“This will be the biggest media event we’ll cover for the year, if not in the history of Yahoo,” said Ken Fuchs, VP of global media for Yahoo.

Also read: NBC’s Olympics authentication gives you a break

With 27 reporters on the ground in London — more than double Yahoo’s allotment for the 2010 Winter Games — and 25 regional sites covering the games in 12 languages in more than 200 countries, Yahoo is expecting a global audience of more than 700 million viewers over a two-week span.

Also read: Yahoo CEO – We must be clearer about what we won’t do

“This will showcase what you can do even though you don’t own the broadcast rights,” noted Fuchs. “If you look at past Olympics, there were more [viewing] minutes generated without the ability to live stream official events.”

Of course, Yahoo isn’t publicly revealing any revenue expectations for its coverage. But its business model seems to compare favorably to that of Comcast/NBCUniversal, which is paying $4.4 billion for U.S. Olympics broadcast rights through 2020 — and already reported a $200 million loss on the 2010 Winter Games.

Also read: Shazam to ply 2nd screen app to NBC’s Olympics coverage

Here’s how Yahoo’s major Olympic sponsors are getting involved:

>> Citi is sponsoring the Yahoo Olympic Medal Count, which will be available to nationalist-minded, “USA!”-chanting medal trackers on PC and mobile platforms. Citi is also backing Sportacular, an app that allows users to get updates, stats and news on specific events.

>> Visa will back some of Yahoo’s social media elements tied to the games. (Yahoo, for example, plans to amply employ its IntoNow social TV division.)

>> Transamerica will team with Yahoo to produce a video series, Tomorrow Makers, which will offer preview coverage of the next day’s events, profiles of the participating athletes, medal predictions and other content.

>> Procter & Gamble will sponsor a wide swath of Yahoo Olympics programming at both the corporate level and for its individual brands.

Computer scientists have been promising that reliable speech-recognition software is just a few years away for decades, and while progress has been made even the best software leaves a lot to be desired. Similar promises are being made these days around mobile payments, and a sizable number of people and companies believe that the smartphone can be a natural evolution of the credit card in just a few years.

“There has never been a more exciting time in payments,” said Dave Talach, vice president of global product management at Verifone, echoing during a panel discussion at GigaOm Mobilize what many in the payments industry have been saying alongside the launch of products like *Google* Wallet.

But it’s not going to happen this year, and it’s not going to happen next year, Talach and his fellow panelists agreed. It may not even happen the year after that, as extensive field trials have to be conducted to make sure phones with NFC (near-field communications) technology work properly with merchant terminals and back-end payment-processing systems before any of this can hit the mainstream. Oh, and somebody needs to convince the average consumer why paying with their phone is easier, safer or more rewarding than pulling out cash or a credit card.

Mobile payment backers like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) like to point to the use of NFC technology in lots of places already, such as gas stations and restaurants. But those strategies have actually been a disaster, according to Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile.

“Merchants have been burnt by NFC,” she said, referring to the cost required to build out payment infrastructure to support credit cards with NFC, which are used in “less than 1 percent of transactions.” Such cards are used more widely in Europe and Asia, but have yet to really catch on in the U.S.

Square’s Keith Rabois, chief operating officer of a company that makes a mobile credit-card reader and iPhone application, unsurprisingly agrees with Chambers’ view.

“We don’t think NFC is going to resonate with mainstream consumers,” he said in a conversation with Om Malik of GigaOm before the mobile-payment panel. “It’s good cocktail-party chatter.”

Yet NFC technology is getting serious backing from Android phone makers as well as Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM), while everyone waits to see if Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) decided to include the technology in the iPhone 5. Paypal is actually planning to release an app later this year that lets users of NFC phones pay each other, Chambers said, implying that Paypal will hedge its bets as it goes.

The real problem isn’t technology or tricky partnerships like Isis, a mobile-payments consortium backed by archrivals AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon. (“A joint venture between competitors is tough to execute on,” said Brad Greene, senior business leader at Visa, which is actually a member of Isis.)

It’s convincing people why they need or want this technology, said Ken Miller, vice president of strategic risk services at Intuit.

“The entrenched leader right now is cash or plastic, which takes two seconds. You have to come up with something that is as good or better, plus perks, to get mass consumer and merchant adoption,” he said.

