According to the new survey conducted by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile payments and commerce will not only get big but they’ll be powered largely by the old-school financial companies. The survey’s participants appear to have arrived at the conclusion that the carriers, Google and even trendy new startups like Square had their chance to jumpstart mobile payments and largely blew it. Now Visa, the banks and more established online payment companies like PayPal will clean up their mess.

When polled, 50 percent of Sharma’s panel identified financial institutions and PayPal as the companies most likely to dominate the m-commerce/payments market. And they expected the overall mobile commerce and retail market to become huge. Almost 60 percent of those polled expect m-commerce to surpass e-commerce by 2016 in North America, with Asia and Europe shortly behind.

Sharma asked his panel a host of questions about all aspects of the mobile industry. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits:

The headline of 2012 was supposed to be the saga of Apple vs. Google fighting it over the smartphone OS, but the big battle turned out to be between Apple and Android proxy Samsung. The courtroom brawl between the two mobile titans was the biggest drama of last year, according to the survey, but respondents expect Google to enter the fray directly in 2013.

Google has for years been perceived as the most open player in mobility, and though that reputation has dipped slightly in the last three years, it’s still well ahead of any other wireless industry company or group in the eyes of Sharma’s survey participants. What’s particularly interesting is that Apple’s already poor reputation for openness fell to an all time low this year. Even the carriers — which traditionally are the most closed of any group — scored higher than the iPhone maker.

Apple may have donned the black hat when it comes perceptions of openness, but that has no impact on how its peers view its prospects for success. When asked who the four most important players in mobile are, nearly 100 percent of respondents both named Apple and Google in their picks. Samsung was named by about 75 percent of the survey, while just over 35 percent of the panel named a major global carrier.

The panel also expects Apple and Google’s respective strengths in smartphones to carry over to the tablet — a segment Apple currently dominates. Some 65 percent or respondents believe Android will dominate in tablet unit shipments, but an even greater number believe Apple will keep its lead in total tablet revenues due to its higher device prices.

In 2012, Apple’s new iPad and iPhone were the most compelling mobile gadgets of the year, but expectations are high that Samsung will best its long-time rival in terms of product innovation this year. After the success of the Nexus 7, a good portion of respondents expect Google to come up with another desirable gadget in 2013. There also appears to be some anticipation of an Amazon smartphone.

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The company, which launched in preview mode today, gives people a simple polling tool that makes it easy to get feedback about a decision between different choices. Users can ask a question and supply images using bookmarklet tool, which also allows you to supply a price for that item. Or users can paste in a URL as another option. The question can then be shared to the Maybe community and also out to Twitter, Facebook and to friends via email.

When it comes time to vote, a user can easily choose between each option, add their own comments to a discussion forum or  share it again as a “Re-Maybe.” There doesn’t appear to be a time limit. The results of the vote tallies are not displayed until a person votes.

Hamoui told me many people just resort to sending each other emails with a list of links to get feedback about what choices to make. That can be inefficient because people aren’t able to see all the choices side by side. Maybe is trying to simplify the process of making informed decisions.

“There are a lot of places to discover things and a lot of places to get more detailed information about stuff but the general process of making a decision isn’t documented anywhere or facilitated,” said Hamoui.

Maybe is still a work in progress and doesn’t have a mobile interface, which is a top priority. The site is also working to add research tabs, which will automatically pull in relevant online information about the question a person is trying to answer. That speaks to Maybe’s larger ambition to become a resource for helping everyone make any decision they need to make. So it won’t just be multiple-choice decisions, but other types of questions like putting choices in ranked order. And it will help people discover options in the first place, when they’re not sure what they should be choosing from. Ultimately, Maybe will try to provide people a way to understand the rationale and reasoning that goes into other people’s decisions, which can help guide a user’s choices.

I’m not sure how big it will be initially, but I think Maybe can find an audience. For a lot of decisions, you can still just get quick feedback by going to Facebook or Twitter or using mobile apps like Thumb. But those aren’t designed like Maybe to help choose between different options. Having something built around decision-making can be useful for people, especially as it evolves and takes on more use cases and provides more information and resources. Many people are piecing together tools to make good decisions, but they’re not always sure they have all the right information. It would be nice to have a place that provided more services to ensure people ultimately have confidence in whatever decision they need to make.

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A new survey from Informa finds that 60 percent of all global carriers plan to deploy LTE by the end of 2013. That may not seem like a surprising figure to our North American readers since every operator large and small has announced some form of 4G strategy, but in other parts of the world operators haven’t been quite as enthusiastic about the technology.

