Author: Julie Campbell

The company has announced a number of smartphone friendly transaction services.

Telefónica’s German international wireless carrier brand, called Telefónica Deutschland, has just announced that it will launch a new smartphone-to smartphone direct money transfer and service as well as mobile payments wallet service.

The goal of the company is to propel the world forward toward a cashless society.

According to the Telefónica Germany CEO, René Schuster, “Soon, children will only know from history books what a wallet and hard cash are.” He added that “Mobile payment with your smartphone has arrived in Germany. Our customers will soon be transferring money mobile-to-mobile and paying in shops using their digital wallet.”

The new peer to peer service will be the first of the mobile payments services that are launched.

This will occur in February by way of a wireless carrier. This element of the mobile payments offerings will be called mpass. By using mpass, smartphone users will be able to make money transfers to other mpass accounts in real time. All the sender will need to know about the recipient is her or her cell phone number. The company has stated that the process is very user friendly and is a free service.

The app to use mpass will be made available to users of devices based on both iOS and Android operating systems. It will require a one-time registration the first time that the service is activated, but the information will be saved after that point so that it does not need to be re-entered.

Beyond the initial mobile payments launch of the P2P service, Telefónica Deutschland has said that it will also offer consumers their O2 Wallet. This is a smartphone wallet that will function using NFC technology in order to allow contactless transactions to occur at a participating merchant’s point of sale. This service will use the PayPass technology from MasterCard in order to provide secure credentials confirmation and payment data from the NFC chip equipped smartphone to the reader device at the register.

Telefónica Deutschland consumers will be sent a new free NFC pack that includes an NFC SIM card so that they will be able to download the app, register, and use these mobile payments and wallet services.

The latest design for the product packaging will feature the smartphone friendly barcodes.

In its latest step to appeal to nutrition conscious consumers, McDonald’s Corp. has announced that it will be adding QR codes to the latest design of its product packaging, to make it easier for customers to learn about the foods they are purchasing.

The fast food restaurant has been making several similar efforts to simplify the transmission of information.

This largest fast food chain in the world has been making a number of different efforts over the last few months and in recent years, in order to make nutrition a higher priority. The QR codes are an element of this overall effort, in that they make it easier for consumers to check the nutrition content of the foods that they order.

By using QR codes, this nutrition information becomes much more conveniently accessible.

Kevin Newell, the chief brand officer at McDonald’s, explained that “Customers tell us they want to know more about the food they are eating and we want to make that as easy as possible by putting this information right at their fingertips.” As a growing number of those guests to the restaurants have smartphones, QR codes became a natural choice to assist in this effort.

The packaging featuring the barcodes will be launched throughout the United States, this week. Though they will not be present on every item, these black and white square will be found on the carry out bags, as well as on the fountain beverage cups from American locations. Throughout the rest of 2013, this same effort with QR codes will be rolled out worldwide as the information is translated into 18 additional languages.

The packaging, itself, was designed with the assistance of a number of different groups of people. It began with the feedback of the customers, themselves, but it also took into account the opinions of advisors in the fields of nutrition, fitness, and public health as a whole. The QR codes are an extension of the effort made last September, where all McDonald’s locations in the United States added the calorie information to each of the foods listed on their restaurant and drive through menus.