PayPal’s mobile payments business is now expected to do $3 billion in volume this year, double what the company predicted last fall. But the bigger challenge and opportunity awaits in mobile payments for offline goods, something PayPal is gearing up for. Read more »
Starting today, diners at all 370 of the U.K.’s Pizza Express restaurants will be able to use the chain’s iPhone app to pay for their meals at the table via PayPal in “less than a minute.” No wait-staff intervention needed. Read more »
Last year, Sony Ericsson dropped Symbian, boldly claiming it would take the top spot in the world for Android device sales. Now that a wireless payment infrastructure exists with Google Wallet, the company is ready to add NFC chips and software from NXP in future handsets. Read more »
Verizon Wireless is tapping Payfone, an emerging mobile payment platform, to offer its customers a way to pay for online items via their cell phone bill. The deal illustrates the kind of scale Payfone is putting together with its new payment service. Read more »
Google Wallet debuted this week for Sprint customers owning the Nexus S handset while the smartest Android keyboard, SwiftKey, gains intelligence and better word prediction, thanks to the cloud. HTC’s Flyer found its way to my desk and first impressions are favorable, as you can see. Read more »
Even with the rising competition from heavyweights Google and PayPal, Square isn’t sweating the added competition. I talked Square COO Keith Rabois about the increasingly busy mobile payments space, how Square will fare over time and the challenges facing both Google and PayPal. Read more »
ANALYSIS: PayPal is suing Google and some of its executives. Here is a behind the scene look to give the real skinny. Internal politics, boardroom betrayals, multi-million dollar sign-on bonuses and hurt egos — it is a drama worth a daytime soap. Read on. Read more »
VIDEO: Osama Bedier, Google’s VP of paymentsl, sat down with me after Google’s big NFC announcement and explained why the company is uniquely positioned to grow the momentum for NFC, why Google isn’t sweating competing efforts and how it will handle consumer’s transaction data. Read more »
Google launched its big push into mobile payments with the introduction of a new payment platform called Google Wallet based NFC technology. The company said it will pair contactless payments with Google Offers to help retailers and merchants strengthen their ties to consumers. Read more »
Google is reportedly planning to jump-start mobile payments with a press event this Thursday, followed by a trial service in five major U.S. cities. Sprint’s Nexus S appears to be the handset of choice; it contains a near field communications chip that works with payment terminals. Read more »
Not two years after introducing the world to its little mobile credit card reader, Square is looking to write the obituary for the modern cash register–along with every location-based, daily deal and mobile payment app in existence with its new Square Register and Card Case. Read more »
As the U.S. continues to wrangle over wireless mobile payment solutions using NFC chips, the U.K. is moving forward. Today, Orange UK launched QuickTap, a way to pay for purchases at 50,000 retail locations. The right incentives, such as cash back, should help spur consumer adoption. Read more »
Android owners have one less reason to drive to the bank now that PayPal has added check scanning to its software for handsets running Android 2.1 or higher. I ran through the process to deposit a check over 3G and found it to be relatively simple. Read more »
Boom, a new mobile remittance service, aims to undercut existing money wire services like Western Union with a solution that is designed to be cheaper, more flexible and built with mobile users in mind. It’s tapping the huge market for unbanked consumers. Read more »
There are a ton of mobile payment initiatives getting under way. But to get mobile payments to soar, it takes the buy in from merchants, who have to be convinced that it’s a necessary and beneficial step up from the current way of doing business. Read more »
Apple’s next iPhone won’t have near field communication (NFC) capabilities, according to Wall Street research firm Bernstein. Rumors have been going back and forth about whether would include the tech in its next-gen smartphone, which recent reports suggest we won’t see until at least fall. Read more »
Corduro, a Google Ventures backed start-up, is hoping to provide a potent challenge to mobile payment providers like PayPal and Square as well as back-end payment processors and customer relations software providers with its new cloud payment platform. Read more »
Visa is starting to put its big payment acquisitions to work with a new a digital wallet offering that looks to bring one-click transactions to ecommerce, mobile and social networking sites. The wallet will help consumers checkout faster and should reduce online abandoned shopping carts for retailers. Read more »
Making wireless payments using near field communications just became a little easier for customers of Carta Worldwide, a global payment solutions provider that is the first company to integrate with MasterCard’s Mobile Over-the-Air Provisioning Service. Could NFC payments arrive sooner rather than later as a result? Read more »
Silicon Valley start-up PayNearMe is addressing the 1/4 of households that don’t use credit cards and today, it’s rolling out four new options that ramp up the number of things consumers can pay with using cash. Read more »