Europe is still experimenting with its first LTE networks and in some cases – most notably the U.K. – regulators haven’t even auctioned off 4G licenses. In many developing markets, 3G networks are still fairly new, and as any infrastructure vendor will tell you, a lot of carriers are still making considerable investments in 2G.

The standard knock on LTE was operators don’t need it. GSM carriers could milk plenty of upgrades out of their HSPA networks, making LTE an expensive and unnecessary conceit (T-Mobile USA was making similar claims before its own LTE strategy magically appeared). It was the poor fate of CDMA operators in the U.S. – with no upgrade path to better networks – that drove them to fast track 4G.

My, how attitudes have changed. Informal’s poll of 528 global operators found that 70.5 percent now think there is a viable business case for LTE. I guarantee if that poll was taken 18 months ago, the answers would have been very different.

So where did this newfound love for LTE come from? The short answer is the smartphone – more devices, more data demand, yada, yada. The more complicated answer is that carriers are becoming increasingly attracted to LTE’s efficiency, not just its speeds and capacity. Consumers don’t just want more data, they want to pay less for it. Without LTE, carriers may still be able to deliver the fast, but without LTE they can’t deliver the cheap.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Horia Varlan

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While saving money is a common reason cited for moving IT to the cloud, it is really not the overriding driver at all for most companies, according to new research.

What’s more important than cost savings for companies — at least in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific regions — is the ability to standardize their software and business processes across the company, according to a new survey of 600 large companies by Tata Consultancy Services, the $8 billion IT service provider. In Europe and Latin America, the primary rationale was the ability to ramp systems up and down faster.

According to the survey:

The factors driving companies to launch entirely new applications in the cloud are quite different – to institute new business processes and launch new technology-dependent products and services.

The results confirm at least one bit of conventional wisdom — that European companies lag their U.S. counterparts in cloud adoption. Among U.S. respondents, 19 percent of their total applications run in the cloud compared to 12 percent in Europe. But both regions lag Asia and Latin America in adoption — at least in percentage of applications now running in the cloud: 28 percent for Asia and 39 percent for Europe Latin America.

However, companies in all regions expect their cloud usage to grow dramatically by 2014. For example, U.S. companies expect that 34 percent of their total applications will be cloud-based in two years. European repondents said they expect cloud applications to hit 25 percent in that period. But Asia and Latin America will keep up the pace, with Asia-Pacific companies expect to hit the 52 percent mark and Latin America 54 percent in 2014.

One of the reasons companies typically cite for moving to the cloud is that they’re able to move such IT budgets to an operational expense (OPEX) that can be spread out over the course of deployment as opposed to a larger, up-front capital expense. OPEX is far easier to get approved but, in terms of actual cost, there can be a point after which the cloud cost can exceed the capital expense. After five years paying a cloud provider for storing data — and also paying the networking charges for accessing that data — in some cases it may actually make sense to go with an on-premise solution. Companies need to do this math up front to determine which model works for them.

But, as Tata’s results show, cloud computing is big now, even if it’s not the  panacea for bloated budgets. Actual adoption likely will ramp up significantly as companies get comfortable with the model and better understand how and when to use it, and what it might cost.

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While cost savings, where present, were small among the survey’s 3,645 respondents — under $20,000 in 35 percent of cases — the cloud brings a wealth of benefits around mobility, efficiency and, believe it or not, jobs. Mobility, the ability to access applications and data from a variety of end-user devices, was actually the No.1 reason respondents gave for adopting cloud computing. The survey results aren’t entirely surprising when one considers ideal cloud use cases, especially with regard to infrastructure-as-a-service clouds.

For IaaS, the delivery model is arguably best-suited for handling dynamic or unknown workloads because organizations don’t have to overprovision resources before launching their applications. It’s also very helpful for testing and development, ad hoc applications, and other workloads where companies don’t want to buy and manage physical servers and storage. Cloud computing very likely will cost more in the long haul, but it’s very valuable in the short term, which explains Zynga’s hybrid Z Cloud infrastructure, for example.

Of course, some companies — including Netflix — have decided that cloud computing’s flexibility and minimal requirement for hardware ownership (and management) make it worth sticking with. Earlier this year, video startup Animoto suggested to me that running a GPU farm on Amazon Web Services cost slightly more than running its own in a colocation facility, but stuck with AWS to save itself the hassle of managing servers, switches and everything that goes along with running a data center.

