Every year the World Economic Forum picks a couple dozen or so up-and-coming technology startups from around the world and dubs them Technology Pioneers. In the past, Technology Pioneers have included Google and Mozilla. Last year, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove joined the club.

Today, the World Economic Forum is naming 26 Technology Pioneers for 2010. They include Twitter, Amiando, Playfish, Obopay, Innovid, Bloom Energy, and Boston Power. Twitter probably should have been named last year, before its huge growth spurt, but better late than never.

Amiando, based in Germany, is an online ticket service which is going gangbusters. (It competes with Eventbrite). Playfish is a social gaming company based in the UK, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $300 million. Obopay is a mobile payments service which raised $70 million last year and now powers Nokia Money.

Eighteen of the 26 companies are from the US. The remaining eight from Brazil, Germany, India, Israel, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.

To be selected, a company must be “involved in the development of a life-changing technology innovation and have the potential for long-term impact on business and society.” The companies must also “demonstrate visionary leadership and show all the signs of a long-standing and sustainable market leader.”

The winners are invited to attend the WEF annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January and rub elbows with world political and business leaders.

As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree. From the release:

“Rural consumers will particularly benefit from money transfers and, for urban consumers used to online services, we are enabling services such as payment of utility bills, purchase of train and movie tickets, top-ups, all through their mobile phones. Nokia Money is simple to use, secure and available across different operator networks and on virtually any mobile phone. This means millions of new consumers will soon be able to manage all their financial needs from their mobile phone”

Nokia will hardly be the only player in these emerging markets — other competitors include mChek and Paymate. We’ve also seen some alternative payment models like Aryty, which allows users in the US to remotely charge up the mobile accounts of family and friends in India and the Philippines.

Stateside, the technology will also likely see some success, though it will be competing with a variety of other payment methods, and US users haven’t been nearly as quick at adopting mobile payments as customers in other regions have been. Nokia’s release notes that while the technology will be based on Obopay, it will be making a number of improvements and will allow the payment service to interoperate with competing services.

When news came out earlier this week that mobile payments company Obopay raised another $70 million, effectively doubling its total funding raised to date, some observers were surprised at the sheer size of the round. While others expressed skepticism that mobile payments would ever really take off, at least in the U.S.

But the bigger opportunity for Obopay and mobile payments in general is not in the U.S. It is in India and other parts of the world where a large portion of the population don’t have bank accounts. These are the so-called “unbanked.” There are billions of them and their relative spending power is on an upwards trajectory. Obopay CEO Carol Realini says:

There are four billion phones, and only one billion bank accounts. Our view is you have to have a way for both the banked and the unbanked to participate in the mobile payment system.

And that is her strategy in a nutshell. Obopay operates in the U.S. and India right now. If you have a bank account, you can link it to Obopay and use your phone to make payments wherever Mastercard is accepted. If you don’t, you can load up your account using a prepaid model. Realini throws out some Gartner estimates that only 6 million people use mobile payments today across the entire world, but that could grow to 100 million by 2011. (Add salt, nobody really knows).

Despite Obopay’s two-pronged strategy, if mobile payments do take hold, I’d expect them to be more popular among the unbanked outside the U.S. Most people in richer nations already have an abundance of payment options available to them, and adding a mobile wallet won’t make a huge difference one way or another for most people. In countries where payment options are more limited, the ability to turn your mobile phone into a wallet should be much more appealing. Obopay is not alone in trying to bring mobile payments to India. Other startups such as Australia’s Paymate and India’s own mCheck are also making inroads. But that $70 million should help Obopay establish a presence there.

One more thing about that money. Many of the reports suggested that the entire $70 million came from Nokia, which is wrong. Realini confirmed to me that “there are other investors.” Although she says she is not at liberty to disclose who they are at this time. One place to look is the long list of investors who have poured money into the company in the past. Qualcomm, Redpoint Ventures, Onset Ventures, and Richmond Management seem to be the company’s steadiest investors across previous multiple rounds—although I have not confirmed their participation in this one.

But Scred has a few European twists. Managing currency conversions is no problem. If I am chipping in for a meal in Amsterdam, it can tell me how much I owe in dollars and how much my Dutch friends owe in Euros. It also lets you pool debts between friends. So if I owe you $5, and you owe our mutual friend Nancy $7, it automatically allocates my $5 to Nancy.

