In case you missed it, one of the more grandiose announcements of the summer came when AT&T and Verizon teamed up to displace credit and debit cards with smartphones. That was just one of many recent initiatives and announcements in the mobile payment space. Other include: Starbucks unveiling a mobile rewards program, JC Penney experimenting with mobile coupons, commuters paying for fares with mobile devices, fans at live events ordering concessions without leaving their seats, and transit authorities developing smarter parking meters.

I recently caught up with three innovators working deep within the mobile commerce space: Naveed Anwar, senior director of PayPal’s Developer Network; Kevin Hartz, founder and CEO of Eventbrite; and Humberto Roa, co-founder of iConcessionStand. They share their thoughts on mobile payments and ecommerce below.

How are smartphones changing the ecommerce space?

Naveed Anwar, PayPal: The mobile commerce industry is booming. By the end of 2011, Nielsen predicts smartphones will overtake feature phones in the U.S. market. And Gartner predicts that by 2014, mobile and Internet technology will help over three billion of the world’s adults to electronically transact. In addition, emerging economies will see an increase in mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. The worldwide mobile penetration rate will reach up to 90 percent.

How will mobile wallets affect consumers?

NA: Consumers want to live an on-demand lifestyle, and that trend is driving consumer purchasing behaviors. The mobile wallet is necessarily an on-demand wallet, meaning it’s accessible from different devices and platforms and can hold more than any wallet in your back pocket: multiple funding sources, coupons, receipts, loyalty cards, private label cards, and business cards … and that’s just the start.

What has been the biggest challenge for micropayment platforms?

NA: The biggest challenge they face right now is keeping up with — and getting ahead of — the pace of change. The mobile space, for example, is innovating so fast that we need to be focused and strategic about the opportunities we pursue and the tools we offer. When everything is moving at a hundred miles an hour, that’s a lot easier said than done.

What is the most important thing you’ve learned about building mobile apps on an ecommerce platform?

Kevin Hartz, Eventbrite: The one thing that’s always struck me as being most important is simplicity — the ability to create accounts and conduct transactions is essential to adoption. If you have a platform that anyone can build an app on, then innovation will run rampant and everyone involved has something to win.

How many of your users prefer electronic payments to a more conventional payment option?

KH: The last stats I saw showed that over 60 percent of the volume of Eventbrite transactions use some form of electronic payments, and that figure has been pretty steady over time. We have some exciting plans for mobile forthcoming and expect that number to grow as mobile devices continue to penetrate transaction volume in our market.

How has mobile changed event planning?

KH: One of the biggest changes is the imminent death of the paper ticket. Eventbrite is a big opponent of the conventional paper ticket, and the mobile wallet concept only helps us to kill it dead even faster. It boggles my mind that we still use physical tickets for sporting events, concerts, etc. We’ll definitely see a lot of innovation on this front over the coming months, because it’ll only make things simpler for people. Simple sells.

How have micropayment systems helped you as a small business?

Humberto Roa, iConcessionStand: We offer an exclusively mobile marketplace that’s location-based and that allows people to interact with stores relative to a particular venue, so we’re a small company but have many of the needs of a much larger company. Micropayment systems makes it possible for us to be able to pull off those kinds of logistics.

What aspect of mobile payments needs to change?

HR: I really hope that mechanisms such as chained payments will go mobile. We monetize our app by charging a small convenience fee on each transaction, and ultimately we’d like to be able to collect that convenience fee immediately and pass on the rest of the funds to the ballpark. [Note: iConcessionStand is an app used to purchase concessions at venues, such as ballparks.] Right now, we aren’t able to do that because chained payments aren’t available for mobile, so we send all of the money to the ballpark and then invoice them for our convenience fees.

This post is part of a collaboration between PayPal and O’Reilly exploring the future of payment.

The rise of mobile wallets will be discussed at the Innovate 2010 Developer Conference, being held October 26-27 in San Francisco. Full details are available here.

The Grameen Foundation’s Mifos Initiative is tackling those integration challenges in a unique way. Rather than develop proprietary software with hundreds of country-by-country variations, Mifos is making its code available via open source. Financial institutions can repurpose the software for their unique microlending needs.

In the following Q&A, Mifos director of engineering Adam Feuer explains the rationale for pursuing the open source option. He also discusses some of the unique mobile and integration challenges his team is encountering.

Mifos is an open source technology. Why did you go that route?

Adam Feuer: Mifos source code is free and you can download it from our website. We’re hosted on SourceForge.

We chose open source for several different reasons. Transparency is one: We believe that banking software, especially microfinance software used in the developing world, needs to be transparent and open. That means open source so that people can see how it works and verify that it’s operating correctly.

We also believe Mifos should be free so you can modify the software and make it suit your application. If we went out of business (not likely to happen but it is possible), or if people didn’t like the direction we were going, they wouldn’t be stuck with what we had accomplished or the direction we were going. That helps banks feel a lot more secure.

How many contributors are touching the code?

AF: Mifos is a small open source project, but it’s spread all over the world. Twenty of the 40 or so contributors are paid by the Grameen Foundation and they directly report to me. Another 10 contributors are third-party developers who are working with us to develop software. They work for partner organizations. Another 10 or 15 are volunteer developers who are just contributing to make the world a better place.

We have plenty of work and would love to talk to you if you are interested in helping and you program in Java or JavaScript and you know user interface technologies.

How are you addressing mobile?

AF: In Africa and India you send SMS messages with your phone to access your bank account. It takes a few messages back and forth to move money from one account to another or to make a payment. But it’s way better than having to drag yourself across a dusty city and use public transport to visit a bank branch where people may or may not discriminate against you because you’re poor. Toward that end, we’re integrating with a major mobile money system in Africa, a prototype called M-PESA. There’s also a mobile money system in India that we’re looking at for pilot projects.

What are the major challenges you’re encountering?

AF: Information technology in the developing world is a challenge for a variety of reasons. One of them is finding power to run a computer. Finding a good Internet connection is also challenging. We have to design our software to work in these conditions.

Another problem is that if you know information technology in say Kenya or India, you can get a better job. So microfinance banks have a hard time keeping employees that know anything about computers. We have to design our software so that it’s relatively easy to use and easy to learn. You can be sure that you’ll be training new people on it very frequently.

The main challenge that we are facing right now is how to open Mifos up in a modular way so that we can enable someone to write a plugin to customize Mifos for their particular country or environment. We see supporting plugins as the way to welcome everybody in the world to the promise of usable financial services for the poor.

This excerpt was edited, condensed and adapted for Radar. The full interview, available at the PayPal Developer Network, is part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and PayPal exploring the future of payment.

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• PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
• The Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce