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Social payments are taking a giant leap forward. PayPal has unveiled a Facebook app that lets you send money to friends.

The app, simply titled Send Money, is just as straightforward as its name. You have the choice to send either an ecard with money or just money with no card. You select a card, choose a friend to send it to and then select how much money to send.

“The PayPal and Facebook infrastructure have now merged,” PayPal’s Anuj Nayar says. “This is another way to personalize the act of giving money.”

Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

PayPal has taken the wraps off its single sign-on digital identity service for online shopping, PayPal Access. The move comes as the San Jose-based payments operator unveils a series of new partnerships with a host of banking technology suppliers at the BAI Retail delivery show in Chicago.

PayPal Access is designed to simplify the checkout process by enabling the company's 100 million account holders to sign in at participating retailers' sites with just their PayPal user name and password.

The initiative is a key element of X.Commerce, a new division of PayPal parent company eBay, that aims to provide a common set of APIs for building consumer-facing online merchant services.

Intuit has made an interesting move today with its mobile credit card reader GoPayment reader. Intuit is allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment, which competes directly with Square, is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).

Similar to Square, the GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee.

4. Offers, Offers and More Offers With the daily deals craze dying down post-Groupon IPO, mobile offers are springing up. Google Offers, Google's response to Groupon's daily deals, continues to expand and personalize its deals. It recently stepped into the mobile commerce space with an Android app. Amazon entered the daily deals space with Amazon Local. Mobile commerce isn't a part of the story, but with Amazon's hefty investment in Living Social and an infrastructure far more mature than Groupon's, Amazon may be waiting for just the right moment before really making its move. Meanwhile, daily deals superhero Groupon moved further into the location-based mobile commerce space through a partnership with Loopt. Soon after the Loopt announcement, Groupon launched Groupon Now, which inserts real-time, location-based offers into the daily deals game. Such offers are usually only available for a few hours, do not include the typical Groupon tipping point and are meant for impulsive mobile users.

5. Shop Till You Sit: Tablet Commerce Tablets are all the rage this year. A recent study by eMarketer.com predicts that one in three online consumers will use a tablet at least once a month by the year 2014. Appel iPads are positioned to dominate the tablet market until 2015. So what are people doing on their tablets? Shopping, naturally. And thus the boom of tablet commerce. Amazon.com, the top revenue-producing Internet retailer, naturally leads the pack with a strong tablet-optimized site. Couch commerce, the act of sitting on one's couch and shopping from a smartphone and tablet, saw a strong increase this year - especially after Thanksgiving dinner and on Black Friday. Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet on September 28. ReadWriteWeb Writer Jon Mitchell calls it a store with a screen, quite literally suggesting that its sole purpose is to be a media consumption device. As the Kindle Fire continues to gain consumer mindshare and more developers flock to the Amazon Appstore (don't call it the App Store, OK?), we expect more tablet commerce growth in this area. Shopping catalogs designed specifically for tablets will add to the tablet commerce experience. Google launched a shopping catalog app for tablets back in August. Google Catalogs, as they're called, are like "window shopping with your iPad and Android tablet." The only potential problem for retailers? Now they won't have catalog readers' home addresses on hand.

6. Location and Local Groundswell: Chicago to Des Moines to Boston and Back Again The partnership between daily deals service Groupon and location check-in Foursquare was a big one. The two got together and made it happen. Or, as the Groupon blog says, "when we think of mobile addiction beyond Now! we think foursquare, and many of you guys do, too." The idea of positioning daily deals on Foursquare as an "addiction" doesn't exactly insure longevity; rather, it signals imminent burnout. But hey, we'll forgive Groupon's marketing team - with Groupon's stock prices slumping, the company is needs to keep looking for new ways to hit up consumers. Dwolla, mobile payments system based in U.S. mobile payments capital Des Moines, Iowa, seeks to completely sidestep credit cards. Unlike its main competitor PayPal, Dwolla does not snag a percentage of the transaction; instead, it asks for a shiny silver quarter, regardless of the transaction amount. LevelUp from Boston-based SCVNGR brings location-based gaming to the daily deals space. The idea is simple: Users will receive better deals the more they use the system. Much like the "unlocking" of Foursquare badges, LevelUp users will unlock new "levels" of awesome deals with particular merchants as they continue buying. Like its competitor Dwolla, SCVNGR recently began building local mobile payments into LevelUp.

