Russ Jones and I at Glenbrook were talking the other day about how some of the SMS-based banking services (like Chase Mobile) remind us of the early days of the Internet - pre-web browser days.

Back in those days, we had things called list servers that would respond to commands we'd email them. Send them an email with "help" in the body and you got back a list of things you could do with that particular list server.

This afternoon I was reading Evan Schuman's latest post on this StorefrontBacktalk blog titled "Mobile: How Do I Buy With Thee? Let Me Count The Ways". Evan makes some of those same points - recalling the days of the text-based Lynx "browser" - but then goes on to talk about the key issue with mobile commerce and mobile payments:

"That defining moment has yet to hit mobile commerce. Forget design and programming issues. There hasn't yet even been broad agreement on how m-commerce is supposed to work."

Great stuff - and oh so true.

Last week Canada's Interac Association announced "the completion of Canada's first INTERAC debit card transaction at the point-of-sale terminal using chip technology. The transaction was processed today by TD Merchant Services using a BMO Bank of Montreal chip debit card at Mercato Giovanni's Fresh Food located in downtown Toronto. The chip debit card transaction was conducted in preparation for the Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario market trial of chip technology which will begin in fall 2007."   » Continue Reading