Payments

The mobile payments race took an interesting turn today with an announcement from VeriFone and PayPal.

VeriFone, the business-focused electronic-payments company, unveiled a partnership that brings eBay-owned PayPal's merchant services to VeriFone's PayWare Mobile iPhone application.

PayWare, which is aimed at small businesses, consists of a hardware add-on and complementary iPhone application that turn a mobile handset into a credit card reader. With the new PayPal partnership, PayWare will accommodate PayPal payments as well as traditional credit-card transactions, and PayPal will market PayWare to its user base of business owners and eBay sellers. In addition, PayWare will now … Read more

Pine Grove's Loan*Calculator Plus is a free collection of nine easy-to-use financial calculators for loans and debt, focused on personal finance: Loan Calculator; Compound and Simple Interest and Calendar Math; Accelerated Extra Payments; Cash-Down Automobile Loans; Balloon Payments; Mortgages; Remaining Balance; Refinance; and Basic Amortization. In other words, exactly the sort of finances most people deal with on a daily basis: cars, homes, and small businesses.

Loan*Calculator Plus opens with a simple dialog that serves as a central control for its various tools, with prominent buttons for the nine calculators plus two extras, a Cash Flow/Scheduling … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's latest project, Square, which plugs into mobile devices and allows users to process payments, is getting bigger.

During an interview with VentureBeat's founder Matt Marshall as part of this year's Demo Fall conference here, Dorsey explained that the company was now producing some 10,000 scanner units a day, which allow Square users with a smartphone and the Square software (which is free) to run credit card payments from just about anywhere.

Dorsey compared the speed of Square's rollout, which was put on hold in late-June while the company … Read more

Imagine walking into your favorite cafe and instead of waiting in line to place your order for a large iced nonfat latte and handing over your debit card, you submitted your order and authorized payment from your bank account via an application on your phone.

You can't do that now. But it's very possible that some day you will. It will be a big leap forward getting banks, credit card companies, retailers, and cell phone makers--not to mention consumers--on board with this idea. But a few companies are beginning to provide digital stepping stones to what someday could be a wallet-less future.

On Thursday, Intuit and Mophie (maker of the JuicePack battery for iPhone) will introduce the Complete Credit Card Solution, which fits over the iPhone 3G and 3GS like the JuicePack and has a credit-card reader that uses Intuit's 18-month-old GoPayment mobile payment software. It will be available as an iPhone accessory in Apple Stores.

The idea is to allow small businesses or anyone who needs to process payments that doesn't have a permanent place to plug in a cash register to be able to accept something other than cash on a device many people already have. The hope is consumers would find this more convenient than keeping cash on hand when they want to make a purchase, even from a nontraditional retailer.

While plastic and cash are still the way the vast majority of retailers do business, that could change over the next few years as smartphone usage continues to skyrocket, and more personal finance details are being taken care of online and on the phone. Hardware makers, banks, and payment processors are at least dipping a toe into the water by participating in trials or offering new ways to pay people without using plastic or cash. … Read more

Apple raised some eyebrows over the weekend when news spread it had hired an expert in mobile payments.

But now there's a report that says the company is already testing a prototype iPhone with near-field communication (NFC) chips inside, which could pave the way for using future iPhones as a mobile wallet.

TechCrunch heard from an unnamed source that on Tuesday Apple is testing an iPhone with NFC chips it's ordered from NXP Semiconductor. It's not clear what kind of tests, and it could be very preliminary in nature. But coupled with the hire of Benjamin Vigier from mFoundry … Read more

There's been a lot of talk recently about mobile payment, from casual money transfers over PayPal mobile apps to using a mobile phone to physically kick-start a payment, as we observed during our  field test with the Bling Nation tag.

These examples both fall under the category of mobile payments, but their technology differs as much as their goal.

Depending on how you slice it, there are four or five possible definitions of "mobile payment," with up to two off-shoots. For simplicity's sake, we'll outline the major four and will mention the others as off-shoots, though this definition certainly isn't final.

Mobile Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, as with other peer-to-peer services like music-sharing, are informal transactions made between two people. Paying the babysitter and reimbursing a friend for your share in a lunch tab fall into this category. PayPal and similar services might facilitate this type of transaction (though PayPal, of course, can also be used for more-formal payments, such as eBay and other online purchases.)

International transfers might also fall under this category, such as remittances sent overseas from an earner in one country to family in another. M-Via is one company that specializes in using text messages to authorize funds sent to Mexico.

Mobile Point of Sale (POS) Unlike mobile P2P technology, which may use text or a software application to transfer funds, mobile point-of-sale (POS) is all about hardware. The cell phone becomes a wallet or payment token, the physical object that carries a radio frequency ID (RFID) chip or near field communication (NFC) technology. This could be an external sticker, or perhaps be integrated as a hardware component on the device. It's this chip that communicates with the payment terminal to green-light transactions.

Because transactions are triggered wirelessly without requiring physical contact between the sticker or card and the payment terminal, this type of solution is also known as "contactless" payment.… Read more

It's not every day a company gives you $20 worth of free cash to spend as you choose and let you run wild. And it's not every day you pay for your lunch with a wave of your cell phone. This is exactly what Bling Nation is doing to promote its new mobile payment product, which ties into your PayPal account.

We slapped a BlingTag--a yellow and white adhesive square--onto the back of several mobile phones and took the nascent payment solution for a field test at three freshly installed partner retailers in Bling Nation's incubation headquarters of Palo Alto, CA.

The BlingTag, as the sticker is called, uses NFC, or near field communication, a technology that relies on an RFID chip nestled within the adhesive to authenticate transactions made between your cell phone and the BlingNation payment console. NFC is a short-wave radio communications technology that's not unlike Bluetooth in concept. However, it has a much tighter range--up to 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) for NFC versus up to 30 meters (not quite 100 feet) for Bluetooth.

To make a payment, the cashier types in your total and your phone number. You tap (or hover) the BlingTag sticker over the sensor and almost immediately receive a text message with an authorizing pin that the cashier then types into the console. The machine spits out a receipt and you receive a second text message verifying your purchase. The dollar amount, meanwhile, is deducted from your paired PayPal account. If the merchant has signed onto Bling Nation's loyalty program, they could opt to credit you points that you could rack up, in lieu of using a punch card, to eventually purchase more of their product.

As with debit card payments made through a supermarket's card-reading terminal, there's no ID involved, just a pin-based authentication. In Bling Nation's case, the pin code isn't a secret, and it's constantly changing.

The entire process took no longer than paying by credit card, although we did experience a false start that required us to abandon our first BlingTag and begin again because Bling Nation is currently incompatible with Google Voice numbers.

What about security?… Read more

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are teaming up to turn your cell phone into a credit card, according to a story published by Bloomberg on Sunday.

The nation's two largest cell phone operators are forming an alliance with the credit card company Discover Financial Services and global bank Barclays to create a new service that could displace credit and debit cards with smartphones, the news agency reported. AT&T and Verizon Wireless are believed to be equal partners in the venture, with T-Mobile--the fourth largest wireless operator in the U.S--holding a smaller stake, Bloomberg also reported. … Read more

Facebook, on the verge of 500 million members around the world, might envision a global virtual currency with its Credits system. But the way that system is handled in different parts of the world is far from universal.

Very late Wednesday, Facebook announced that it's partnered with MOL Global, a Malaysia-based payment technology company, to offer its Facebook Credits virtual currency for sale through MOL's online channel and in retail stores across South Asia and Australia. MOL's "network" consists of over 500,000 outlets, including cybercafes, convenience stores, and online banks in countries including Singapore, … Read more