• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, March 6, 2013

As I prepare to head to the annual SXSW Interactive extravaganza, I’ve been perusing the program looking for more indicators of mobile commerce trends.

At the event last year, a session on mobile payments featured panelists involved in various parts of Isis, the joint venture of mobile carriers that now has launched as a pilot in Salt Lake City and Austin, the home of SXSW.

The session last year drew a standing-room only crowd. Interestingly, all the discussion from the stage focused on consumer to business usage but all the audience questions dealt with person to person payments. (Square, anyone?)

After that session last year, Isis had an NFC-enabled vending machine in the lobby of the convention center that drew massive crowds. There’s still a lot of curiosity about waving or tapping a phone causing a payment transaction.

It will be interesting this year to see if there’s the same interest and we’ll be looking for anyone in Austin actually using Isis, so stay tuned.

For commerce, MediaPost’s OMMA Mobile at SXSW on Friday leads off, with a keynote by Walgreens’ head of digital marketing followed by presentation by Dominos and Quiznos, so we can expect to hear about the state of the art in mobile retail.

Over the weekend, there’s a session on app strategies featuring Urban Airship and one on mobile loyalty with Starbucks, World Wresting Entertainment and yet another exec from Urban Airship.

Mobile location is on the agenda, with a session including geofences featuring Redbox, which has a great app for locating and reserving videos.

There’s also a presentation about why shopping will never be the same, because of mobile and it features eBay, which capitalized on mobile early and is now seeing a huge payoff.

So it looks like plenty of mobile commerce will be bantered about and we’ll be watching to see what draws the crowds and interest this time around.

Are you going or is there anything you want us to look for there?