, certain features like its media player have to be optimized on a device-by-device basis. So far the list of optimized phones includes: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus S and Galaxy S II, the Motorola Razr, Droid X and Droid 3, and  the HTC Droid Incredible and MyTouch 4G.

Of course, there are plenty of other voice assistants available on Android. Vlingo’s Virtual Assistant performs many of the in-app functions that Siri can and Dragon Go can’t, but now that Nuance is buying Vlingo, it won’t be a competitor much longer. There is also Google’s Voice Actions, but as Kevin Tofel pointed out in his recent comparison between Siri and Voice Actions, there’s not much to compare. Google recognizes specific pre-determined commands, while services like Siri, Dragon Go and Vlingo can infer meaning from natural speech.

Nuance is extending voice and semantic search anywhere it can find a niche, from cars to Websites. Dragon TV marks its latest foray into a new realm of consumer electronics, one that is rather fitting considering how many people like to yell at their TVs. Unlike Dragon Go, a consumer simply can’t download the TV app onto their living room sets, but Nuance hopes to work with connected TV manufacturers, set-top box, and cable service providers to embed its platform in their products.

Dragon TV will work much the same way as Nuance’s other consumer-facing apps, taking in natural language speech commands and spitting out the intended results. For instance, a couch potato could say “go to PBS” and immediately be switched to the local affiliate or “record Dexter” to digitally tape the next scheduled recording of that show. The platform can understand more complex commands, such as “find comedies starring Vince Vaughn,” and even implement Siri-like requests such as sending text messages from the TV or updating a Face book status.

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Of all the tickets sold by Fandango to “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1,” 22 percent were sold via mobile devices, the company plans to announce later on Monday. That’s a record for Fandango that was previously held by the last Harry Potter movie opening in July, during which Fandango sold 20 percent of its tickets through mobile devices.

Fandango’s mobile traffic has soared: it now accounts for 40 percent of all traffic to the company’s site, according to representatives. The company has a variety of smartphone and tablet applications that let you purchase tickets and on Friday it started allowing users to have tickets scanned for entry at participating theaters right from their mobile devices.

Mobile ticketing is not a new idea, but the growing number of people using it for such mainstream movies as Breaking Dawn (the fifth-largest movie opening ever in the U.S.) illustrates just how quickly smartphones are penetrating the market. Buying tickets this way–as opposed to walking up to the ticket counter and buying a paper ticket–also gives Fandango and its partners ways to gather data on ticket-purchasing habits that could help them target likely movie-goers with offers or ads more appropriate to their tastes.

Updated 10:46 a.m. ET to clarify that the film generated the largest percentage of tickets sold via mobile device as opposed to the largest number of mobile tickets.

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Dish Adding Fandango; service will allow users to purchase movie tickets through their satellite TV. (Broadcasting & Cable)

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1Cast Signs Dow Jones, Bloomberg; news video aggregator adds those two companies to its roster, also recently launched mobile apps for Android and the iPhone. (MediaWeek)

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