But in this game of one-upmanship, Square has thrown down the gauntlet by announcing this morning that it has made the payment process hands-free.

The San Francisco company, which was recently valued at $1 billion, said it has made it as easy to pay as saying your name.

A new version of its application, called Card Case, will leverage geo-fencing capabilities in Apple’s latest operating system update for the iPhone. The technology will identify when a person is within 100 meters of a favorite merchant.

Square’s Director of Products Megan Quinn explains that when a shopper is within range, a tab at that establishment will automatically open — without that person ever touching his or her iPhone. Once the user places an order and goes to pay, all they have to do is give their name.

The merchant will see on its iPad that a tab has been opened in that person’s name from inside the Square app.

Once a customer gets outside of the 100-meter range again, the tab will automatically close, whether a transaction was conducted or not. In theory, this means it would only be open for a few minutes if the shopper simply walked by a coffee shop and didn’t stop.

In addition to having to have an iPhone with the latest operating system, the consumer will also have to designate shopping establishments at which tabs could be automatically opened.

Since Square opened it up eight weeks ago, 20,000 merchants nationwide have joined the Card Case app’s directory.

In May, Square unveiled its mobile payments strategy for small retailers, including the iPhone and Android applications for consumers and the iPad software for merchants. Before that, it had focused primarily on allowing small businesses to accept credit cards using a swipe accessory plugged into a smartphone’s headphone jack.

Quinn said the most obvious benefits to the new features are speed and ease of use; however, there’s a more touchy-feely reason, too. “We’ve removed the artifacts from the experience, so it’s about the interaction between the merchant and the customers.”

In other words, it’s like walking into Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

[Photo credit: Wikipedia.]

That’s prompting marketing companies to develop new offerings that seek out more detailed information about Facebook fans, with the aim of sending targeted messages, offers and promotions.

Merkle Inc., Lithium Technologies Inc. and other marketing companies are helping companies build applications for consumers to download on Facebook, which will allow customers to access a company’s loyalty program, what promotions they might qualify for and check their points. In exchange, the consumer gives the company permission to access their personal information like name, gender and email address on the social-networking site.

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A Swedish-based company called Wrapp is creating a new way for people to easily give gift cards to their friends through social channels like Facebook, where mutual acquaintances will also be able to contribute additional funds to the card if they wish.

To provide incentive to consumers, Wrapp is partnering with retailers to give the first $5 or $10 off the card.

The logic is that no one will actually give only the minimum. But even if they do, it might drive traffic to the stores and get consumers to buy something when they normally might not have.

Wrapp was founded by a number of successful entrepreneurs from companies you’ve probably heard of.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Hjalmar Winbladh, previously helped start Sendit, a mobile Internet company purchased by Microsoft; he later co-founded Rebtel, a mobile VoIP company. Also participating is Andreas Ehn, the founding CTO of music phenom Spotify, and Carl Fritjofsson, an advisor to Groupon.se.

The service launched two weeks ago in Sweden, and now the executives are focused on launching in the U.K. and the U.S. before the end of the year.

“Gift cards are a $100 billion business in the U.S., and it has not had that many innovations,” Winbladh said. “It went from a piece of paper with manual logs to a piece of plastic that is integrated with the cash register. It’s still a physical product.”

There’s a ton of social-gifting sites experimenting with different models, including Giftiki, Thoughful, Shareagift, Friendfund, Friendgiftr and eBay’s Gifts Project.

Here’s how Wrapp works: Download the app to either an iPhone or Android phone; log in to your Facebook account; click on a friend, who might be celebrating a birthday or anniversary; pick from one of the gift cards available, which can be targeted based on the intended recipient and contribute as much money as you want.

The recipient will receive a message on their Facebook wall, saying that they have received a gift. Other friends will see the message and have the chance to contribute.

The recipient then shows the mobile application at check-out to redeem it.

Windbladh said many of the gift cards will come with $5 already stored on them.

“If I’m cheap, maybe other common friends will add more money, or maybe I will add more money. The average gift card in the U.S. is $20 to $30,” he said.

But he figures, if someone walks into the store, that’s cheaper than most advertising campaigns.

Wrapp is focused on partnering with large big-box retailers, like Best Buy or Target, which have large marketing campaigns, an interest in seeing their brand on Facebook, and absolutely no interest in offering a daily deal on Groupon or one of its competitors.

