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Sir Richard Branson4 clicks has personally invested an undisclosed amount in SF mobile payment start-up Square. This investment comes shortly after a $100 million round of investments, and before Square tries to launch globally.

When asked about the investment Branson said, “I’m very passionate about helping people start and grow successful businesses, and Square is an incredible technology that inspires and empowers everyone to be an entrepreneur.”

Branson loves the fact that anyone can go to Square’s website and get a free credit card reader to plug into their phone or tablet and start processing payments. It is also hard to ignore the massive growth of the company. In only a year Square has shipped out 800,000 card readers, and just recently passed processing $10 million dollars a day in payments. They are currently processing $2 billion in transactions annually.

SoundTracking, a social mobile application that allows people to create “musical postcards” that can then be shared with friends on social sites,  announced Tuesday that it had received $4.75 million in financing.

To use SoundTracking, people take pictures, log their locations and attach the songs they are listening to at that moment.

“We are making sharing the core experience and discovery is a bi-product.”

PayPal today issued an update to its Android app that will enable people to make payments to each other via near field communications enabled smartphones. This does not include consumer to merchant payments but rather is a widget geared towards making payments with friends or other PayPal using people that happen to have NFC on their devices.

PayPal does not make any money from peer-to-peer transactions. It is a feature that the company offers more or less because it can. Really, the best thing that peer-to-peer does for PayPal is give it insights into how people transfer money between each other through the data generated by each transaction.

PayPal has shunned NFC to this point in its mobile payments push. The company's stance has been "it will not be a hard thing for us to implement if we find that it gains popularity." Really, this new NFC sharing widget for Android does not change that stance at all. Peer-to-peer payments in PayPal are a service, not a business vertical. Essentially, this update for PayPal does not affect how the company will approach mobile payments.

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

Tapit is a new mobile advertising startup, founded in March 2011, that enables content sharing and offer delivery simply by tapping an NFC-enabled phone anywhere the Tapit logo can be found.

The company has now raised a seed funding round from Sydney Angels in record time – just 22 days from the pitch until the round was subscribed for. This is the fastest investment to date for Sydney Angels, the not-for-profit membership organization for angels which typically invests in Sydney-based startups.

NFC (near field communication), a short-range wireless technology, is often associated with mobile payments and mobile wallets these days, as a new way to enable purchases at point-of-sale. But that’s only one of the many possible use cases for the technology, which can also support things like sharing files and media between devices, advertising, ticketless transactions and more. It can even be used to perform actions like those found in NTT DOCOMO’s nifty “tap to follow” offering that lets two Twitter users follow each other simply by tapping phones.

Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

Location Media Microsoft Mobile Sessions Shareables Social Media Twitter Video Editions Africa Asia Australia Canada Europe India Latin America Middle East UK United States Languages France Nederland Polska Portugal Romania Russia Google Offers is now live in Brooklyn: Starting with $4 for SHARKS! 9th November 2011 by Courtney Boyd Myers Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

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.

BankSimple has announced a few things, including a name change. The company is now called “Simple” and has started rolling out its first invites to the service.

Using Simple, you can make purchases with a Simple Visa® card, pay bills, earn interest, set up and track savings goals, and much more. Simple replaces your bank, but we are not a bank. You use our mobile and web apps and speak with our customer relations team when you have questions. We partner with chartered banks that hold your deposits in FDIC-insured products. They take care of money, we take care of customers, and together we’re delivering a new type of financial experience that’s easier, faster, and friendlier.

With a focus on customer service, Simple aims to make the banking experience a better one for consumers, focusing on both web and mobile experiences. To date, online banking hasn’t been the best experience, with companies like Mint helping you manage your money more effectively.

Adyen, a provider of global internet payment and e-commerce services, has been selected by France-based cinema chain operator Pathé to power online and mobile payments for the latter’s 21 cinemas across the Netherlands.

Pathé in the Netherlands has chosen Adyen to integrate payment processing into its existing online and new mobile ticketing services.

With Ajax technology form Ayden, online and mobile payments are set to be processed on a single screen with a single click, instead of loading multiple pages to run through payment acceptance.

Mobile payment solutions cover Africa with basic services including domestic remittances, person to person payments and airtime top-up capabilities.

All of these are only possible because of "cash-in" and "cash-out" features installed at agents. Even these are amazing on their own, but these solutions are not constrained by these basic features.

Many examples of integrating mobile wallets with bill payment applications can be found. This is an area that shows a lot of growth. Either deployed by mainstream brands or also by small entrepreneurs, this is an area that requires further investigation.

Leading coffee chain Starbucks is bringing its mobile payment system to its chain of 700 stores in the UK, allowing owners of the Apple iPhone to make payments for their purchase straight from their handset.

The mobile payment service is already up and running in the US, and is scheduled to launch in the UK from January 5th, when the mobile app should be launched in the Apple App Store.

The company claim that customers using the service reduce transaction time by around 10 seconds, which soon adds up when you are serving hundreds of customers a day. Customers who use the app can still get Starbucks freebies and other promotions added to their account.

Near-field communications (NFC) technology will be built into one in five smartphones by 2014 as mobile payment and interactive promotions take off, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Over 23 million NFC-capable smartphones are expected to be in circulation by the end of 2011, said the NFC Retail Marketing & Mobile Payments report.

This willl rise to around 300 million by 2014, and half of these devices are expected to be active in the US.

A service called Strings, which launched today, is trying to find and collect all the different ways you can track yourself online — your purchases on Amazon, Zappos and other e-commerce sites; your watching on YouTube, Hulu and Netflix; your listening on iTunes; your check-ins on Foursquare. The service is not about socializing and sharing that information, like the Twitter-for-credit-cards Blippy, but about privately harnessing it. It aggregates all that different preference data to build a better picture of things and places you like. The problem with stalking yourself on the Internet is it’s potentially an invitation to other people to do the same — but Strings of course is promising to keep your data safe.

Twitter was born as a text messaging service; tweets are 140 characters because that is the length of a text message, minus a few characters for the author’s name.Today, though, most people in the United States think about Twitter as a Web tool, and they use it either online or via smartphone apps.But Twitter has not forgotten about all the people in the world who do not have fancy phones. On Friday, the company announced that it had acquired Cloudhopper, a Seattle text-messaging start-up.There is “untapped potential” with Twitter text-message use “Mobile is clearly where the majority of usage will happen,” Evan Williams, Cloudhopper has already been working with Twitter to connect its service directly with mobile carriers around the world, in part so that users do not have to pay extra to send or receive text message tweets. Twitter has long had problems with this, and in the past has had to disable text messaging in certain countries because of high fees.Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com