Bloomberg is reporting, based on two people close to the project, that Google will be rolling out NFC payment trials at stores in San Francisco and NYC within the next 4 months (not Boston, unfortunately). And in fact, Google will be seeding these merchants with VeriFone’s NFC accepting payment terminals. Although neither Google or VeriFone confirmed and provided details, the trials and NFC solution may combine financial account info, store gift card balances, loyalty solutions, and coupon subscriptions.

This announcement comes just a day after rumors circled among UK mobile carriers that Apple has said it will not be incorporating NFC into the iPhone 5.

Google is not the first to trial NFC-based mobile payments in either markets, with Visa having rolled out a trial just last year and many others in years before. The difference now is timing: more and more smartphones are expected to ship with embedded NFC chips later this year, and other industry players have created solutions that go-around manufacturers, including micro SD cards that can be incorporated into smartphones without embedded chips. Even Mr. Schmidt has been quoted himself saying, “NFC has been around for a long time but everything has just started to come together.”

Google is uniquely positioned to capture and ignite mobile payments here in the US, with its increasingly popular Android mobile operating system, Google Checkout product, as well as loads of other solutions like Google Places used by the two main parties needed for any payment product to take off: merchants and consumers alike. The company is well positioned to prime and touch almost all players to the payment ecosystem: consumers, merchants, developers and even advertisers.

Here are some important recent Google moves to keep in mind:

• Google has added NFC capabilities to its Android platform, and the HTC Nexus S phone shipped last year came equipped with the ability to read any NFC tag currently out there.
• In December Google gave out hundreds of NFC kits (window tags and fortune cookies for customers) in Portland, Oregon where they are also testing their review and recommendation product, Google Hotpot. These merchant stickers allow users to check in to the location just by swiping their phone on the sticker, with the idea being that checkin and payment can occur at the same time from one of these in the future.
  
  

As for advertising opportunities that NFC offers, Google is also positioned well. A recent NYTimes article explains it well: “The promise of NFC chips in mobile phones for Google is that it opens up all sorts of possibilities for mobile coupons and other sorts of offer-based advertising. In mobile and local advertising, the last few feet between a consumer seeing an ad and stepping into a store to make a purchase is largely untraceable. But if the mobile ad or coupon could be linked to the payment through an NFC chip in your phone, then Google can begin to measure the full cycle of click-throughs to purchase.”

Essentially, when combined with GPS, NFC could enable Google to dominate mobile advertising, showing ads as a person swipes their phone to pay or even collects product info during shopping.

To learn more about this latest mobile payment rumor, read the full Bloomberg article by clicking the link at the top of the page. To learn more about the opportunities NFC presents, check out, “NFC: Enabling Mobile Payments, the Internet of Things, and the Next Wave of Applications.”