The business model it is proposing to retailers is that Wrapp doesn’t get paid until someone redeems the gift card. Then if someone uses it, Wrapp collects a commission on both what the retailer’s contributed to the card and what others contributed beyond that.

So far, the company has raised seed funding from Swedish angels, and is looking to raise money in the next three to six months to support the roll-out in the U.S. Today, it has 15 employees, but will be beefing up its presence in San Francisco for its U.S. launch.

Does it bring in new customers? And will they ever come back?

Certainly the giants in the industry, like Groupon and LivingSocial, will have to grapple with these problems, but for now, it appears that the smaller players in the space are being more vocal about how to close the loop.

New York-based BuyWithMe is announcing today that it is rolling out card-linked offers to some of its merchants. By doing so, merchants will have the ability to track the success of a promotion and reward loyal customers who return to their stores after redeeming the initial vouchers.

San Francisco-based Bloomspot also talks about the concept of rewarding consumers who spend more or return to the merchant after the deal is sold.

The card-linked offer space is not new.

It is similar to the way your credit card company offers you discounts on rental cars or hotel rooms. But now many companies are trying to open it up as a third-party ad network, which will be able to create discounts and offers that are tailored for individuals based on their actual spending habits.

In the same way, BuyWithMe hopes to be able to give its merchants access to aggregated information that will allow them to track the success of the promotion.

For instance, BuyWithMe says merchants will now be able to get answers to key questions: Did customers spend more than the value of the voucher at redemption? Did customers return to make repeat purchases? How much did the average customer spend? What is the most popular day of the week to redeem the voucher? And what is the average lifetime value of a customer?

BuyWithMe says the information is gathered in aggregate, so that a consumer’s privacy is not violated. Additionally, consumers will have to opt into the program and will be able to opt out at any time.

Presumably, consumers will be motivated to sign up if they continue to receive offers that they find valuable.

In a statement, BuyWithMe’s CEO Jim Crowley said, “We have long maintained that the success of BuyWithMe is dependent on the satisfaction of our merchant partners. Our commitment is to help them build a better business and establish long-term customer relationships by offering specific data and insight into the success of their customer acquisition and loyalty campaigns.”

The product, which BuyWithMe is calling MerchantConnect, is launching this month in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and will be rolling out nationally later this fall.

Photo Credit: Images_of_money.

Ms. Kelly quizzed the product developers on how they planned to use the data collected by the device and advised them on what to write in the appliance’s “energy data privacy policy” for consumers.

Welcome to the new world of corporate privacy.

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For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones–recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

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Here lies the challenge of Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones and now, the PlayBook tablet: To conquer the enterprise–which has historically been RIM’s stronghold because of its White House-level security and lack of competition–it needs to sell tablets to consumers.

This isn’t impossible. Apple has had remarkable success selling the iPad to consumers and businesses. In a Forrester survey of U.S. consumers conducted in January 2011, 34 percent of iPad owners reported using their device at work. With enhanced security and dedicated support (“business specialists” at Apple Stores), we’ll see more companies join Mercedes-Benz and GE in buying iPads directly for their employees. But Apple’s success has come precisely because it puts consumers first. A typical statement we hear from executives at firms considering buying tablets is, “We’d really like a tablet that integrates better with our back-end systems, but we’re going with iPads because we want employees to like them.” Businesses care about how workers feel about technology.

Contrary to popular belief, RIM is pretty successful selling its devices to consumers, too. BlackBerry smartphone shipments, subscribers, and revenues continue to rise quarter after quarter, even in mature North American markets. Most important, BlackBerry consumer customers (“BlackBerry Internet Service,” or BIS) now outnumber BlackBerry enterprise customers (“BlackBerry Enterprise Service,” or BES).

But the PlayBook is a complicated product to sell to consumers. For starters, the “BlackBerry Bridge” feature, which displays email and BlackBerry messenger content only when in Bluetooth-range of a BlackBerry smartphone, has security appeal for CIOs but is potentially confusing to consumers. Yes, you can still get Web-based email like Gmail on the device, but there’s no native email application like there is on the iPad—and email is the No. 1 activity consumers do on tablets today. Second, compared with the iPad the PlayBook has relatively few native apps designed for the platform; it supports Android apps but only those designed for Gingerbread, not Honeycomb (not that there are many of those, either). Apps don’t matter to all tablet shoppers, but they do matter to some: 23 percent of consumers considering buying a tablet rank “Number of available apps” in their top-three criteria; 19 percent say the same about Flash support, which the PlayBook browser will have.