There are definitely some areas to exploit. Verifone’s Talach brought up the good point that mobile-payments technologies eliminate paper from the payments equation, such as paper coupons or paper receipts.

Chambers agreed, citing a study that Paypal did examining what people carried around in their wallets. “The digitalization of coupons and loyalty cards, there’s tremendous value in that. Any solution that’s just trying to change payments is not going to be successful,” she said.

And Visa’s Barnes noted that while there is a need for extra promotion in countries where payments systems already work pretty well, there are plenty of places in the developing world where credit-card systems are poor or nonexistent, people use mobile phones constantly and distrust of banks is high. Mobile payments would be competing with cash in those areas, and could actually be seen as far more convenient and safer than walking around with a wallet full of cash.

So despite all the hype in 2011, even those working hard to promote mobile payments as a more convenient (and data-rich) method of payment for goods and services are urging caution.

“The 2010s are the decade for mobile payments,” said Intuit’s Miller, dismissing suggestions that 2012 might be the year of mobile payments. “To me it’s analogous to the Goodyear tire coming out when everyone has a horse and buggy.”

Enter the credit card companies Foursquare and, last week, Facebook have both partnered with American Express to allow for more seamless deal redemptions. Users link their American Express accounts to, respectively, their Foursquare or Facebook “Link, Like, Love” apps. They see deals based on their friends and interests and can load the deals to their AmEx cards, so when it comes time to redeem the deal all they have to do is swipe their card. The transaction goes through at full price and users get a credit on their AmEx statement. Expect other credit card companies, like Visa and MasterCard, to jump in soon.

“You can think of daily deals as a $300 billion media market or a $5 to $8 trillion commerce market,” said Neal Polachek, President of BIA/Kelsey. As credit-card companies enter the space, “I think we’re on the leading edge of a transformation of how the marketplace exchanges money.”

Don’t forget *Amazon*, Facebook and Google. Those three companies are still new to daily deal sites and operating in just a few cities each–Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) rolled out AmazonLocal in early June; Google Offers launched in May; and Facebook Deals kicked off in April–but the infrastructure and customers are there if the companies start thinking beyond “traditional” daily deals sent out via e-mail.

For instance, Amazon could “allow all the deal companies to consolidate their deals in one marketplace,” daily deal software site Deal Current CEO Jimmy Hendricks said, relying on a search/e-commerce format to promote deals–whereby they would recommend relevant deals to customers based on their recent purchases. And once people are able to find deals through search, “the relevancy of a daily e-mail” decreases drastically,” David Strebinger, founder of “request-a-deal” site Wantsa, said. A caveat: “The only way [search] really works is if the quality of the deal matches the quality of the search experience,” said Yelp consumer product lead Eric Singley. “Otherwise, it becomes noise.”

Ongoing challenges with brand loyalty: Brand loyalty remains basically nonexistent among the different sites–both for customers and for merchants, with the average daily deal customer subscribing to 3.5 different daily deal e-mails. That problem can be tackled by providing a better experience for merchants, a better experience for customers — or both. To appeal to merchants, deal sites may have to accept lower margins–estimated currently at around 50 percent.

To get to the point where deal sites are an “everyday tool,” Perry Evans, CEO of local marketing site Closely, said, sites’ margins should decrease to the 15 to 20 percent range for marketing to an existing customer base and 25 to 30 percent for lead generation. “The loyalty is to the merchant,” Hendricks said. Deal sites have to adopt a lower rate or “provide more,” by getting merchants to offer exclusive products and experiences that no other sites have (Daily Candy and Gilt City are doing well with this, he said) and by adding more editorial content (a major component of Yelp’s focus going forward).

“I really like what I’ve seen from LivingSocial recently, like experiences in a city, escapes and travel products,” Evans said. Multiple products might be coupled together to create “an evening out,” and create more brand value. Also, he believes being a “quality citizen” can build customer loyalty: “The business that does the right things in terms of redemption and treatment of the [merchant] can build brand affinity. There’s a risk of a backlash against the way Groupon and LivingSocial work. If you’re sustaining 50 percent margins, at the end of the day, consumers don’t like that.”

