Kenyan mobile network operator Safaricom has now signed up 122,000 merchants for Lipa na M-Pesa, a service launched in June 2013 that enables Kenyan consumers to use the funds stored in their M-Pesa mobile money account to pay for goods in stores... More
Mobile point-of-sale provider Square lost US$100m in 2013 but is making a 34% gross margin on its processing business, according to leaked internal documents seen by Fortune... More
Restaurant booking service OpenTable has introduced a Google Glass version of its app... More
Google Play users in 12 countries can now charge the cost of their purchases to their PayPal account... More
Isis saw its user adoption growth rate double last month and is now adding an average of 20,000 new users a day, Michael Abbott, CEO of the US carrier-led NFC venture, has revealed... More
Mobile point-of-sale specialist Square has introduced a new service that “turns the receipt into a conversation channel”... More
US mobile payments provider Square is pulling out of the consumer mobile wallet business and its Square Wallet app is no longer available to new customers to download... More
Twentieth Century Fox is to use Bluetooth beacons to promote the new X-Men: Days of Future Past movie to cinema-goers in Japan... More
A total of 450million contactless cards, twice the number produced in 2012, were shipped in 2013 by members of the Smart Payment Association, a group that accounts for 85% of the market... More
Bertolli Olive Oil is to use News America Marketing and Thinaire‘s SmartSource with NFC service to deliver recipes, videos and ingredients lists to shoppers while they are in the relevant aisle of a supermarket... More
Banking and payments technology provider FIS has launched a cloud-based service that lets banks instantly issue EMV ‘chip and pin’ or magnetic stripe cards to customers in their branches... More
A Canadian startup has introduced a range of smart sports shirts that monitor the wearer’s heart rate, breathing and movement and then use Bluetooth LE to send the collected data to their smartphone for real time analysis. More
“Apple is likely to incorporate a near field communication (NFC) payment function in the next generation iPhone and has reached an agreement with China UnionPay on a mobile payment service,” investment newswire Brightwire reports, citing “a source close to the matter”... More
US start-up RealtyBeacon is making it possible for real estate agents to deliver details about a property for sale to potential buyers as they drive by, by adding Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to their ‘For Sale’ boards... More
Mobile network operator Vodafone is expanding the functionality of its mobile wallet beyond NFC with a deal to add Austria-based Bluesource’s Mobile-Pocket technology to the service, enabling customers to store hundreds of loyalty, membership, transit and promotional cards in their Vodafone wallet by simply scanning them in using the camera on their smartphone. More
A new Nintendo Figurine Platform and a range of NFC toys that makes use of the NFC functionality in the Wii U GamePad is to be unveiled at the E3 games show next month, company president Satoru Iwata has announced. A standalone device that will enable NFC toys to be used with the Nintendo 3DS handheld console will also be introduced and NFC payments for games are to added, initially in Japan, from this summer. More
Money transfer service provider MoneyGram has partnered with PicomoPay to enable US consumers to send funds to any of MoneyGram’s 336,000 agents around the world from the social payments provider’s Facebook application... More
IT services provider Capita has added support for Barclays’ Pingit mobile payments service to its payments platform, enabling its UK private and public sector clients to add QR codes to their bills so that consumers can make a payment by simply scanning the code with their smartphone... More
Google Glass wearers will soon be able to make payments from their Google Wallet account, by simply saying “send money”, Techcrunch reports... More
More than 1,000 film fans attending last month’s Tribeca Film Festival tapped a promotional poster with an NFC phone to get a free movie ticket, technology providers HID Global and Tamoco report... More