Whereas Apple owns its own channel–the Apple Store–to educate and sell the iPad to consumers, RIM will be relying on the Blue Shirts at Best Buy to sell its device, as well as its carrier partners and other local retailers (20,000 stores worldwide). It’s going to be a tough sell. While the PlayBook has dazzling performance and multitasking—for example, the ability to switch apps and keep a video or game running in the background—and solid hardware design, consumers will be comparing a first-generation PlayBook with a second-generation iPad. iPad will dominate tablet sales in 2011. But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we see a path for RIM to gain market share in 2012. An improved version-two PlayBook must have native email, built-in security and more native apps for QNX, the RIM’s recently-acquired operating system for the PlayBook. To get there, RIM will need to port QNX to its smartphones to expand the platform’s reach and make it more appealing for developers.

Even so, the PlayBook’s appeal is likely limited to BlackBerry smartphone customers, and to win them over, RIM’s marketing execution needs to be flawless. With the recent departure of CMO Keith Pardy, RIM’s new leadership needs to step up and define and execute a vision for this product that puts consumers on par if not ahead of CIOs. Without that vision, RIM will have an expensive product failure on its hands.

Ted Schadler is a vice president and principal analyst and Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

HTC’s strong results reflect rising demand for smartphones as consumers continue to switch from traditional cellphones to gadgets that allow them to browse the Internet, write emails and watch videos.

The Taiwan-based smartphone maker, which is best known for making phones using Google Inc.’s operating system, has been growing at a rapid clip and is neck-and neck with Nokia Corp. in terms of market capitalization.

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Exclusively.In, which launched in June and raised $2.8 million from investors such as Accel Partners, has launched Palaces to Paradise, a companion site to its retail site that will offer discounts on travel packages to Asia.

Travel has been an obvious niche vertical that other flash sales and daily deal sites have readily expanded into.

Gilt Groupe launched Jetsetter in September 2009, and already has two million people signed up to receive its deals by email. About two-thirds of the membership overlaps with the other Gilt sites. Other daily deals sites have expanded into travel, including LivingSocial’s Escapes and Overstock.com.

Just like its apparel site, Exclusively.In is focused on offering travel experiences from Asia. The four travel deals that are live on the site starting today are: A boutique hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan; a jungle lodge located in Kanha National Park in India; a beachside resort in India; and a villa located in Koh Samui, Thailand.

As an example, the five-bedroom villa in Thailand, which sleeps 10 and includes a full-time Thai chef, normally costs $1,290 a night but has been marked down to $1,095. The deal will be available until May 31.

The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

One indicator is the sales of prepaid gaming cards that are purchased at Walmart, Target, 7-11 and many other retailers.

While the game cards are typically purchased in person, they can be used for a range of things, from buying virtual goods within FarmVille  to buying a game that’s digitally delivered over the internet via Xbox Live.

Today, NPD released industry sales figures for February today, reporting that prepaid game cards now account for 22 percent of all accessories sold and that sales have increased 52 percent compared to a year-ago.

Meanwhile, in the same time period console software sales only increased by 2 percent.

NPD’s Analyst Anita Frazier said the jump in game card sales points to the increased importance of digitally distributed content sales within the games industry, and that last month marked the best February on record for accessory sales.

The top-selling item was the Xbox 360 1,600 points card.

Overall, NPD reported that physical retail channel in the U.S. generated video game hardware sales in February of $467 million, increasing 10 percent. Video game software, including console and portable totaled $601.4 million, dropping 5 percent, and video game accessories totaled $257 million, increasing 22 percent.

The idea piggy-backs on other loyalty programs already in the market, such as those of credit card companies that offer discounts when customers visit certain hotels or rental car companies.

But with Clovr’s platform, advertisers and brands can enable consumers to associate coupons directly with a credit card.

For instance, a banner ad could offer a 10 percent discount to an electronics store. Instead of printing out a coupon, the user can opt to link the deal to a credit card. The discount is activated only if the consumer uses that credit card at the register.

