I just signed up for the BarCamp Bank event in Berkeley next month. Not my normal venue, but I would really like to get a conversation going around mobile payments. In short, they don’t work. There’s point solutions here and there that allow a limited number of merchants to interact with a geographically segmented group of users, but nothing that works at the scale of the web. If 2008 is going to be the year of the mobile web we need a way for people doing stuff on it to be able to pay other people providing stuff. And it can’t be based on what carrier you’re on, and which handset you have, or if you happen to be in the United States. We need a global infrastructure for payments on mobile that works for everyone everywhere.

I’m hoping that with folks there looking at issues like social money, risk management and fraud prevention, and online operations maybe they can help us figure out how to crack the nut and get at something better than what we have.