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Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.

A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

Recently, American Express has been pushing its own internal digital commerce initiatives including the company’s digital wallet, Serve. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card. AmEx also announced a number of recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. But today, the financial company is reaching beyond its own internal payments projects to launch a $100 million fund to invest in startups and companies in the digital commerce space.

The digital commerce initiative will make investments in a number of areas involving the digital commerce experience, including loyalty and rewards, mobile and online payment management, fee-based services, security and fraud detection and data analysis.

“The payments industry is undergoing a fundamental change as the very nature of commerce is redefined,” he explains. “This fund is designed to encourage innovation in the payments space.”

The rumored update to the Apple Store app for iPhone, which we noted last week could revolutionize retail, has arrived, albeit a bit later than expected. Apple Store 2.0 brings many improvements, the most noteworthy among them being Personal Pickup and EasyPay services.

As reported, the app now allows you to purchase items directly for in-store pickup, available within an hour if it’s in stock at the local store of your choosing. If an item isn’t available, the expected ship times listed in the online store appear to apply. You can also now order custom Mac configurations (with more RAM, bigger hard drives, etc.) for in-store pickup through the app.

The other big new addition is EasyPay, which allows you to scan the bar codes of items you wish to purchase in-store with your iPhone’s camera (iPhone 4 or 4S only) and then pay for them directly in the app through your iTunes account. The app keeps your EasyPay purchase receipts, which should come in handy if you ever have to provide proof of purchase to in-store security on your way out the door.

The slow rise of NFC (near field communication) has given rise to the idea that you can pay for purchases by doing little more than getting out your phone and tapping it at checkout. While the technology is growing, a surprising number of phones lack this feature. Thankfully there are companies out there who see this issue, and are working to correct it by offering accessories that will add NFC to your smartphone.

The first is called SDpass. This product has launched in China and works with KJava and Android devices with a built-in microSD slot. The microSD connection fits in the available slot, and is attached to a small antenna, which receives the signal. This is currently on sale for around $25, and features 2GB of storage on the SD card.

Another option that will soon be on the market is an NFC-enabled iPhone case being developed in Taiwan. It isn’t much larger than an ordinary case, with most of the bulk on the bottom, due to the connector. Since the dock connector is blocked, they have added a USB port, which will allow you to charge and sync the phone. It is currently looking to get approval from local regulators before it can be used on the market. When it receives approval, it should sell for around $51. Unfortunately there is no word on when (or if) either of these will come to the US.

The trend in online games, already popular in the entertainment industry, is set to extend to the travel industry according to research released this week. 

The WTM Global Trends Report 2011 reveals the ‘gamification of travel’ is already taking hold with companies and tourism organisations including Lufthansa and Tourism Ireland using gaming techniques to create brand awareness and build loyalty.

Last year Tourism Ireland unveiled its Ireland Town game on Facebook giving it the potential to engage with more than 62 million people.

New technologies, apps and add-ons let smartphones both receive and make payments, and the next generation of phones in the coming years will go further than ever to letting your mobile replace your wallet.

Cash transactions are getting rarer with debit and credit cards being accepted nearly anywhere, but you still run into places that stubbornly remain cash-only, whether it's a lunch wagon, a little independent café, or even an artist selling paintings at a market.

Lately, several solutions have popped up for small businesses - or anyone, really - to accept card payments by attaching a card reader to their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, or other smartphone.

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

Des Moines is the home of mobile payments platform Dwolla. It is an interesting case study - local startup creating buzz within the community and getting retailers and consumers to actually use the platform. Dwolla has created a mobile payments ecosystem from the bottom up.

Within a 5-mile radius of Des Moines there are 500 to 700 business that are using mobile payments through Dwolla. The company works kind of like a payments version of Foursquare. You check at the register in the store using your phone and a pre-loaded Dwolla account.

it is likely that the company will be able to partner with banks and financial institutions in the near future to go straight from a bank account to the retailer.

Popular SaaS startup New Relic made its name monitoring application performance, but has added server monitoring to the mix to make the service more functional. It’s actually a natural fit for New Relic, though, as what’s going on with the servers can have a big impact on how an application is running.

