Samsung explained the new wallet feature along with a list of other launch partners during the developer session:

One of the most popular sessions this year featured the introduction of the open API for the Samsung Wallet service, which allows users to collect coupons, membership cards, tickets, and boarding passes from partners’ applications and store them in one place. The service’s launching partners like Walgreens, Belly, Major League Baseball Advanced Media , Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Lufthansa were announced during the session.

I’m conflicted by the news. It’s actually good for consumers to have similar functionality on both iOS and Android, provided the partner list is generally the same. I don’t want to have choose a platform, for example, because its wallet app is the only one that works with vendors I use. But I have to wonder: Why is Samsung doing this and not Google itself for Android?

This question gets back to the concern I just noted about platform choice. Because this app will only work with Samsung devices, it now becomes a choice of what brand of Android phone to use in support of wallet features. This shouldn’t be an initiative with an original equipment manufacturer; this should be a project for Android as a whole. I don’t blame Samsung; it accounts for more of the Android device market than any of its peers so why shouldn’t it keep pushing ahead?

Regardless, I love the idea of a digital wallet. Although I haven’t used it lately, I’m a big fan of paying for goods or services through my NFC-enabled phone with Google Wallet. But the point of a digital wallet is to eliminate our big, bulky physical wallets that are filled with currency, cards and whatever else we need to carry. Do we really want to start carrying multiple digital wallet solutions on our devices or choose a phone based on what wallet features it supports? I certainly don’t.

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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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Apple has thankfully restored the Welcome screen to Passbook that explains what it does as well as the vital link “Apps for Passbook” that takes users to a special page in the App Store listing apps that are Passbook compatible. There you’ll find apps from companies like Sephora, Fandango and United, that were available upon launch. But Apple has many more available for download now.

The change is that Apple has kept this page and accompanying link around permanently: in the initial version of iOS 6, after you downloaded your first Passbook app, the link to the section of the App Store with Passbook-enabled apps disappeared. Simply searching the App Store from the iPhone itself for “Passbook apps” yielded nothing, however. The release lacked Apple’s typical attention to detail, which is why it stuck out as a particularly bad experience.  (For users who already understand the utility of Passbook and want to delete this Welcome pass, there’s also now a button to do that.)

It’s a small thing, but if Apple truly wants to get its users used to paying for coffee or boarding planes or scanning a baseball game ticket with their iPhone, it’s important to guide them through it.

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Here’s how it works: Instead of keeping a stack of paper cards in your wallet or bag, you can set it so a mobile business card from Vizibility appears on your iPhone’s lock screen (assuming your phone is updated to iOS 6) when you’re near particular locations you  have chosen. Instead of handing over a physical card, you let the person use their smartphone to scan the code on your Passbook business card. From there, Vizibility provides services to individuals and businesses so they can collect data regarding how their business cards and information are being viewed, see whether they have common connections with the new contact on Facebook or LinkedIn, and have the option to get real-time alerts when someone views the card.

More companies are finding new ways of exchanging business contact info in a way that incorporates smartphones. Just last week my colleague Kevin Tofel covered another take on this idea with Moo’s NFC chip-equipped business card, which can pass along a person’s contact info and any other relevant information when tapped to any smartphone with NFC — a more advanced version of business cards that come printed with QR codes. The Bump app can also pass contact info between smartphones, but that’s just one part of what that software can do.

It’s a good sign for Apple that despite a bit of a slow start for Passbook, companies are innovating on the platform in a way that can make the iPhone more useful in a variety of real-life situations.

If you want to see how a Passbook business card from Vizibility works in person, track down your local Re/Max realtor in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Southeastern Michigan or Southern Ohio, where 4,500 agents will be carrying them.

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But a few high-profile failings have shown that the company is indeed mortal, most recently with the high-profile implosion of Maps, or the ill-fated Ping – Apple’s half-hearted attempt to shove social networking into iTunes that was mercifully cut short (in favor of integrating Facebook and Twitter).

Before weighing in on Passbook’s fate, let’s first look back at some other potentially disruptive digital commerce technologies in the past –both successes and failures – to determine what crucial elements will be required to hit critical mass with consumer adoption.

The Losers

Let’s start with the losers. Remember Flooz? (No? Exactly!) The late ’90s dotcom paid precious startup cash to Whoopi Goldberg to promote an alternative currency to be used just on the Internet, but it was offering a solution to a problem that didn’t yet exist. The need for an alternative form of payment online was simply not clear to consumers at the time. It failed to attract merchants and users and was eventually shut down after about two years amid a bankruptcy filing.

More recently Facebook – certainly another obvious pick for assured front-runner status – killed off its own high-profile foray into virtual currency. After three years of trying, the company unceremoniously shut down Facebook Credits in June, opting instead to focus on beefing up its payments capabilities.

And then there’s Google’s efforts to do away with the physical wallet. While it’s too early to dub it a loser, the company has been tight-lipped with data around transactions processed via Google Wallet. And continued media coverage points to slow adoption, and leads to questions around its necessity. While the wallet-free concept is appealing on the surface, the rub it seems is that the effort on the part of the merchant is complicated and costly.

