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Visa Inc. is working with Starbucks Corp. in a promotion to improve Visa brand's status within a mobile wallet.

The San Francisco payments network is giving $5 to each customer who uses a Visa credit card to load at least $25 onto a prepaid Starbucks Card account using a smartphone, the Seattle coffee chain said. Starbucks' mobile payment application runs on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices.

The Visa reload promotion, which began last month and runs through June, aims to "make it easy" for consumers to reload Starbucks Cards with Visa, a representative for the payments network said. The promotion is good for a one-time reload of only one Visa card.

This is "an easy way to gain visibility and consumer awareness," and it may herald the beginning of more such promotions, Beth Robertson, director of payments research at Javelin Strategy and Research, said. But most mobile payment promotions will be designed "as drivers of true mobile payment, rather than card reload," she said.

Brian Riley, a senior research director with TowerGroup, said that although the promotion could cover the cost of a grande-size beverage, "$5 will not build loyalty." Rather, it may be a bid to maintain the loyalty of customers Visa acquired through an earlier product, Riley said.

"This promotion shows that Visa is interested in holding on to its status as the primary payment choice for Starbucks Card customers, even though the cobranded Chase Visa card Starbucks used to offer has gone away," he said. A year ago, JPMorgan Chase & Co. phased out the cobranded Starbucks Duetto Visa card it introduced in 2003.

Designer Dror Benshetrit took the stage at Design Indaba's opening day to unveil a project he spent the last four years working on: QuaDror. A versatile structural support system, QuaDror is a fresh take on space truss geometry that offers innumerable solutions for use and eliminates redundancy in structure. "Mass is one of the worst in terms of energy waste," Dror told Cool Hunting.

A hinge without a revolution joint, the QuaDror is extremely strong and energy efficient, but the real beauty about QuaDror is its flexibility. The robust nature of the design allows it to hold up to 86 QuaDrors on top of each other. When stacked the unit can serve as a sound barrier or temporary wall; when collapsed, the QuaDror is completely flat. Dror explained that while you can fit 1,750 pieces in one shipping container, that fact isn't even relevant because "there is no reason why you can't just produce them locally"—a brilliant aspect when finding immediate solutions for disaster relief, which is another viable option for the form's purpose.

Apple has launched a new

each June or July for the past four years, but this year's expected

may not launch until September,

analyst Craig Berger says in a note today.

Berger writes, "For the iPhone 5, we continue to hear that a July launch is unlikely, with various casing suppliers and touch suppliers still ramping up, with some chip vendors not having yet received firm iPhone 5 orders, and with other sockets like the image sensor (most likely going to Omnivision exclusively, but with some potential for Sony to split that socket) still in flux. Given these factors, we think a September launch is more likely, off from Apple's traditional iPhone launch schedule, but giving the firm more time to enhance its next-generation instant communications on the phone."

Berger says his contacts suggest that Apple is planning to build 100 million iPhones during calendar 2011, "much stronger" than Street estimates and the firm's prior estimate of 75 million. And he has heard that Apple has boosted its internal iPad target to 45 million units, up from 38 million previously.

Skyfire, which has racked up millions of downloads of its mobile browser thanks to its ability to convert Flash video for devices, is now poised to announce its first trial with a tier-one wireless carrier in the U.S. The test will establish how well Skyfire can help operators better manage the explosion of mobile video traffic and signals a bigger play for the startup as it looks to expand beyond its direct-to-consumer business. It also shows how carriers are going to have to get creative as they deal with an onslaught of mobile data use.

Skyfire uses a cloud-based delivery service to stream video on mobile devices. The architecture has proven popular with iOS and other mobile users, who are able to use the Skyfire browser to view Flash video content. The company last year tallied 3 million downloads of its browser, including a free Android version as well as $4.99 iPad and $2.99 iPhone versions. But the secret sauce of Skyfire isn’t in delivering Flash video, it’s in optimizing video on the fly for each mobile device so that the stream caters to the device and network conditions. Essentially, it sends no more data than is necessary at that moment.

That’s what is catching the interest of operators. CEO Jeff Glueck told me SkyFire’s first U.S. carrier trial should be announced by the end of the first quarter. Glueck said SkyFire is also in talks with another major carrier in the U.S., as well as a European operator. He said carriers are interested in Skyfire’s delivery system because it can reduce mobile traffic by 75 to 80 percent by transcoding the video for mobile use. While some mobile video providers — like Netflix — adapt their streaming video for mobile devices, Glueck said most do not, sending way more data than is necessary for a small screen. By installing Skyfire’s technology into its own data centers, big carriers can reduce the traffic and ensure more bandwidth for all users.

“This is where we want to be, embedding our technology in carrier networks and devices,” said Glueck. “If we can get deployed in the network, we can optimize all video, all apps and almost any format.”

This is could be a key tool for operators facing a data tsunami. Cisco recently reported that worldwide mobile data traffic is set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month, fueled in large part by mobile video. Last year, Cisco said global mobile data traffic grew by 2.6 times for the third year in a row, even with a slow economy, increased traffic offload and the advent of tiered pricing. Video traffic is expected to eclipse 50 percent of all traffic this year and is forecast to reach 66 percent by 2015, Cisco said. With that in mind, it makes sense for carriers to look at Skyfire and other providers like Bytemobile, which has also been active optimizing web traffic for carriers.

