Bill Ford is, of course, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and the executive chairman of the company that bears his name. He also co-founded a venture capital firm called Fontinalis Partners that focuses on next-generation mobile technologies. Fontinalis is leading a $2.8 million investment round in Masabi with participation from London’s MMC Ventures and existing backer m8 Capital. The company has already gone through several funding rounds, raising $2 million in 2010 and $4 million in 2011. m8 led both rounds.

London-based Masabi said that the strategic investment is aimed at promoting its mobile ticketing technology to U.S. transit agencies, building off of its success in the U.K. (it has 13 transit contracts across the pond), and its recent deployment with Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. To date, the company claims it has processed $50 million in ticket sales worldwide and $3 million alone from the MBTA since its system went live in November.

Masabi’s key product is called JustRide, a cloud-based end-to-end ticketing platform that allows riders to purchase, manage and store transit tickets and passes in their mobile phones. Users can buy tickets from an app in their smartphones rather than wait in ticket lines. For train systems with conductors, the tickets show up as animated watermarks easily identified by ticket takers. For automated ticket systems, the app will display a QR code that will get you through the turnstile. Masabi is also upgrading its software to support near-field communications (NFC) in the future.

Boston, for instance, still utilizes smart card ticketing – which also can be linked to JustRide platform – but the gradual move of its smartphone-toting ridership to the cloud-based ticketing service saves it millions of dollars in ticketing machine and backend infrastructure.

Though smartphone-initiated mobile payments haven’t exactly taken off in the U.S., transit ticketing is starting to become a key component of the digital wallet. The carriers’ mobile wallet Isis may still be limited to two cities, but it’s become popular as a mobile pass for Salt Lake City’s public transit system. Amtrak has started accepting digital tickets on the iPhone, and all of the major airlines now have boarding pass features in their apps.

As for Ford’s interest in public transit technologies, the chairman appears to be throwing his money in the same direction as his rhetoric. Ford has spoken several times about how, at the current rate of growth, the number of cars on the world’s highways would soon lead to massive congestion problems. His proposed answer is coordination between public transit and intelligent traffic management systems to better control of the flow of billions of people as they go about their daily lives.

Fontinalis has invested in many startups designed to make cars smarter such as Streetline, Life360 and Parkmobile, but it’s also invested in companies like Masabi and Wheelz, which go against Ford’s vested interest in individual car ownership.

Bill Ford image courtesy jurvetson via Compfight cc

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The teams that will start accepting Passbook tickets for the first time are the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. The New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals, which began accepting Passbook last September, will again offer the service this season. MLB says there are three more teams that will enable iOS tickets this season, but that are not yet ready to make an official announcement.

MLB was among Apple’s first launch partners for Passbook, which went live with iOS 6 when it launched in September. That surely wasn’t a surprise to baseball fans who know MLB as the most tech-savvy league of all major professional sports. Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media Office, which is the digital arm of the league, responsible for MLB.com, MLB.TV and the At Bat apps, is run by CEO Bob Bowman — who’s speaking at paidContent Live 2013 in April. Bowman has made MLB a frequent and early partner of Apple when it’s come to mobile tech.

Last week, MLB debuted the 2013 edition of its At Bat app for Android and iOS, which included more live, archive and embedded video content, and a new deal to include free game audio access.

He stays ahead of the tech curve by trying to anticipate what the next generation of fans — the kind that grew up with ubiquitous internet access — will want in a mobile experience and how they prefer to interact with their team. The smartphone “is the first screen, not second screen” for them, he told me Tuesday. That means a mobile offering “has to have everything. [The app] has to be slick. If it isn’t hip, cool and easy to use, [fans] are not going to use it.” That’s why “everything we write and plan this is on the first screen.”

That includes using your phone instead of a piece of paper to get into a game, as well as using it to sort stats or watch classic video. But MLB’s mobile efforts are not all iOS all the time. MLB At Bat is also on Android, a platform Bowman said is growing rapidly for MLB.

Right now, he said, iOS users account for 70 percent of the free version of At Bat. But that’s “shrinking every day” as Android has grown — he says thanks to Samsung’s good mobile hardware and its growing cool factor, as well as the Google Play store being better curated by Google.

However, when it comes to users that pay for At Bat — which is $20 per season — 85 percent are still iOS. But that’s changing too, he said. “Slowly.”

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Users will be able to buy their tickets and passes via their smartphone instead of lining up at vending machines. When it comes time to show their proof of purchase, the smartphone application will display an animated watermark with a background color that changes according to the day. The app, which will work on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, also produces a bar code that can be scanned for closer inspection. Smartphone-equipped train conductors will be able to do quick visual inspections of the tickets or scan the tickets to be sure.