Since coming out of stealth mode late last year, Clovr has been fine-tuning its approach to the market.

Initially, it envisioned working directly with banks to make the service available to customers. But since advertisers want a large audience to target, the company’s co-founder and CEO Tom Burgess said today, the company realized it had to make the platform more widely available.

To that end, it partnered with credit card processing companies to enable 99 percent of debit or credit card holders in the country to participate in the offers. Burgess said that Clovr is now entering beta and that its first offers will start appearing in May when it is commercially available.

Clovr is part of a new market that is leveraging old technology called Card Linked Offers, or CLOs for short.

Coincidentally, one of Clovr’s biggest competitors is also being backed by someone Burgess knows all too well.

Yesterday, Clovr’s close competitor, Offermatic, announced it had raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ron Conway and Omar Hamoui.

Hamoui was the founder of AdMob, the mobile advertising company purchased by Google for $750 million in 2009. And Burgess was the founder of Third Screen Media, a mobile ad network that was acquired by AOL in 2007.

Today, Offermatic is Burgess’ West Coast competitor, much like AdMob was his West Coast competitor when both he and Hamoui were executives in the mobile advertising space.

A third company competing in the space is Atlanta-based Cardlytics.

Burgess said there’s one main difference between Clovr and Offermatic. Clovr is a platform that any ad network can use. It does not have a sales team and is not offering deals directly to consumers.

Offermatic launched its beta in December, and sends discounts to consumers based on their spending history. Similarly, it links a consumer’s credit and debit cards to its system so that people receive the discount automatically.

To be sure, all three companies are trying to solve the problem of low redemption rates of physical coupons or vouchers.

Clovr’s second round of funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures. Clovr Media seed investors Kepha Partners and Common Angels also participated. In total, the company has raised nearly $10 million.

To that end, Adobe is unveiling new features today that will enable marketers to monitor, measure and monetize platforms, where consumers are having conversations about their products and brands.

As an example, Aseem Chandra, VP of Marketing for Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit, said the product will be able to alert a company to a spike in traffic on Twitter, and track down the original source.

What they might find out is that Justin Bieber, who has nearly eight million followers, tweeted about his favorite jeans, which was read and spread by thousands of others on Twitter or Facebook.

With that information, the tools could then enable a brand to make decisions on future celebrity partnerships, or more likely, on what keywords to buy on Google.

Chandra said one reason it has gotten so difficult to see where the traffic is originating from is that a ton of activity is also coming from mobile devices, including the proliferation of tablets. “How do you measure that, and where does it originate from? You want to be able to correlate those two and encourage the behavior,” he said.

The new SocialAnalytics features, which are apart of Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, is expected to be unveiled this morning at Adobe’s Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City. The tools track more than 40 different social networks and gather positive, neutral or negative sentiments. A beta was introduced last year, and since then 75 customers have been using the platform. The product will be available more widely in the third quarter.

Chandra said the past year has shown them how important social media is to media, entertainment and e-commerce companies.

“Everything we do as consumers and professionals is informed by social. That’s going to stay regardless. The conversation we are having with CMOs is that they see that, and are asking us how do I make the important decisions around their business, marketing programs and campaigns? …There’s a lot of activity and it’s well deserved.”

EMoney was given the task of moderating a panel called “Leveraging New Markets” in front of a packed room with two other competing panels.

The participants were Ted Sorom, the CEO of Rixty, Bruce Bower, the CEO of Plastic Jungle and Jeff Thomas, SVP of SecondMarket.

There’s no video, so you’ll have to endure a written recap from my perspective as chief interrogator.

First, if you aren’t familiar with these companies, the four of us can attest there’s only one thread in common: Liquidity, and creating marketplaces to make assets more fluid.

The discussion is well-timed as we push beyond e-commerce and Web 2.0 to a new reality, where reducing friction to payments is turning into a large opportunity.

One solution popping up everywhere is to create virtual currencies, which solves the problem of paying for many items at small price points because it doesn’t make economic sense to charge 50 cents to your credit card on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, there’s lots of clogs in the system, ranging from gift cards that are never redeemed, to a large population of people who don’t have credit cards, to the more extreme, like what will eventually happen to all of those unused Groupon and LivingSocial vouchers?

Here’s a look at how all three are trying to add liquidity to the system:

Rixty: The San Francisco company allows consumers to buy prepaid cards with cash to be redeemed for game credits online, such as Facebook Credits and Zynga’s CityVille.