As for Groupon backlash… There was little consensus on whether Groupon (whose representatives did not appear on any panels at the conference) has a sustainable business model. For now, it’s #1, with LivingSocial close behind (and, at a distant #3, probably BuyWithMe). “Groupon will become the MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) of daily deals,” predicted Strebinger. “Groupon’s done amazing things in terms of scalability and building up sales forces to sell deals. But it doesn’t think the way LivingSocial or Google (NSDQ: GOOG) think in terms of how to make things more relevant or social.” The “constantly evolving” LivingSocial, with its expansion into the social and mobile spaces and “strategic” partnerships, has “a lot of opportunity for movement over the next 12 to 18 months.”

However, Evans expects bold moves from Groupon: “I’d buy Yelp, OpenTable and Foursquare if I were the CEO. I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see those kinds of bold moves,” he said. “It’s fun, in a sadistic way, to beat up on Groupon. But at the end of the day they’re going to get out first and have a big checkbook.”

Isis was formed last November by three of the four largest wireless carriers in the U.S. to investigate and deploy technology designed to let consumers use their mobile phones as digital currency. It welcomed American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa Tuesday to the consortium, saying in a press release that “Isis’ relationships with all four payment networks mean that with Isis-enabled phones and payment terminals in place, merchants and consumers will have ubiquity and freedom of choice when it comes to payment network acceptance.”

That could be a problem for Google, which is trying to build a similar network of phones and payment processing terminals equipped with NFC (near-field communications) wireless technology. There is a lot of enthusiasm for the concept of mobile payments among mobile industry companies and payment processors, but any such venture will need the support of both phone makers and the retailers who must install new equipment in their stores to accept mobile payments.

Google thought it had solved part of that problem by tapping into Mastercard’s existing PayPass network, but if retailers participating in the Isis system can accept payment from all four major payment processing companies, that could prove more attractive. It’s very early days for this type of technology but the growth of the Isis consortium underscores how seriously some big-name players in payments are taking the mobile opportunity.

O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.

For those who have been watching the UK mobile industry for a while, you might recall that these operators have tried to get together to offer m-payment solutions in the past (see: M-Pay, Simpay and many other efforts that are now relegated to the dustbin of mobile history).

None of that has gone anywhere, and the last few years have mainly been about each operator working on its own initiatives. (Including Orange working on an NFC trial with Barclaycard, pictured.)

Now it appears that the market is forcing them to rethink this idea. Consumers are catching on to using their devices for a lot more than calls and texts. Smartphones are getting increasingly equipped with the right technology to execute payments securely.

And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon. (And given how apps have largely passed them by as a business opportunity, they definitely don’t want mobile payments to be repeat performance.)

The operators have scheduled a call for later today to talk through more details and we will update this story as we get more information. [Update below.]

For now, they have pointed out that the JV will need regulatory approval to go ahead. (I can hear Hutchison’s Three marching to Ofcom’s offices already…)

Update: Three made a swift response after the JV was announced, and as you would expect highlighted its exclusion from the forming of the JV. CEO Kevin Russell noted: “Directionally, this is a good move on taking m-commerce forward. As the leader in the adoption of mobile internet services in the UK we would want and expect to be at the heart of a cross-industry development like this and are more than a little concerned that – as a core competitor – we have been excluded from this joint venture. The crucial test of the openness of this initiative will be our ability to launch services for all UK mobile consumers simultaneously.”

On the conference call, the CEOs of the different operators all emphasized that other operators would be welcome to come into the venture after it launches. “We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”

It’s clear that there are still a lot of details to be ironed out, and some of the questions that the CEOs fielded, if anything, seemed to create more rather than less confusion. The JV will be an infrastructure for payments, but it won’t process any payments. This will be down to each operator, working with their individual partners, it seems.

It also looks like the first products of this JV will be about advertising rather than NFC payments. Again, Dunne: “NFC is gong to take a little more time, but between the three of us we buy considerable amounts of handsets and [handset makers have] been looking for someone to put their hand up and embrace NFC in a big way.” On advertising, it looks like the idea will be to use the platform to launch campaigns, targeting the subscriber bases of all three operators. In both services, users will be able to opt in and opt out of services.

In a release announcing the news, Visa says it expects the transaction to close today.