The Winners

PayPal was among the earliest contenders to seize on a market opportunity that many major credit-card companies and traditional commerce outlets missed (or underestimated). By providing an easy way for people to pay online without having to sacrifice time or security, PayPal offered a simple solution for a problem that was emerging alongside the rise in e-commerce and especially online peer-to-peer marketplaces like eBay. PayPal will now try to extend its reach offline having partnered with Discover Financial Services and multiple retailers, including Home Depot and Barnes & Noble.

Another standout market transformer – which, notably, primarily benefits merchants – is Square. Using a postage stamp-sized dongle, Square has significantly expanded the offline commerce market by enabling anyone with a smartphone to sell anything, almost anywhere and anytime. Its traction has been measurable, and it recently announced that it is already processing more than $10 billion in payments a year, with some three million merchants using its service. A recent deal with Starbucks should help propel user adoption dramatically.

If it’s not broken…

The key with both winners is ease and convenience — both PayPal and Square require little effort on the user’s part, but offer high value in return. PayPal builds on something most people are already using, namely online commerce , but adds the critical element of security.

And Square requires a fraction of the investment on the part of the merchant compared to traditional POS card readers – which can cost $10,000 to $15,000 – and actually makes the transaction easier for all parties involved. Let’s also not underestimate the appeal of the ‘cool’ factor with Square. As an example, take your local food truck, which now has access to cutting-edge technology enabling it to deal with potentially more customers; consumers benefit by simply being able to quickly sign their bill with a finger and receive an instant email receipt. Because of these ease-of-use advantages, Square has exploded while mobile wallets have at best lingered, with none poised to catch on.

Recently, I attended the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas where attendees and speakers were providing a reality check on the state of mobile commerce. In one session, Jennifer Schulz, head of global product strategy at Visa, summed up the issue succinctly: “There won’t be mass adoption of mobile payments until there is a better consumer experience beyond the card.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Full disclosure: I work at edo, a card-linked offers provider).

Duplicative vs. Daring

Companies looking for innovative ways to engage with consumers, especially around mobile payments, should first and foremost focus on building solutions that are easy for all parties involved  ̶  consumers, banks and merchants  ̶  and that tap into a long-standing need in the marketplace. In the case of Passbook, the problem I see is that it’s not layering anything new onto my iPhone experience. To the contrary, my question about Passbook is why I need it, when I already have all the apps I want on my smartphone.

Even at this early stage of its functionality, Passbook should be more than simply an aggregator of digital cards and instead offer something truly unique. Currently, users must first download the brand’s mobile app (Starbucks, United Airlines, Sephora, and so on) and then connect the app into Passbook. Early users are finding this process confusing and duplicative, expressing frustration around the manual work needed to add different cards and services into Passbook, with limited return. In addition, the number of participating merchants is still very limited, and even those that exist often offer restricted availability. For example, McDonald’s has integrated with Passbook, but (curiously) only in France.

Passbook then is at best a novelty at this point. While there’s certainly the possibility Apple will revamp the app wholesale, and in turn gain meaningful traction, I’m more inclined to put my money on the bet it’s destiny is to join poor Ping in the ignominious Apple Graveyard. I think that nothing will replace ubiquitous credit and debit card payment systems until a service comes along that is a dramatically simpler solution, or offers compelling additional functionality that encourages people to leave their cards (and wallets!) at home. Given Apple’s dominance as the mobile device of choice around the world, Passbook has as strong a shot of success as anyone, but only if they figure out how to overcome these limitations. Until then, plastic will still be king.

Jeff Fagel is Vice President, Marketing and Brand Development at edo Interactive. You can find Jeff on Google+ and Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Pressmaster.

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On Wednesday Lemon is introducing Lemonade, a platform that lets publishers connect to Lemon through a new API. Previously, users had to take a picture of cards, coupons and receipts they wanted to store in the Lemon app. On a basic level, Lemonade will let companies connect their payment, membership and gift cards, coupons and tickets right into the Lemon app and will allow them to communicate with their consumers through the app. Lemon is offering a SmartCard Wizard, to help publishers easily build their own cards inside Lemon.

Lemon also wants developers to create add-on services that can provide additional value on top of the Lemon platform. Users will be able to browse a list of add-on services that offer discounts, offers and other services that interact with the data users store on their Lemon app. To help encourage development, Lemon is offering a $20,000 challenge for developers who create the best add-ons. There’s also a data dashboard for developers to see anonymous data on users, including demographics, spending habits and redemption rates for offers.

Opening up to third-party publishers will pit Lemon against Passbook and perhaps Google’s larger vision for Google Wallet. Lemon founder and CEO Wences Casares told me Lemon will integrate with Passbook so users can send some cards over to Passbook.

But he believes Lemon will be a broader and more flexible tool for users, allowing them to not just call up information but manage their cards and communicate directly with providers through the app. He said publishers will be able to sell services through the app. For example, a credit card company could enable users to sign up for another card through the Lemon app. And unlike Passbook or Google Wallet, Lemon is available on Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices.

