While much information on this is yet undisclosed, The Wall Street Journal is positive that search and social media giant Google will be unveiling their plans for a smartphone as digital wallet platform in an upcoming New York conference on Thursday of this week. We’ve been following this angle eagerly for months now as near-field communication has become a hot item in Google’s Android britches.

Their coverage adds a few companies to the already-known fantastic four of the credit card companies and a few new retailers who are expected to carry the NFC point-of-sale technology.

According to the article in the WSJ,

At an event Thursday in New York, the Web-search company is planning to show off the technology, called near field communication, which is embedded in newer smartphones powered by Google’s Android software and that can help turn the devices into a kind of electronic wallet, these people said.

The program will launch first in New York, San Francisco, and potentially other locations, followed by a broader rollout, said a person familiar with the matter. Participating retailers include Macy’s Inc., American Eagle Outfitters Inc. and the Subway fast-food chain, said a person familiar with the matter. Retailers that participate in the program will have upgraded terminals at the point of sale that can read the mobile devices and provide special offers.

The principal block to the development and deployment of NFC technology has recently become having something to use it on. It’s proliferation through smartphones has been extremely vast over the first quarter of 2011; but it’s adoption in retail and brick-and-mortar markets has been a bit of a roadblock for it’s spread. By hooking up with retailers like Macy’s, American Eagle Outfitters, and Subway, Google will set the stage for putting this technology into the limelight and put its use directly into the hands of consumers.

As a payment technologygy, NFC offers the chance to unchain customers from credit cards and wallets, giving them the chance to use apps to control their finances at point-of-sale. This means that app writers can design their own specialized interfaces to give users an idea of how they’re doing financially while they’re making purchases.

It will also enable another angle of communication between retailers and customers, which could take advantage of the fact that the transaction is two-way. Upon entering a store, hyperlocal applications could receive deals and coupons from the store in order to guide the customer to make purchases they otherwise wouldn’t have before. The same with advertisements. Because a consumer is now using their phone instead of a credit card for financial transactions, it would be the perfect platform for informing them that there’s a sale on their favorite type of refried beans or that the sub sandwich of the day is the meatball sub that comes with a free bag of chips.

Near-Field Communications and the Retail Ecology

Google announced their candidacy for supremacy in the NFC market long ago by adopting the technology to enable it in their Android smartphones before many others in the marketplace (with the exception of Nokia) and recently partnered their way into the Near Field Communications Forum. In the same marketplace, Microsoft has been angling for their own slice of the pie becoming a likely primary rival.

The ubiquitous nature of smartphones and their obvious role in customer-retailer transactions will be the future for many smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers who will become part of the fiscal ecosystem. Each transaction will have pennies shaved off and fed into their pockets and there are millions of such credit-card transactions a day. The competitive race between all the players in this field is just heating up and the proliferation of point-of-sale devices that will enable this technology will springboard it into our lives.

We’re probably going to see NFC apps and chips in smartphones go head-to-head in the next year and clear winners will start to make themselves known, while others may be forced to slink away. Mobile payments and the smartphone as the digital wallet will also raise privacy concerns, but the sheer convenience and power in the hand will overcome many of those fears.

The technology still has a short sprint to make before it’s considered viable in the consumer market, but the niche is there and something will fill it. Google seems to be just the contender to bridge the gap.