The system will be tested this summer with a pilot group before a full launch this fall. It can also work in conjunction with the MBTA’s contactless CharlieCard, allowing monthly pass holders to link their cards to their account and charge them up through their smartphone. The move to mobile ticketing should speed up the ticketing process commuters, many of whom are forced to buy tickets on the trains because there are no vending machines at their stations. It also allows the MBTA to not have to buy or maintain additional vending machines and lowers the cost of handling cash.

Ben Whitaker, CEO of Masabi told the Wall Street Journal that the the MBTA had been trying to build a payment system around its CharlieCards, but the system required a huge investment in hardware placed at every station. By going with Masabi, the MBTA can start migrating a lot of the work to smartphones. About 60 percent of commuters already own a smartphone. Whitaker said using near field communications via smartphones wasn’t an option because the technology wasn’t fully in place.

Going with Masabi is another reminder that while NFC is often touted as a solution for payments and ticketing, simpler barcode-based systems are ready now. We’ve seen the success of Starbuck’s payment system and more recently LevelUp has gotten a lot of momentum for its local loyalty program by creating its own barcode-based smartphone payment system. Ultimately, you just need a system that provides a simple and seamless mobile experience and barcodes are proving they’re up to the task.

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Mobile payments are more reliant right now on digital goods purchases, which is expected to double by 2015 and will account for 40 percent of the market. But the faster growth will occur with NFC, which can be used in retail and merchant locations to buy physical items. Juniper said 20 countries are expected to launch NFC services in the next 18 months.

Developing countries may also help drive mobile payment growth. Markets that don’t rely as much on traditional credit cards and banks are ripe for new payment options. Remittances and money transfers can also be big in emerging nations. Juniper believes mobile payments in developing countries will double by 2013. However, the more mature markets of east Asia and China, western Europe and North America will represent 75 percent of mobile payment transaction value by 2015.

Forrester reported a few weeks ago that mobile payments will hit $31 billion in the U.S. by 2016. While it’s a decent annual growth rate of 39 percent between 2011 and 2016, it’s a more measured forecast compared to what Juniper’s predicting. Forrester believes that mobile commerce will still get going but at a slower pace as companies struggle to understand their mobile investments and how to integrate mobile into their sales operations.

I think the two research firms highlight the two sides of mobile payments. There’s paying for (often digital) goods online using a mobile phone, and then there’s the opportunity to use a phone as a real world wallet replacement. Though online commerce is where things have been most active in the mobile world, the real opportunity is to get into offline payments in the physical world. That is still an emerging market, but if companies like Square, PayPal, Google, and a host of others are successful in convincing people to embrace mobile payments in stores, we could see them really take off.

Is it worth $670 billion? It’s looking more and more plausible. We reported last year that mobile payments was expected to bring in $633 billion by 2014. That’s a tall order, but as PayPal pointed out recently, it’s now expecting to process $3 billion in mobile payments this year, up from its $2 billion forecast in April. Square in May pushed past $3 million processed per day and it’s growing fast. The U.S. still lags behind in mobile payments compared to Asia. NFC still needs to mature here, and consumers and merchants need to be convinced the tech is worth the risk and investment. But things are starting to heat up, and these pie-in-the-sky forecasts are looking more attainable every day.

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Mobile ticketing generally means visually inspecting tickets sent via SMS or scanning barcode images on your phone. But a new San Francisco start-up called MogoTix, launching Thursday, wants to make mobile ticketing fully mobile on both ends, by enabling event holders and attendees to transact using mobile phones.

Event producers can go to MogoTix.com and create a custom web site for their event, from which they can sell tickets, just like Eventbrite. The tickets are then sent via picture message to users that appear like 2-D bar codes.

At the event, organizers can check in guests using a MogoTix iPhone app that scans the tickets. The system can let multiple organizers see who’s checked in, broadcast the names of guests as they arrive and send out alerts to guests a few hours before the event. For users, the benefit is less chance of losing your ticket. You just need to have a phone.

Mobile ticketing is forecasted to grow to 15 billion delivered tickets by 2014, according to Juniper Research. MogoTix hopes picture messaging and mobile ticket-scanning will give it some differentiation.

The company received $115,000 in funding two months ago by a group of angel investors led by Dave McClure and his 500 Startups fund. MogoTix is led by Scott Thorpe — founder of Fynspire, a web development company — and also gets advice from Cass Phillipps of FailCon fame and James Goodman, who built Ticketmaster Online and was one of the first employees of Tickets.com.

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