Eye on Mobile: Android Surges, Tyfone Closes on Financing

While Apple Inc.’s iPhone remains the iconic smart phone for mobile payments, some recent research reveals that the Android platform produced by rival Silicon Valley denizen Google Inc. is mounting a serious challenge in shipments and usage of the mobile Web.

In a development with importance to e-commerce merchants and other marketers moving to mobile commerce, phones using Android accounted for one quarter of all North American mobile page views in August, up from 6.4% in August 2009, according to the latest numbers from Quantcast Corp. Google’s gain came mostly at the expense of iOS, the operating system used by the iPhone. That system lost 11.4 points of mobile Web share, to finish at 56% in August.

Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry line of smart phones, commanded a 9% share, while all other systems (such as Linux and Microsoft Windows) came in at a collective 10%. San Francisco-based Quantcast measures Web usage by device and operating system.

These results follow a report last month by Gartner Research indicating that Android became the third-largest mobile OS in the world in the second quarter, measured by handset shipments. Its share in this measurement shot up from 1.8% a year earlier to 17.2%, a whisker behind RIM’s 18.2% and well ahead of the 14.2% share recorded by iOS. Unlike iOS, which is exclusive to Apple and AT&T Mobility, Android runs on a number of networks and handset models at a wide range of prices, a factor cited by Gartner in explaining the OS’s remarkable climb in global share.

Earlier research by Pleasanton, Calif.-based Javelin Strategy & Research showed how Android phones were challenging the iPhone for dominance in mobile banking (Digital Transactions News, June 10).

Relative shares of mobile operating systems are important because they influence how developers, merchants, and processors configure applications and Web sites for payment processing.

In other mobile news, Portland, Ore.-based Tyfone Inc. announced on Tuesday it had closed on a Series B financing round, raising $5 million. The company, which among other products makes a micro Secure Digital (SD) card called Sidetap that can act as a mobile wallet and near-field communication (NFC) device for point-of-sale contactless payments, said it will use the money to move up Sidetap production.

The Tyfone round comes at a time when memory-card-based NFC appears to be gaining some traction in the U.S. Three major banks, including most recently Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp., have said the will start NFC pilots in U.S. locations using SD cards made by DeviceFidelity Inc., a Tyfone competitor based in Richardson, Texas. DeviceFidelity reached a development agreement with Visa Inc. earlier this year (Digital Transactions News, May 18). Meanwhile, Tyfone has a deal with First Data Corp. to market Sidetap (Digital Transactions News, March 16).

The financing round was backed by new investors HDFC Holdings Ltd., Polaris Software Lab, and an unnamed “strategic manufacturing partner,” according to Tyfone. Existing investor Ojas Venture Partners also participated.