Sending and receiving funds on Money Exchange is free (as it is on PayPal for funds between two PayPal members). Dave Cautin, the senior vice president in charge of Revolution Money’s online business explains, “It is an opportunity to very easily collect money from your friends and associates. It could be used by housemates sharing the rent, or friends chipping in to buy a group gift.” Of course, there are many other apps that do this on Facebook already, including ChipIn, CashFly, and PayFriends, which are all based on PayPal. OboPay, which lets you text money to your friends from a mobile phone, also has a Facebook app. None of these are particularly popular, however. PayPal has 65 active daily users on Facebook. ChipIn has 81. CashFly and OboPay each have 3.

Revolution Money sees an opening here. “Massive online communities will have a currency,” predicts Cautin. And he wants Revolution money to be it. “For us, social networking is our laser focus,” he says. The company is also working on integrating the payment service into AIM, and offers it through its own Website.

In truth, Revolution Money sees MoneyExchange as a loss leader for its real business, which is the RevolutionCard, its credit card that undercuts Visa and Mastercard. It has no intention of making money off of MoneyExchange by charging for transactions because in its eyes the online payment service is just a way to build up a valuable network of potential credit card customers. You can be sure that every MoneyExchange member will get an offer for the RevolutionCard. Steve Case is just seeding the market.

Slowly, mobile payments are starting to creep their way into the US. Though foreign countries tend to use the service more, the US will eventually catch on when we all realize that paying your bills while out and about can be easy. Verizon has now announced that it will be using Obopay’s service to allow customers to send mobile payments to each other and stores by using their cellphone.

The service will allow customers to walk into participating stores and pay for items by waving a cellphone in front of a register. Both prepay and billing options will be available, with MasterCard getting in on the prepay deal. Though convenient, don’t expect to be paying for a Snickers Bar at the 7-11 anytime soon. A lot more stores need to participate in the program before Verizon and Obopay’s plan can be effective. At this time, Verizon has yet to announce how much the service will cost.

Verizon to offer mobile payments with Obopay [Reuters]

Buxfer is deeper than Billmonk, letting you track and tag out your expenses with friends and groups over time. The groups option makes it great for managing debts between roommates or within a club. Billmonk is more geared to managing splitting debts between friends and lending out your stuff. Buxfer goes further, letting you analyze you expenses over time through a Google finance-style pie chart with adjustable time frame. Buxfer has gone to great lengths to make importing transactions as easy as possible. They currently support adding transactions to your account via SMS and the ability to import your credit card statements (.csv,.qfx,.ofx). From there you can tag and divide up your expenses as you see fit.

What’s great is that these sites start with a simple day-to-day problem that can frustrates us all and present a solution. However, without intimate integration with payment services, it’s still a chore. I’m not so OCD that I will tag and text myself about every payment I make. Wesabe has payment integration, but is also going after the quicken market. Billmonk really benefited from integration with Obopay deal and perhaps Buxfer will find a similar partner.

This is a crowded space with a single, hugely dominate player, PayPal Mobile. See TextPayMe and KushCash as well.

Today Helio announced that its subscribers will be able to pay their bills via Obopay. Targeted mostly for pay-as-you-go users, Obopay is the latest in MasterCard’s way of having you spend money on their terms. It works sort-of like a prepaid credit card that you can use to top up minutes, buy crappy wallpapers, and such. But it’s also so much more!

Helio says that if you have a phone with Obopay on it, money can be sent to you from anyone. This is a great way to buy your friends who you occasionally talk to a small — gift like a ringtone or video game (NOTE TO MEN: Do not buy your sig other a ringtone). It seems like a decent product and if you visit Obopay’s website, you can get $5 for signing up and an additional $5 for scamming your pals referrals.

Helio taps into Obopay [Electronista]

Palo Alto based Obopay is set to launch sometime Thursday (the site is currently password protected). This is the newest product in the very active mobile payments space (see PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe as well).

A few more details about Obopay have come out since Matt Marshall posted a teaser two weeks ago. Obopay will rely on a java client on the phone instead of sms or text message payments like PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe. While this provides for a richer and more secure interface, Obopay will be of use only to people who have phones that support java:

The first 25 phones that we are porting to cut across 2 of the major carriers (i.e. Cingular and T-Mobile) and one major MVNO that we are in trials with. Five different handset manufacturers are represented in this group (i.e. Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson) including the three largest manufacturers. In our porting effort we are targeting all of the handsets that are currently offered by the big 4 carriers that are targeted at our end-user group.

The service itself will allow for person to person payments between phones. Obopay says that “users can send money to almost any mobile handset”, which may imply a text message (or email?) for unsupported phones – I just don’t know how that will work yet. Users will also be issued a debit card attached to the account for real world payments, including ATM withdrawls.

As to fees, the information I have now is “The transaction costs just pennies”. I’ll update as I receive more information.