On the panel, Sorom announced that Rixty’s distribution was increasing from 20,000 physical locations to 70,000 with the addition of Green Dot MoneyPak prepaid cards, which are sold at Walmart and 7-11. Greendot charges a $4.95 service fee, which Rixty will redeem as soon as soon as the card is spent online.

Plastic Jungle: The San Jose, Calif.-based company is a secondary market for unwanted and unused gift cards.

The company buys them for up to 92 percent of face value, and sells them at a discount. Bower says some of the highest value gift cards are for Target and Walmart because they are the closest to cash. The lowest value cards are from local retailers or seasonal items, like See’s Candy, which only sell well on Valentine’s Day and Christmas.

SecondMarket: The New York-based company is a secondary market for private stock in companies, such as Facebook and Twitter. It deals in getting liquidity to employees or shareholders, who can’t yet sell their stock on the public market.

The summary is that while cash may still be king, the trend is to enable liquidity.

Some of the high-level takeaways:

– Thomas of SecondMarket: The company is constantly in headlines for being associated with Facebook’s $70 billion-plus or minus-private valuation. He said private company stock sales have become the fastest growing part of its business with transactions increasing to $400 million in 2010, up from only $100 million in 2009.

He said an essential part to keeping the assets liquid is to keep the information flowing, which is inherently difficult with companies that aren’t required to disclose any financial information. The company will soon be partnering with researchers to produce independent reports that will be purchased by potential investors.

Sorom of Rixty: One of the big questions was how dominate Facebook will be able to become as a virtual currency platform.

Most panelists agreed that it was inevitable that it will become a powerhouse, but that it will face hurdles on two fronts. In order for it to win, it will have to appeal both to consumers and merchants. And, currently it charges a 30 percent fee, which is much too high for most physical and even some digital goods.

Sorom said regulations will also limit its activities. Just like at Rixty, they have avoided allowing users too much liquidity. The credits can only be used for pre-approved merchants and can not be swapped or traded among friends. Similarly, Sorom believes that Facebook would not have that have that ability, given current federal regulations.

Bower at Plastic Jungle: Bower saved the best for last. Whenever trying to come up for a good description of liquidity think back to your college days, especially if they were pre-Internet.

As a crafty collegiate, he learned to live off one square meal, turning in his other meal plan points for cash. He purchased brand new textbooks on his parent’s dime and then returned them for used books a day later. All of the cash allowed him to gain the most important liquid asset of all — beer.

Photo Credit: Rick Scully.

This time, unlike the one that aired right before the Super Bowl kick-off, LivingSocial is focusing more on the deals themselves.

In the Super Bowl, it used the tagline “LivingSocial changed my life,” and had a strange storyline that featured a gruff-looking man who turns into a cross-dresser.

The two new spots are a little more on point.

For example, in “We’ll set the stage, you play the part,” a man and a women perform a number of quick costume changes as they transition through a number of scenes, ranging from a restaurant (55 percent off fine dining), to a hair salon (72 percent off) to a dance floor (where they save 62 percent on tango lessons). For the finale, the curtain closes and the announcer says, “Sign up for free to get daily deals at LivingSocial.com.”

The Super Bowl commercials for both LivingSocial and Groupon demonstrated how difficult it is to portray this somewhat new concept of offering a voucher for a heavily discounted service.

Even so, LivingSocial’s commercial might be a little misleading since it uses “free” in the tagline. As any regular participant of LivingSocial or Groupon would know, you have to pay for the voucher in advance if you want the deal. (But it may not be so obvious to a newbie).

While LivingSocial’s Super Bowl ad fell flat, Groupon fell on even tougher luck with its series of three advertisements, which viewers revolted against and called insensitive.

The one that got the most feedback was a 30-second clip featuring Timothy Hutton that said while Tibetan culture is in jeopardy, “they still whip up an amazing fish curry, and since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com, we’re each getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15.”

Groupon initially offered to retract that one, but ended up having to apologize and yank all three. The company tried explaining that it was raising money for those causes, but the connection was lost on viewers.

LivingSocial’s new commercial can be found on the company’s Web site. It’s also embedded below. Mashable reports that the new campaign, which will kick off Sunday, was created by the Martin Agency.