Lemon has more than 2 million users of its app, which is nice but much smaller than Apple’s addressable market with Passbook, which is in the hundreds of millions. It will be tough to convince some brands and publishers to connect to Lemon without a larger audience to justify the investment. But it shows how mobile wallet apps don’t have to be solely about payments. There is still a lot of room to compete to be an organizer of all the other stuff that goes into people’s wallets and purses.

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Ameranth is accusing Apple of infringing four patents. The company says Passbook’s ability to store airline boarding documents, hotel reservations and movie tickets infringes on similar ideas patented by Ameranth between 1999 and 2005.

While Apple is often sued by companies that buy up patents only to enforce them later, Ameranth is not your average patent troll. First, this company does make products — online poker and restaurant software. And second, it’s got some pretty high-profile backers, some of which happen to be direct competitors with Apple. That would be Microsoft and Motorola, as VentureBeat reported earlier.

Microsoft and Motorola’s investments are described as “strategic,” which means they are probably small investments. But as VentureBeat points out, it could also be a way to avoid being a target.

A quick glance at Ameranth’s company news site shows that Apple is by no means Ameranth’s first target in enforcing these patents. The company sued a bunch of big names in travel and ticketing in July on similar grounds, including Hilton, Marriott, Best Western, Kayak, Travelocity, Hotels.com, Ticketmaster, StubHub, Fandango, Urbanspoon and others. Ameranth has been partly successful, too. It’s convinced several companies to license its patents, including at least one ticketing company, TicketMob.

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To be clear, using the app for what it’s advertised for — scanning barcodes — works as intended. But getting to that point was more complex than expected. In all, the app feels incomplete and perhaps rushed. In other words, it doesn’t feel like an Apple product yet.

Here’s what I found, and what I hope will be fixed over time.

Setting up Passbook involves many more steps than you would think. The first time you launch Passbook, you’ll get a screen showing the kinds of passes that can be added along with a very helpful link to the App Store. That link takes you to a curated list of apps already integrated with Passbook: Amtrak, United, Walgreens, Target, Fandango and more.

I selected the one I was looking for: United. After the download, launching the United app displayed my boarding passes. The process of adding those to Passbook wasn’t all that obvious, but after opening up my boarding pass in the app an “add to Passbook” button appeared finally. Clicking that took me to yet another step where I could manually add each boarding pass to Passbook.

Now, United’s app design is a little clunky, but it isn’t Apple’s fault. But why so many steps to the Passbook process? Why is it necessary to download one app just to use another app?

When I went to find my Passbook pass, the app worked as expected: I got a well-designed boarding pass with my flight information and a barcode that was scanned by a United gate agent without incident. However, there were some other things that were not quite right about Passbook.

The implementation of notifications is odd. With still 10 hours to go before my flight’s departure, a notification appeared on my screen from United with my flight time. It stayed there all day, even to a certain point after the flight. It wasn’t clickable and nothing I did would make it go away.

What happened to the location-aware notification advertised? I still had to go to the Passbook app once I was at the airport to find my boarding pass. The way Apple described it, when my iPhone 5′s GPS detected I was near the airport the pass would pop up on my screen so I wouldn’t have to go searching for it. That didn’t happen.

Using the app more than once breaks the experience. My United boarding pass is in Passbook. Great. But I also want to get the other available Passbook apps. One problem: the link to the App Store within Passbook? It completely disappeared. And there’s nothing that tells me how to find it.

Hmm, maybe I can just search the App Store myself. Searching for “passbook” brings up a dozen apps, but the only result that’s legitimately related to Passbook is Walgreens. Searching more specifically, for “Target Passbook” for the Passbook-enabled Target app finds me nothing. Searching for “Target” finds me a Target app, but nothing in the description indicates that Target is Passbook-enabled. This is confusing because you don’t know if you’ve found the most recent app. This is both a problem related to App Store search and the way Apple is promoting these Passbook apps.

Those are my biggest concerns, but I have some other nitpicks:

Brightness doesn’t correspond to the setting for the whole phone. I have my iPhone 5′s brightness cranked way down to save battery, but Passbook passes still display with the brightness of a thousand suns (or so). Perhaps this is necessary to make sure scanners can read the barcode?

It doesn’t appear to be designed for the iPhone 5 screen. Somehow Passbook appears on the iPhone 5 screen the way the apps whose developers have not yet modified their apps for the new 4-inch screen do: centered on the display with black bars framing it on top and bottom. Except, you know, Passbook wasn’t made by any old developer. It was made by the same company that made the new display. This seems like a weird oversight.

Each of these complaints I listed are minor, but they add up to a worse experience than I expected. I know that Passbook is just one feature of more than 200 that are new in iOS 6, and it’s not going to be used as frequently as the Maps app, which is a far greater concern for a lot of users. But still: for one of the headline features of the new OS, the state in which it was launched is pretty underwhelming for new users. And like the uproar over the maps app showed, it stands out because it is so unexpected from a company known for its attention to detail.

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