Last night, I had the opportunity to moderate a local Mobile Monday event in my hometown of Portland, Ore., a place that prides itself in weirdness. You can find signs and bumper stickers proclaiming “Keep Portland Weird,” at least some of which is part of a public awareness campaign to keep a balance between locally owned businesses and national chains.

It seems as though there’s little chance of deviating from that motto in a city that is home to a Zombie Walk. But I digress. Last night’s Mobile Monday event, something that goes on in cities across the country, definitely had a local flair. Panelists were Siva Narendra, chief technology officer and co-founder of Tyfone, and Matt Hall, vice president of business development at Vesta. Both companies are in the mobile payments space. (They’re not the least bit weird, but more about that later.)

It’s clear, as Hall pointed out, that in order for something like mobile payments to really take off in a developed market like the United States, it must solve a significant problem. One big problem I found on my way to the event was getting on the Max train. Well, not really getting on it, although I did get assistance from a train operator on the platform who also informed me that the ticket machine that I was about to use would not accept dollar bills. It marked the second time in about a week that I found the ticket machines out of order for some reason or other. 

Last time this happened, I noticed a few people hedged their bets and got on the train anyway without paying. Of course, you might get fined if you don’t pay, but you can go through a process of letting the TriMet system know when a machine is out of order, as yesterday’s nice train operator explained to me. (This as opposed to another train operator a couple weeks back who made a snotty remark when I wasn’t sure which train to get on. Geesh, if you don’t like (lost) people, don’t sign up for a job with mass transit, got it? Yeah, and I should have the right trains cued to my cell phone. Quid pro quo, but said curmudgeon train operator doesn’t know where I work. Ha!)

Again, I digress, but there is a point to this madness. How much money is TriMet poring down the drain with these malfunctioning ticket machines? I have no idea and haven’t done a lot of research into that matter. During at least one encounter, the machine kept spouting: “Exact change required.” Yeah, like everyone trying to get on the next train has the exact change.

Chances are, they have a cell phone on them because a great number of them are chatting it up or texting on the train. Plus, I know cell phones are highly prevalent, at least during certain times of the day, because TriMet says they’re the most frequently lost item, surpassing umbrellas. (The most unusual item left on a bus was a human skeleton, according to the agency, which can only go a long way to support these Zombie fans.)

So just theorizing here, but if more cell phones could pay for transit fares, the local transit authority might get a lot more money than it does in fines. Narendra, who has more than 100 issued or pending patents, points out that various cities already are deploying systems that use cell phones to pay for fares. Earlier, when I asked the nice train operator if Portlanders could use their cell phones to pay, he wasn’t aware of anything like that, nor was his colleague, so we’ll just have to wait.

Tyfone, by the way, has a tiny device that slides into a phone’s existing micro SD card slot, so it gets around that oft-cited problem of NFC to get pre-installed into handsets. Not that there’s anything wrong with NFC, but this type of solution might be a faster way to get to the end game.

Back to the “weirdness” meter, the event last night was held in a downtown venue that hosts untold numbers of laptop-wielding patrons. Our panel was on a slightly elevated stage, with a few rows of chairs for people interested in the topic. During our discussion, people not connected with the event kept working away at their laptops throughout the perimeter of the bar/restaurant/coffee shop. Some didn’t even have their headphones on, yet they didn’t seem disturbed by our microphones and fisticuffs (just kidding about the latter.) They went about their business. One guest who wasn’t part of Mobile Monday was so intrigued by our “insider industry” type discussion that he re-positioned his chair to better hear and watch the panel, apparently with great interest. Later, another guy approached our group and in his hands was a device that looked like a Palm Pre Plus, but he said he didn’t know/apparently didn’t care what model it was. Suffice it to (subjectively) say: weird.