And, as the survey suggests, even software as a service and platform as a service are all about simpicity. Sure, companies will save some money on enterprise licenses in most cases, but the real value is in making it much easier to launch, manage and access business applications.

The highlights of the CSC survey are included in the infographic below. The full results can be found here.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Monochrome.

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Consumer Reports found 17 percent of those surveyed planned on giving an Apple iPad this year, and 10 percent intended to buy an iPhone 4S for someone on their shopping list. Another survey conducted by online opinion site SodaHead found 39 percent of respondents wanted to receive an iPhone 4S, while 31 percent were hoping to find an iPad 2 under the tree this year.

Apple’s mobile products were among lots of other electronic gadgets cited by shoppers in Consumer Reports’ poll of 1,013 adults, but only a few of those were mobile phones or tablets. Amazon’s Kindle Fire also received quite a few mentions, though it wasn’t nearly as popular as either the 4S or the iPad. Internet-ready and 3-D TVs were also popular among consumers.

Of SodaHead’s pool of over 3,000 respondents, the Kindle Fire came in at 17 percent, behind both the iPad and the iPhone 4S, but users seem to prefer smartphones over tablets in general, in contrast to what gift-givers appear to be planning as per the Consumer Reports poll, possibly because a phone is more generally useful than a tablet, but a tablet is both cheaper (entry-level price, unlocked) and less complicated (doesn’t come with contract requirements) to give.

Interestingly, SodaHead’s survey found the majority of respondents (59 percent) didn’t want to get apps as gifts this holiday season. Admittedly, gifts with no material presence tend to be a little disappointing, but at least 41 percent of those polled were fine with the idea, so you’re probably still safe offering them as stocking stuffers.

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Jobs has succeeded in transforming the way we consume information in both our personal and work lives. With their intuitive interfaces, sleek lines and quality craftsmanship, it’s easy to see why so many of us now carry an iPhone, iPad, or both with us wherever we go. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone or iPad? If you haven’t got your hand up, chances are the person next to you does.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, nor was it the first with a touch interface, but it revolutionized the way that we browse the internet on our cells and consume data. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, your Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handset have all been influenced by this device.

And this brings me to our obsession with smartphones.

We’ve all been there, checking our emails on our smartphones at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m. We now shut the office doors and immediately start working again on the train, the bus and in taxis. We are permanently connected. According to a national survey by Telenav, a third of Americans would rather give up sex than their smartphone. They’d also be willing to wave goodbye to chocolate, caffeine and exercise before they parted with their beloved device.

UK adults and children are just as bad. UK communications industry regulator Ofcom has discovered that 60 per cent of teenagers describe themselves as “highly addicted to their smartphone.” Almost half (47 percent) of teenagers and 22 percent of adults also admit to using their device on the toilet.

Our cell phones have now transformed from a device for contacting and playing Snake to becoming a central part of our personal and working lives. The mobile workforce can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

With more than 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 300,000 Android apps now available, what are the apps that today’s web workers should look at using to aid productivity and increase efficiency? Below are just some of the apps that I find indispensable:

• CamCard: This great app takes a picture of a business card and automatically adds the information to your contact list. No more rummaging through pockets trying to locate the contact details of the people you met at various meetings and events.

• Evernote: A popular tool with remote workers, Evernote enables you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable.

• Huddle: With Huddle’s iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry apps you can access my company’s cloud-based collaboration platform and manage your projects, files and people from any location, at any time of day.

• Twitter: Yes, it can be dangerously addictive, but having Twitter on your mobile ensures that you are constantly connected to the latest updates from your community and you can track what is being said about your company.

• 1Password:  How many times have you sat on your iPhone/iPad trying to remember one of the numerous passwords you have for a wealth of websites and apps? 1Password securely stores the information required and logs you into websites immediately.

• Skype: If you’re on Verizon Wireless’ network, Skype mobile gives you free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM.

• QuickOffice: Access, create, edit, and share Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

• Expensify: This fantastic app allows you to capture your expenses and receipts from any location. You can track everything and build your expenses reports on the move.

• Bloomberg Mobile:  Keep up to date on the latest international business news, stock quotes and company descriptions, etc.

• Instapaper:  Ever found a great article that you just don’t have time to read? Instapaper ensures that you can come back to it later.

What other mobile productivity apps do you use and love? Let me know in the comments below.

Hear VMware’s CTO Stephen Herrod talk about the three key pillars of enterprise mobility — apps, data and people — at Mobilize, September 26 and 27.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic.

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