Fundamo, based in Cape Town, South Africa, had been a privately-held enterprise with more than 50 customers covering five million subscribers in 40 countries, with a special emphasis in Africa, with other deployments in Asia and the Middle East. Its services work on the premise of SMS-based mobile payments, rather than new technologies like NFC, although Fundamo has also said to me in the past that it would incorporate new technologies as and when they became accessible to its market base.

In the same announcement, Visa also said that it had extended its agreement with Monitise, a UK-based mobile payments company that develops apps for a range of devices for users to access their bank accounts — or in this case, their Visa account details — and make transactions using them.

– Apple Cloud: On the heels of yesterday’s news that Apple has apparently inked a deal with EMI for streaming music, the patent blog Patently Apple has uncovered a patent filed back in Q4 2009 by Apple describing how a cloud-based music service would work. The big question: is this a smokescreen; a single bullet from the patent scattergun; or the real thing?

– NFC: Just when you thought you had heard enough about plans for NFC, at last we are now starting to see some actual commercial rollouts.Yesterday, Telefonica-owned O2 in the UK announced its first partners for its as-yet unnamed mobile wallet service. They include Visa Europe, Wave Crest, FIS and Intelligent Environments. Not to be outdone, France Telecom’s Orange today launched Quick Tap, its NFC service, in partnership with Barclaycard and MasterCard, along with the first handset for the service, the Tocco by Samsung. Both are going live this summer.

– Verizon: Nearly a year after Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) launched its latest mobile operating system, the biggest carrier in the U.S. is finally getting its first Windows Phone 7 device, the HTC Trophy. Will be interesting to see how this impacts WP7′s small market share, and whether Verizon will give it nearly as much fanfare as it did the iPhone when Apple’s device first went on to its network this year. (So far, the single press release marks a significantly different approach.)

– iPhone 4: In March, the chairman of China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou, made a speech in which he said that Steve Jobs expressed interest in developing an iPhone that would work on the country’s 4G standard, TD-LTE. Mr Wang either knows something, or is simply hoping that in saying the same thing over and over, he might will it to come true, because he’s been making the same remarks again. China has 600 million mobile users, and is apparently afflicted with an illness called “Apple fever”, two facts that are surely not lost on the Cupertino-based company.

– AT&T: And speaking of the iPhone, in the U.S. AT&T (NYSE: T) is the subject of a new lawsuit from users who claim that it has overcharged them by up to 300 percent for using data on the devices. AT&T denies wrongdoing.

– Sony Ericsson: It may not be big enough anymore to break out as major OEM in IDC’s most recent handset rankings, but Sony Ericsson is still pressing on and launching products it hopes will strike the right note with users. On the same day that Sony Ericsson launched new editions of its Xperia mini and mini pro devices, it also unveiled a major integration of Facebook into the entire Xperia line of devices.

The two new handsets, which will be available in Q3 of 2011, feature bigger screens, faster processors and the latest handset version of Android, 2.3 commonly known as “Gingerbread.”

Meanwhile, while Sony Ericsson is not going as far as HTC or INQ is launching a “Facebook phone,” it is putting Facebook closer to the core of the mobile experience on its devices than ever before. Sony Ericsson says that Facebook inside Xperia will make the social network “immediately accessible from the most used areas of the phone,” the picture gallery, phone book, calendar and music player. In the music integration, people will be able to “like” tracks, and that will automatically update in their profiles as well. Sony Ericsson says this is a new service. Given the number of other “social” music services that were are seeing in the market (eg from Spotify and Rdio) it will be worth watching if those get integrated into the mix, too.

The Facebook update will be available to all Xperia users when they upgrade the software on their devices to 2.3; and as such it will come preinstalled on the new mini devices.

– T-Mobile: Looks like AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile USA could not come a moment too soon for parent Deutsche Telekom. The operator, which reported its earnings earlier today, noted that the operation lost 99,000 customers in the last quarter, with the growing prepay segment unable to make up for the declines in the contract segment. The total number of subscribers is now 33.6 million. Revenues were virtually unchanged at €3.8 billion ($5.5 billion). Group-wide the company reported net profits of €480 million ($697 million), compared to €767 million ($1.1 billion) a year ago. Revenues were also down to €14.6 billion ($21.2 billion), down from €15.8 billion ($23 billion). More results here.

