The ballooning of the mobile payments market still has several avenues for growth.  These channels are exactly what several companies are exploring to get their share of an industry predicted to reach revenues of $245 billion by 2014.  Experts also see 2012 to be the pivotal year for mobile payments. With a few months left in 2011, businesses beef up their portfolios to get ahead of the competition and innovate, especially with POS adoption and major players like Google Wallet entering the market.

Tabbedout is one of the companies that embraced POS technology, and has just been Focus POS certified.  This milestone means they can offer more mobile payment options to various establishments, like bars and restaurants across the country.  Tabbedout CTO and co-founder Dave Lemley  is excited with this development and shared their organizational goal to the public:

“Integrating with a POS leader like Focus POS allows us to offer our mobile payment solution to a wider network of bars and restaurants nationwide. Our goal is to make mobile payment an everyday simple and secure process for the consumer that generates additional revenue for Tabbedout venues.”

Another area mobile payments shows promise is with mobile wallets.  Mobile wallets allow users to abandon their plastics and use their smartphones to just tap to make a purchase.  Google Wallet, in cooperation with Citi Mastercard worldwide, is already gearing up for the upcoming holiday season.  This product, despite the usual onset bugs, is quite promising with the easy tap and spend feature.

Other updates within the avenue of mobile payments include Android person-to-person payments app launched by Visa.  This lets a person send money to another Visa user. Euronet also announced the upcoming release of wipit, a mobile payment service for both iOS and Android.  Digging in to the hardware of mobile payments, Broadcom recently introduced NFC chips for mobile payments.

Aside from POS, the evolution of mobile payments largely involves online integration, which is deemed to bring the market to a full scale growth courtesy of social networking. Within social networking are billion dollar sectors like gaming and advertising.  Of these two, social gaming has been attracting income for mobile payments, with only more potential as time goes on.  People get hooked into virtual game spending, and combed with an emerging mobile culture, you get a very lucrative mobile payments sphere, even with mounting concerns on regulations globally.