India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be "fair dealing" (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright. That means that you can break the DRM on your iPad to move your books to your Kindle or vice-versa. It also makes it legal to make, distribute and sell tools to accomplish this.

“Eventually we want to make a version of the Obama Square application available to everyone from within the App Store,” Katie Hogan, an Obama re-election campaign spokesperson told The New York Times. “Someone who is a supporter of the campaign can then download the app, get a Square attachment and can go around collecting donations.” The app will collect information such as the donor’s name, address, occupation and employer.

A representative of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney told the Times that Romney’s campaign will begin beta-testing Square during Tuesday’s primary election in Florida.

“We’re going to be testing it in Florida tomorrow night to see how it works and then hope to roll it out to the rest of the country,” Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign’s digital director said. “Anything that reduces the barrier to donate is going to help us with our supporters.”

Twitter offers a great way to get your information spread far and wide: the retweet.

Making Re-Tweet Ready Posts Make sure your post info has room for your original info plus a retweet. If your original post is close to 140 characters, the person retweeting has to edit your post to send it back out. Smells like work? People won’t make extra effort to retweet you if they have to edit your posts. Make sure you use URL shorteners like bit.ly or is.gd or ow.ly (there are dozens) to get back more of your real estate. If you’re going to tweet a URL, give folks a sense of what they’re clicking into. For instance, I use (video) or (youtube) when pointing to a YouTube video. And make sure you use (NSFW) on things that are Not Safe For Work. The more helpful or entertaining your tweet, the more likely people will take an action. The more jumbled with @ names and multiple urls and hashtags your tweet is, the less likely it will be retweeted. People will gladly retweet causes (unless you fatigue us). Starting a tweet with an @ means that a good chunk of folks won’t see it.

Retweet other people and promote other people 15x to every 1 time of your effort. Don’t tweet every damned thing you write about or do. Folks will fatigue quickly. Befriend and add value to the best retweeters. It’s a live network, a human network, a give-and-take relationship. That’s it. That’s how I do it. What about you? How are you getting it done? Photo credit Mike Baird ShareThis Tags: communication, howto, socialmedia, twitter ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before. Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it. Check out the Thesis demo site See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase

In South Africa, the continent’s strongest economy, mobile phone use has gone from 17 percent of adults in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010. Today, more South Africans – 29 million – use mobile phones than radio (28 million), TV (27 million) or personal computers (6 million). Only 5 million South Africans use landline phones. Nielsen’s recently released Mobile Insights study in South Africa, which examined consumers’ usage of and attitudes toward mobile phones, networks and services, reveals a number of interesting insights such as: -- Nokia rules: More than half (52%) own that company’s handsets, followed by Samsung and BlackBerry, and 56 percent of those currently using other brands indicated their next handset would likely be a Nokia. -- SMS text messaging is practically ubiquitous among South African mobile customers, and is used by almost 4.2 times more people than e-mail. More than two-thirds (69%) of consumers prefer sending texts to calling, in large part because it is less expensive, and 10 percent believe texting to be a faster way of communicating.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification and interconnection technologies. It combines the functions of a contactless reader, a contactless card and peer-to-peer functionality on a single chip. It operates in the 13.56MHz frequency range, typically over a distance of a few centimeters.

Consumers will first see NFC technology appear in their most commonly utilized personal device – the mobile phone. With NFC, the mobile phone transitions from running primarily voice applications to becoming a more personalized device that can let you conduct secure payment transactions, gain access to public transportation, building access and store digital rights. In essence, the mobile phone becomes a point-of-sale terminal, a ticket counter, keys to your building, a transport card, a debit/credit card and an electronic business card all in one easy to use device

Users of Samsung’s mobile phones and other devices that include Philips NFC chips will be able to access content and services in an intuitive way. For example, a Samsung mobile phone equipped with NFC technology could automatically connect with an NFC-enabled PC or TV, simply by holding them next to each other, in order to transfer digital pictures or other data, according to the statement of two companies.

PayPal has been a powerhouse in online payments but it hasn’t really cracked the much bigger market for payments for goods in the real world. Now, the company is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments.

