US consumers will soon be able to reorder supplies and control their home appliances using Amazon Echo, the connected device that uses voice recognition to complete spoken commands to shop, play music, read the news and more. It is now available for pre-order following an invitation-only trial that began in November 2014. More
Korean internet portal Naver has launched its mobile payments platform Naver Pay following an unveiling in March... More
Swedish firm Seamless is preparing to roll out its mobile payments solution SEQR in the UK, with the first merchants expected to begin using the service at the end of the summer... More
The number of customers using CUA’s redi2PAY HCE mobile payments service more than 35 times per month was about three times higher in March 2015 than it was six months earlier, and the number of customers using mobile payments five to 14 times per month was up 63% for the same period, the Australian credit union has revealed. More
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Alipay parent Ant Financial have each invested RMB3bn (US$483m) into Koubei, a joint venture that will let consumers order and pay for local services in China using their smartphone, “with an initial focus on the food and beverage segment”. More
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Revenue from mobile money transfer services will hit US$2bn this year, doubling to $4bn by 2018, Juniper Research says, citing Africa as the market leader... More
OceanFirst Bank is working with digital banking provider Digital Insight to begin offering Touch ID functionality within its mobile banking app... More
Merchants in India accepting electronic payments could be offered a tax rebate, a government proposal suggests... More
Nearly a third of shoppers at Westfield London shopping centre who donated to charity during a 100-day pilot put in place by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), Save the Children and Visa Europe Collab used their contactless card, as did one in five who donated at one of the city’s Costa coffee shop counter collection points. More
Canadian carrier Rogers has spun off its Suretap NFC mobile wallet service as a separate company, with the brand now operating independently and open to other carriers. Mobile network operators Bell, Telus, Koodo and Virgin have begun offering the service to their customers on Android and BlackBerry devices from today. More
PARTNER NEWS: NXP Semiconductors has unveiled a ‘plug and play’ NFC controller with integrated firmware and an NCI interface that is aimed at accelerating NFC adoption in the internet of things (IoT) by allowing hardware makers to rapidly build the technology into any device. More
Swedish gesture recognition firm Crunchfish has developed an interactive screen that can be placed in shop windows to encourage passersby to browse deals, read reviews and compare products with a swipe, push or grab of their hand. More
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A new Google patent details a system to allow the pairing of items such as keys or a wallet with a mobile device to alert a person when they are about to leave the house without one of the items... More
Visitors to this year’s Cannes Lions event will be notified when one of their LinkedIn contacts is nearby or when they have signed up for the same sessions as a favourite via beacons installed by Eventbase... More
Spanish supermarket chain Bonpreu is to roll out a mobile payments service to 170 stores, using a platform developed by Dinube that combines proprietary tokenization algorithms, NFC and biometric fingerprint security. More
The Ukrainian capital of Kiev has become the fifth city in the world, after London, St Petersburg, Chicago and Bucharest, to allow fares to be paid with open loop contactless cards... More
Some 8% of global mobile users have made an in-store mobile wallet payment either using NFC or via an app in the last six months, research from trade body Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) and Wirecard has revealed... More
Forty bars and nightclubs across the Australian city of Adelaide have installed Bluetooth beacons to track visitor attendance and push offers to passers-by using a platform provided by startup Little Birdy... More
One in four US consumers would consider sharing their DNA with their financial institution if it meant it would make authentication easier and their personal information more secure, research from Telstra reveals... More
Printed electronics specialist Thinfilm has closed a private placement in which “several” US investors have invested a total of US$22m... More