Glueck said operators will still likely turn to tiered-data packages and network management techniques to get the most out of their networks and manage usage. But he said Skyfire can play an important role in helping carriers make the most out of their limited resources. Even with the launch of 4G, Glueck said it’s only a matter of time before those networks also experience massive video traffic. Optimizing mobile video will allow carriers to treat all video traffic equally instead of singling out a provider, which is also in line with the net neutrality rules passed by the FCC.

Skyfire can host the traffic themselves for smaller carriers. But in many cases, it makes sense for an operator to license Skyfire’s software and run the software from their own data center. It will better ensure that there are no capacity issues, something that Skyfire encountered briefly when it launched its iPhone browser. Glueck said Skyfire’s approach is likely to be popular with carriers because it can work off of commodity servers and doesn’t require a special hardware.

There isn’t going to be any one solution to head off the coming mobilpocalypse. As my colleague Kevin wrote last year, carriers are also looking to handle increasing data usage through Wi-Fi offload, better idle features for devices, metered payment plans and in-home femtocells. If Skyfire’s trial goes well, add video optimization to the list.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

In a recent commentary piece for PYMNTS.com, Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster argued that NFC will not ignite explosive growth for mobile payments. Even with new developments like Google's Nexus S phone with NFC or the ISIS mCommerce network from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, Webster writes that merchants will continue to lack enthusiasm until a proposition that wraps value around NFC is really brought to market.

Her opinion piece drew passionate reaction from both NFC diehards and non-believers alike. Feel free to add your response along with the ones from PYMNTS readers we've already compiled below.

Related Article: Will Apple Get Us to Wave At the Point of Sale?

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"Karen your comments are "right on!" When I read that same CNN.com article, I thought the same as you... I've been in the industry long enough to know that the following quote from the article is just not going to happen: 'We're going to start seeing more and more people leaving their homes without their wallets.'" - Ira Goldman

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"Excellent look behind the headlines. You have put your finger on a number of elephants in the room, like merchant adoption, that are being ignored by the big players. We have seen this time and time again---Mondex comes to mind and currently RFID. As for the media, market research companies long ago learned how easy it is to generate publicity by publishing outlandish forecasts that overstate adoption of new technologies, which are then repeated by gullible reporters in the general media who need to write about something new to keep their jobs and then used by eager beavers to convince their management to fund their initiatives." - Jim Shanahan, President, Maverick Network Solutions

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"Apple has demonstrated time and time again an uncanny ability to tap previously uncalibrated latent consumer preferences, and make a lot of money doing so. But the immutable laws of a successful payment system are a bit more complex and consequential than my Angry Birds app, so it will great to see how, for instance, we'll be able to 'un-wave' that latte purchase if I decide to get a caramel macchiato instead." - Kim Anderson

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"The key to acceptance is the value add on both sides of the transaction. Apple's introduction will boost the number of users, but critical mass is still a long way off. The ever expanding capabiliites of smartphones and their ability to become a principal Internet access channel for consumers will drive the migration to smart device NFC." - Chris Cosgrove

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"Karen, as for your comments, 'Spot on'! Believe that an NFC revolution is on its way, but there are a growing number of horses that have been admitted to the starting gate, and several more to come, presenting even more innovations that will both help and confuse the growth of mobile purchasing." - Lisa Stanton

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ISIS is very interesting as they will have access to 200+ million U.S. subscribers, but more importantly, they control the handsets and will control what's added and downloaded...so jury is still out. I believe Apple, Google and maybe Facebook are the ones which will open the market's eyes and introduce the solutions which makes NFC disruptive.

So what I am trying to say is, that as an industry, we tend to forget about the most interesting aspect of NFC, which is ‘How millions of NFC handsets will bridge the two worlds of brick-and-mortar and Internet, no more MOTO transactions for payments, new virtual currencies at POS, value added services and just for simply exchanging data, which today may be residing on your virtual social network account’. I have been waiting for this since 2001... :-) “ - Bengt Horsma,

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"You have hit the 'nail on the head' in every respect! This is what we have been preaching at iCache for some time now and have now found a 'Payments Prophet' in your writings! Thank you so much for bringing logical thought and reason to a complex space. Technology has the potential for so many things but there has to be practicality brought to the usefulness and free market acceptance of technology.

There is a quantum difference between a cool technology looking for a home versus a technology jammed into a very delicate ecosystem. This has the potential to gain a lot of initial press but very low adoption and lifespan. The sad part is that it is a distraction from meaningful change.

As a footnote, I am a huge fan of Apple but their business models are not typically inclusive of others in an meaningful way and always seem to end up in closed-loop systems. The payments space and ecosystem demands are far too complex to be absorbed into what is probably being contemplated as an 'Apple only' model where the iTunes store holds card info, the iPhone is used for payment and the is a new 'iPOS' terminal deployed (probably using the iPad).

The evolution of the wallet needs to be a true evolution which works with existing POS terminals -- you can't change 13 million of anything overnight! NFC is a revolution and one that will take years upon years to become a reality." - Jonathan Ramaci