PayPal hosted a partner event for retailers yesterday and began explaining how they’ll be able to implement its tools for in-store payments. The big reveal will happen next month at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, but the company showed a glimpse of how it’s marshaling its resources. It’s important for PayPal to step up with a compelling offering because the mobile payments market is getting crowded with options like Square, Google Wallet and upcoming services like Isis from the cellular carriers and digital wallets from credit card companies.

Scott Thompson, president of PayPal, said in a blog post the company is looking to be a one-stop shop for merchants to help them address every part of the shopping lifecycle. OK, that’s a bit of jargon, but it means PayPal is going to help push out targeted advertising, help with in-store discovery and improve transactions with a handful of options.

45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).

The large existing user-base of low-cost, mid-tier, NFC-less feature phones popular in emerging markets is a prime target for this technology. However, technical difficulties have prevented the adoption of SIM-based NFC. As the SIM card slot is located behind the battery, radio signals to and from the NFC module are effectively blocked in many phones.

Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.

As of today, FB has a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

We're working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information. When you arrive on these sites, you'll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page. You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by "No Thanks" on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.

We are a generation constantly terrified by the idea of someone, somewhere, effectively advertising to us by way of glancing at our "data" and knowing whether or not we like country music or alternative 1990s rock. But is it really so terrifying to have annoying banner ads offering deals on some product you might actually enjoy?

Putting sensors and actuators in everything from homes and cars to shoes and coffee cups promises to make our daily lives easier, safer and more efficient. But such 'ambient intelligence' requires a merger of the virtual and digital worlds. EU-funded researchers in the Sensei project are bridging the gap and their results are already leading to 'smart cities' being set up all over Europe.

'Today, the internet world is a virtual world of data mostly stored and accessed from servers,' says Dr Hérault. In the future, we will have an 'Internet of things' in which a multitude of things in the real, physical world will be digitised continuously: in many situations, we won't just be asking web servers for data, we will be asking sensors in everyday objects for data, he suggests. 'We need to understand how best to interconnect the real world and the virtual world.' 

An open service interface that uses semantic information to process data means that information is accessible and understandable to both humans and machines.  'You could ask, for example, "What is the temperature on Oxford Street?" The system would decode that semantic information, access sensor networks on Oxford Street that have temperature sensors, check the reliability of each network with regard to information quality, and return an answer,' Dr Hérault explains. 

Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.

Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.

DUBAI — Digital contactless payment has become more popular among UAE travellers as they prefer to make payments and seek information in a visual format on a device, according to a latest global industry study.

Around 32 per cent of UAE respondents find using their phone rather than cash or credit cards to pay for things “extremely appealing” as against 24 per cent globally, revealed a major global industry study “From chaos to collaboration: How transformative technologies will herald a new era in travel”.

Commissioned by Amadeus, a travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, the new report outlines the way new technologies and social change will transform travel by 2020. The study challenges the industry to overcome the uncertainty and stress of modern-day travel through the application of new innovations.

We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

The yellow-handled hammer, which the eBay CEO purchased at Home Depot using PayPal, signals that the company’s plans for entering the mobile payments business has entered the construction phase.

The company also announced fourth-quarter results yesterday, solidly beating both the company’s internal guidance and analyst expectations. One of eBay’s big initiatives over the past year has been to find ways to work more closely with physical retailers by providing them with the technology they need to operate more efficiently online and offline. Over the past year, that has included buying 13 companies, for a total investment of $3.4 billion.

“We are right at the intersection of something that’s really cool,” Donahoe said. “This isn’t something that everyone sees, like social networking three years into it, when only the early people knew about it.”

Kicking off the new year with a fresh wad of cash: according to an SEC filing, mobile and online payments startup Jumio has raised $25.5 million in funding on top of the $6.5 million it raised from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – and others – back in March 2011.

The startup’s twist on helping e-merchants process card payments digitally is to leverage webcams (and smartphone cameras) to read credit cards rather than making people enter their details or swiping their cards. Its solution, called Netswipe, in other words turns phone cameras and webcams into credit card readers.

Jumio confirmed the financing round but declined to provide more details (which investors participated and what they plan to use the additional capital for) at this time.