– Visa: Heads up for news from the credit card and payment giant Visa, with potentially a new push on mobile payments in partnership with others. The company’s CEO Joseph Saunders yesterday said that the company could be announcing developments on its e-commerce strategy as early as next week, according to Dow Jones . Last week, Visa (and competitors like MasterCard) scored a win of sorts when the mobile operators behind the Isis mobile payments scheme said they would scale back their NFC ambitions (which might have originally bypassed Visa), in favor of a mobile wallet service in cooperation with Visa and other big payment providers.

– JiWire: The location-based advertising company, which uses WiFi networks as the basis of its platform, has raised $20 million in funding. Investors in this round included Trident Capital, along with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Panorama Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners. In an emailed release, JiWire notes that John Moragne from Trident will join the JiWire board.

Total funding for the company has now reached $45 million. The new funds will be used for product development and international expansion.

Square COO Keith Rabois tells the WSJ that Visa and Square will now “explore collaborative partnerships that make sense.” The company, which was founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who runs the company in addition to heading up product at Twitter, raised $27.5 million in a funding round earlier this year which valued it at $240 million. The LATimes cites a source who says that Visa’s investment is in the “single-digit millions.”

Verizon: We’ll help out, but there have to be some limits. Government sanctioned website blocking would represent “a major shift in U.S. policy,” noted Verizon lawyer Thomas Dailey. Dailey said that some limits need to be place on the new bill, including-

US-only enforcement. The bill should clarify that ISPs are only required to take action against U.S.-based domain name services.

No private right of action. Private parties that want to get websites shut down because of constant copyright violations should have to do it the old-fashioned way, through a lengthy lawsuit in civil court. The web-blocking short-cut should only be available to the Department of Justice, and only used when “truly necessary.” (This view was directly opposed by another witness, Scott Turow of the Authors’ Guild, who said that a private right of action should be allowed.)

Proper notification. ISPs need to be told exactly what’s expected of them in terms of restricting access to a website, and they need to be notified when the restriction period has ended, as well.

Limit the cost. Verizon is only willing to block so many domains until it needs to get reimbursed for the costs of the blocking system.

Visa: There’s only so much a payment processor can do. Denise Yee, Visa’s chief trademark lawyer, also spoke to the committee, telling them that intellectual property disputes put a payment provider like Visa in difficult positions. Back in 2006, Visa responded to copyright complaints about AllOfMP3.com by kicking the website out of its payment system. “That decision backfired,” Yee told the committee. The website ended up suing the bank that was providing Visa services, and to Visa’s surprise, AllOfMP3.com won, when a Russian court found that it did not infringe copyright law. The court ordered Visa to start accepting orders from Russian customers of AllOfMP3.com again.

Congress should be careful not to create a web-blocking system that could cause other countries to retaliate, said Yee. And such as system “may set an unrealistic expectation that payment systems can singlehandedly prevent online infringement.”

She added that in the past six months, Visa has received IP complaints from 30 different rights-holders.

Both Yee and Dailey said it’s vital for their companies need to be protected from litigation by “safe harbors” if they comply with the proposed web-blocking laws.

But overall, these service providers seem aware that politicians seem determined to pass an anti-piracy bill, and made it clear that they’ll be ready to comply with government plans to block websites. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the hearing by reciting statistics from an MPAA-sponsored anti-piracy study that came out last month.

In a sense, part of COICA’s mission-shutting down websites-has already been taken up by ICE, which has seized more than 100 websites in the past several months, claiming they violate intellectual property law. Those seizures have now been challenged by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who may also end up an opponent of the COICA bill.

Rosetta Stone: Someone’s got to do something about this “Google” thing. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) was invited to the hearing today but didn’t show up. In their absence, they were slammed by another witness, Rosetta Stone CEO Tom Adams, who said the search engine should be forced to review URLs for intellectual property violations before indexing them. Rosetta Stone has been an opponent of Google for some years now, and sued the search giant for trademark infringement but lost; that case is now on appeal. “The fact they’re not here to answer to their actions in this field of intellectual property, I think is very disappointing,” said Adams.

Adams found a willing listener in Sen. Tom Coburn, (R-Okla.), who said he would subpoena Google for a future hearing if they won’t show up willingly.