Tabbedout, an innovative Austin, Texas start-up that is tackling the problem of closing out bills at restaurants and bars, said it has completed its Series A round with an additional $3.7 million, raising the total to $5.75 million for the round Read more »
Rather than scaling back on its plans for its own NFC payments network, the carrier-led Isis joint venture is ramping up and welcoming more credit card companies and banks. And that, Isis believes, will make the carrier venture even more critical to the success of NFC. Read more »
Israel is quickly becoming a hotspot for mobile innovation. Today, 15 of Israel’s new mobile startups strutted their stuff in front of an audience of American investors and tech industry leaders at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. Here are four to watch. Read more »
AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are reportedly downsizing plans for a joint near field communication payment network called Isis and are looking to partner now with credit card companies Visa and MasterCard on a more modest mobile wallet offering. Read more »
Visa’s investment in Square is the latest move by big credit card companies to better position themselves for the coming mobile payments boom. The companies need to stay active in this market or risk being bypassed. We look at the efforts of the big three. Read more »
The Square credit card reader for iOS devices is now available online at the Apple Store, and will soon be available at brick-and-mortar Apple retail locations. Official Apple Store availability is a significant step in the ongoing rise of Square’s success. Read more »
The pieces are falling into place for near field communications to take off over the next few years, according to a new forecast from Juniper Research, which estimated 1 in 5 smartphones will support the wireless technology by 2014 with 300 million NFC-capable devices available. Read more »
AisleBuyer, a Boston start-up, is introducing a new photo card capture technology in the coming months that allows merchants and small businesses to process a payment just by taking a picture of the front of credit or debit card with a smartphone. Read more »
For many merchants, the idea of NFC as a credit card replacement isn’t that much of an incentive, said Vivotech CEO Mike Mullagh. The real reason to get onboard with NFC is the promise of more one-to-one mobile marketing through NFC-enabled smartphones. Read more »
It’s pretty clear mobile payments and the idea of delivering payment capabilities as an app are finally hitting their stride, but amid the details of how we’ll pay for things online, what it will mean for our relationship to money and our relationships with retailers? Read more »
Payment company VeriFone recently went after rival Square by releasing a demo app that showed how a user could skim credit card info using Square’s hardware dongle. VeriFone claimed the app couldn’t be used to actually skim, but it turns out that it can — easily. Read more »
Someday we’ll all be waving our phones over payment processing terminals to pay for goods but it’s going to take time yet. Four different groups are competing to profit from wireless transactions that use NFC chips. According to MasterCard, this is still a multi-year story. Read more »
Apple’s smartphone competitors almost certainly will include NFC in devices in 2011. The iPhone 5 will reportedly pass on the tech according to a report from earlier this week, but a new source says it could get it after all. Which is it? Read more »
Zong has been a major player in mobile payments, best known for allowing people to bill Facebook Credits purchases to their phone. But the provider sees a bigger audience in payments and is expanding support to Flash, Unity, the mobile web and to interactive TV platforms. Read more »
Visa is getting into personal payments ring by offering the ability to receive and send funds directly to Visa credit, debit or prepaid card accounts in the U.S. The move pits Visa against leader PayPal and others and further validates the market for personal payments. Read more »
Some of the groundwork is finally being laid for mobile payments, but the industry still has to find ways to convince users to pay for stuff with their phones. For the mobile wallet to catch on, apps will have to do much more than execute transactions. Read more »
As an experienced user of various credit card processing services, I know why VeriFone is concerned enough about Square to employ the kind of scare tactics found in yesterday’s “open letter” — Square is poised to revolutionize the credit card payment industry in a big way. Read more »
In a shot across the bow of Intuit and Verifone, mobile payment startup Square is dropping the transaction fees it charges businesses. It will now rely solely on a 2.75 percent flat fee and will waive the 15 cent per transaction fee that it previously charged. Read more »
A year ago, few people in the U.S. had ever heard of BilltoMobile, a direct carrier billing company. But the San Jose company is fast emerging as a leader in the mobile payments space with direct billing arrangements with Verizon and AT&T and now Sprint. Read more »
No sooner do rumors start flying about Apple’s plans for NFC and mobile payments systems in future devices than job listings appear to back up the claim. Apple is now advertising for three jobs, including one engineer position and two global mobile payment platform managers. Read more »
