Author: Rebecca

The two companies have come together to help to turn smartphones in a digital form of wallet.

Samsung and Visa have just announced that they will be working together to help to speed up the worldwide adoption of mobile payments services, by combining their expertise and technology.

This new combined effort will be based on NFC technology that is embedded in certain Samsung devices.

Called the Visa Mobile Provisioning Service, is designed to allow financial institutions to take advantage of transactions using mobile payments account information that is securely downloaded through the use of NFC technology.

Furthermore, the Visa payWave mobile payments applet will be loaded onto Samsung NFC devices.

This will automatically turn smartphones into a mobile payments option for the consumers who purchase them. According to the global head of product at Visa, Jim McCarthy, in a statement, “Samsung devices enabled with Visa payment functionality will no doubt be a powerful product offering — especially in markets where paying with a mobile device is becoming commonplace.”

McCarthy also added that the heart of ensuring that mobile payments become widely available worldwide is to provide financial institutions with a secure way of offering these millions of smartphone carriers with a way to safely store and transmit their account data. He explained that “that is exactly what Visa and Samsung are ready to deliver.”

This is not the first time that Samsung and Visa have worked together on mobile payments initiatives. They previously came together in May 2012 to take part in the trial that was held during the Olympics in London, when the limited edition Galaxy S III smartphone was distributed among the athletes for use during the games. Those phones had the payWave technology built in and allowed the users to register so that they could use the device to for a digital checkout at certain retailers in the city.

The next version of the device, the Galaxy S IV, will have the Visa mobile payments technology built right into it for use with its NFC chip. It is expected to be unveiled on March 14 at a press event.

The ESPN College Football campaign used the barcodes to generate hundreds of thousands of scans.

The outcome of the ESPN College Football mobile marketing campaign have now been released by Taco Bell, which has revealed that the QR codes from their product packages were scanned 225,000 times in less than two months.

This marketing effort was part of the overall Bowl Championship series campaign.

Taco Bell feels that this achievement was a considerable one. This is not the first time that the fast food chain has run mobile marketing campaigns that have used QR codes. This time, it is receiving applause from many in the industry for the way that the barcodes were applied in order to generate the greatest amount of attention and use.

The QR codes were placed on the soda cups and the 12 pack taco boxes throughout the campaign.

Those items could be scanned using a smartphone and any scanner app designed for reading QR codes – of which there are many available for free. When a customer scanned the barcode, he or she was redirected to analyst Mark May’s previews that were presented for the upcoming games in the series. The initial launch of this campaign was on December 20, and it ran right through until February 3.

The QR codes saw periods of higher and lower popularity, coming to a high point as the games were actually taking place. However, after January 7, there was not as much attention seen by the barcodes, simply because the National Championship Game had already been played by that point. This was, however, a matter of context and the company does not at all consider it to be a failure of the campaign.

Behind the management of the QR codes was Snipp Interactive. Its CEO, Atul Sabharwal, pointed out a number of elements that led to the success and high rate of use in the campaign. He also shared that he feels that this is a prime example of the true potential of these smartphone friendly barcodes as a “mobile response mechanism”. He added that “It’s even more impressive when you consider that this wasn’t a contest, sweepstakes or giveaway, which have traditionally always generated high volumes of responses.”