The new server-monitoring information is displayed in context with application-performance data so that users can drill down to the cause of a problem once they see performance start lagging. On the server side, New Relic monitors CPU, disk and memory utilization, network activity, and processes, which SVP of Product Jim Gochee told me lets the company keep an application-performance focus while hitting the key metrics that affect system health.

New Relic claims more than 13,000 active users.

TORONTO — Canadians who find themselves short of change for that Venti Skim Gingerbread Latte can now pay for their Starbucks beverage with the scan of an iPhone.

The Seattle-based company announced Tuesday that an app for Apple's mobile phones can now handle purchases, provided a customer has preloaded an account with money to spend.

The account can be funded within the app with a credit card.

As we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010.

On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST.

There was a more than three-fold (350%) increase in the number of global customers shopping through PayPal mobile on Thanksgiving 2011 compared to last year. These shoppers were mainly located in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.

Telefonica Digital staff are to start testing NFC payments using BlackBerry smartphones, RIM announced in a blog post yesterday.

In collaboration with local banks and retailers, 350 Telefonica employees will trial the devices at its headquarters in Spain.

Telefonica CEO Matthew Key is quoted as saying the technology will be rolled out in several markets in 2012.

Research In Motion has staked its claim as a leader in the mobile payment and Near Field Communications space with the announcement of a new pilot project which will see Telefonica employees at the network operator's Madrid headquarters able to pay for goods in local retailers with their BlackBerrys.

The Telefonica Wallet for BlackBerry project will allow users of the NFC enabled BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380 handsets to pay by touching their device against a reader in participating stores.

The SIM-based NFC technology stores funds and transcation details electronically on the phone's chip while at the front end an application on the device allows user to choose which cards they want to use, as well as get account balances.

Starbucks customers in the UK will be soon be able to walk into their local store, fire up their iPhone and pay for their orders via their Starbucks card, the company has announced.

The one-touch app, which has been available in the US since the beginning of the year, is set to launch on January 5th, allowing Starbucks card owners to link their accounts to the iPhone application and pay using the on-screen barcode in any of the 700 Starbucks locations in the UK.

It’s perfect for people that regularly travel without cash and regularly utilise their Starbucks card in order to pay for their coffee on the commute to work or when out shopping. With one in five customers already using their cards to pay for their cup of Joe, Starbucks is likely to see a rapid uptake in application usage.

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 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.

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.

Starbucks is launching what it claims is the high street’s first iPhone mobile app payment system after growing impatient with the rate of development of mobile NFC technology.

Customers with registered Starbucks Reward Cards will be able to make purchases in all 700 UK Starbucks stores using a one-click iPhone or iPod Touch app from January. It is also developing an Android app that it hopes to launch at the start of 2012.

The coffee chain said it “did not want to wait” for the development of NFC and it becoming mainstream. Because so few handsets are currently NFC capable, Starbucks chose to develop its own mobile payment system using iPhone apps.

Opportunities emerge from the deep semantic web

Economics is the science of incentives. While the promise of searching a huge store of databases may not sound like Saturday social night at the local drive in burger joint, it does by extension, introduce new incentives.  The new technology will drive people to build databases.  A new generation of entrepreneurs will collect, organize, analyze and create – not information – but data.Database of databases of databasesThe first things entrepreneurs will organize are human knowledge data – starting with their own, then relating it to others. Not unlike the human genome project, the vast human knowledge reservoir will be mapped. Entrepreneurs will enter their communities (on line, neighborhood, work, school, church, social networks) and create a database for what other people know and parse the data in any number of important and useful databases.The reason for this is simple; data are collections of human observations.This is the only thing people are willing to pay forRead more at www.conversationalcurrency.com

AirStrip Technologies is setting your doctor free. The Texas based company is developing a suite of hardware/software solutions that allow physicians and nurses to monitor important vital signs from their smart phone. Now, your doctor can use her iPhone to keep track of heartbeats, nurse’s notes, exams results, and drug doses even when she is out of the hospital. AirStrip already has their obstetrician application (AirStrip OB) up and running in facilities across the US, and they’re working on similar Apps for critical care, cardiology, imaging, and lab work. By extending their virtual presence, doctors may be able to provide better healthcare 24/7. This may also be a sign that virtual diagnosis, monitoring, and expert support are poised to revolutionize medical practice. You can check out a free demo of AirStrip OB at the App Store, or watch a local news segment on the program in the video below.Read more at singularityhub.com