Prepaid card issuers using Cachet Financial Solutions’ Select Mobile Money white label platform can now offer their customers a way to charge Apple Pay transactions to their prepaid account balance, the company has announced... More
Taiwan Mobile Payment Co (TWMP), the consortium of regional banks bringing NFC payments to market in Taiwan, is to use Oti Wave, the NFC payment dongle developed by On Track Innovations... More
The largest producer of confectionery in Latvia has installed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons in its stores in the capital Riga to send information directly to a customer’s smartphone in the default language of their device... More
Turkish payment system operator BKM has added a host card emulation (HCE) option to its platform, providing the country’s issuing banks with a way to offer HCE payments to their customers for the first time... More
Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has invested an undisclosed sum in Israeli start-up Visualead, developer of the “visual” QR code technology adopted by Chinese social media site RenRen in May last year... More
Nintendo sold about 2.4m NFC-enabled Amiibo figurines in 2014, the company has revealed... More
US grocery chain Marsh Supermarkets is to use Bluetooth beacons to deliver targeted information such as shopping lists and recipes directly to a shopper’s Apple Watch or smartphone, marking the “world’s first iBeacon-wearable integration at retail”... More
CardMobili has added support for Bluetooth beacon-based marketing services to its digital wallet platform... More
MasterCard has announced a global partnership that will combine its payment technology with Masabi’s JustRide mobile ticketing platform... More
Glasgow City Council-owned bus shelters around the Scottish city will be fitted with NFC tags and QR codes to allow people to engage with advertisers by accessing interactive content such as vouchers, games and videos using their smartphones... More
A US startup is taking pre-orders for a biometrically secured mobile wallet, consisting of a payment app and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based “bio-sticker” attached to the back of the user’s phone... More
Business productivity management specialist RedCritter has unveiled a platform for schools that recognises, rewards and socialises students’ learning achievements via NFC and QR codes. More
US mall operator Taubman is piloting BLE beacons for an indoor navigation service at its Mall at University Town Center in Sarasota, Florida, with plans to roll out the platform to other properties throughout the year... More
Japan’s KDDI has launched an LTE smartphone with NFC that runs Mozilla’s Firefox OS, the open mobile platform advocated by the Firefox browser maker. The LG Fx0 offers a 4.7-inch HD screen and is powered by a 1.2GHz quad core Snapdragon processor running Firefox OS 2.0, the latest version of Mozilla’s operating system. More
Car maker BMW has embedded NFC tags in a four-page advertisement for its i3 and i8 models in German magazine Spiegel Wissen... More
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has added support for host card emulation (HCE) to its RBC mobile app, “allowing Canadians to pay with most Android mobile phones without worrying about being on the right mobile network or having the right SIM card.”... More
Mobile proximity solutions provider Ubudu has unveiled uBeacon Mesh, a platform that enables Bluetooth beacon installations to be used to create two-way mobile communications with consumers... More
The UAE Banks Federation has announced the completion of the pre-implementation phase of a project to develop a mobile wallet platform that all its 51 member banks will be able to use to offer P2P, mobile payments and loyalty programs to their customers... More
Starbucks is to use Bluetooth beacon technology in the first of its new Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room locations in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle in the coming year... More
MasterCard’s cloud-based payment service is now available in China, following its initial launch in the US in September 2014... More