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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.

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.

Orange and Barclaycard have launched the UK's first contactless payment service allowing customers to pay for purchases using a smartphone.

Orange Quick Tap allows payments of up to £15 in over 50,000 outlets around the country, including Pret A Manger, McDonald's and Subway.

Customers have to purchase a Samsung Tocco Lite smartphone to use the service, which is available for £55 on pay-as-you-go or free on a £10 per month, two-year contract.

Location-based social game mechanics are not inherently transactional. That is where the company's newest product, LevelUp comes into play. Take merchant offers, location, game mechanics and make then transactional and you have an idea what LevelUp is trying to do in the mobile payments space.

LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.

How Does LevelUp Work?

iTnews is reporting this morning that the Bank of New Zealand has begun a Near Field Communications (NFC) payments trial, in partnership with Vodafone NZ and Visa.

The news comes quickly after the Commonwealth Bank announced its ‘Kaching’ iPhone app. Kaching will use a case over the phone to enable contactless payments, as well as allowing users to pay to mobile, Facebook and email.

CBA’s Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will present in Australia’s only dedicated NFC conference. To find out more about NFC in Australia and New Zealand, click here.

"A team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, and they think found a 'choke point' [PDF] that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, 'you'd cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,' said one of the scientists." Frequent Slashdot contributor (and author of a book on Digital Cash) Peter Wayner wonders if "the way to get a business shut down is to send out a couple billion spam messages in its name."

Four major credit card companies are working with the Isis mobile wallet venture to install mobile payment security applications on upcoming NFC-ready smartphones in the U.S.

Visa expects to license its own software, called PayWave, to the upcoming near-field communication (NFC) smartphones sold by the three wireless carriers in the Isis consortium, a Visa spokeswoman said yesterday.

All four of the credit networks offer contactless payment software, which today is more widely used on cards containing chips than in smartphones. Isis officials said in July that having all four on board will increase consumer and merchant acceptance of NFC-ready smartphones used to make point-of-sale purchases.

Broadcom, the radio chipmaker is making a big bet on mobile payments finally hitting its stride with its latest Near Field Communications chip.

Craig Ochikubo, VP of the business unit that oversees NFC at Broadcom believes it’s finally time for mobile payments to shine.

NFC can be used to authenticate a device more easily than a Bluetooth pairing, so if someone wanted to share a video file from his phone to his television set, all he would have to do is swipe the phone against an NFC reader and ship the file over using a Wi-Fi or other large data rate protocol.

Are mobile payments the new speech recognition technologies?

One of the bigger stories in mobile this year has been the growing investment and hype behind the idea of using one’s mobile phone as a method of payment, but it’s pretty clear that the details of how any one company or organization will build a mobile-payments system are still very much up in the air.

a sizable number of people and companies believe that the smartphone can be a natural evolution of the credit card in just a few years.

New mobile payment services help banks realise the future of payments

Visa Europe, Europe’s leading payments technology company, today announced the launch of Visa Mobile Person-to-Person payments and Visa Alerts: two new services designed to help consumers manage their money and make payments using their mobile phones.

the new services give Visa Europe’s member banks the tools to respond to growing consumer demand for fast, secure, convenient and innovative ways to make and manage payments using their mobile phones.

I don’t disagree with the headline (see full article here).  The problem for NFC payments has little to do with the state of NFC technology, or the road-map of NFC-enabled handsets, or the POS integration required at merchant sites.  Those issues are either solved (or solving).The main hurdles for NFC payments are twofold:a highly complex payment ecosystem of banks, merchant acquirers, and payment processors who must demonstrate regulatory and PCI compliance, flawless security, and adequate payer authenticationand customers’ proclivity to adopt a new mode of payment, e.g. from ‘card-swipe’ to ‘phone-touch’Ask yourself – would I have to use my phone to complete a payment vs. my credit card? Personally, I think the experience will be novel but only really offer nominally more convenience.

NFC still isn’t too common in the US, but it looks like it’s going to be a standard feature for all future mobile devices. Manufacturers have been slowly implementing NFC functionality into their phones and tablets recently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 will ship with native support for NFC. For those not in the know, NFC (Near Field Communications) is a method of communication that two mobile devices can use to communicate with each other just by being in each other’s presence. It can be used for a whole range of functions such as making payments, to collecting information. Today at the BUILD conference, Microsoft also demonstrated the usage of NFC on its Windows 8 tablet. Using an NFC-enabled business card, the demonstrator could simply collect the website address from it by pointing the corner of the tablet towards the card and tapping the notification. It sure beats launching a QR code scanner or manually typing it in. Check out the video after the break:

New technical standards and consumers’ extensive use of mobile media put us on the cusp of an explosion in mobile payments.

Long rumored and heavily used in Asia, mobile phones have the ability to be used as payment devices similar to credit cards.

Now, the growing penetration of smartphones, the widespread use of phones to comparison shop, share price or product features or accept discount and coupon offers makes mobile payments the next high demand phone function.

With big bets by the titans of technology and consumer finance, 2011 is becoming the year that American business got serious about jumpstarting the “Internet of things“—a broad web of digitally enhanced locations that consumers can navigate the same way they now use smartcards to pay their bus fare or open security doors at work. For Seattle startup Iota, that transformation isn’t happening fast enough. This team of former T-Mobile employees is aiming its considerable experience in the mobile sector at a new type of device that it says is ready to go right now. They believe it can be made cheaper, easier, and more open than expensive new radio frequency ID-enabled smartphones controlled by the big market players. Their mission is to put the futuristic promise of what’s called “near-field communications,” or NFC, into the hands of anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone, or wants to spend less time digging around in a field of apps. The company, based in Seattle’s hip Capitol Hill neighborhood, has raised $1.4 million so far and is currently about $600,000 of the way through a $1 million convertible-note round, founder and CEO Russ Stromberg says.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has unveiled Kaching, a mobile phone application and case capable of conducting NFC-based, e-mail P2P, and Facebook payments from a single handheld device.

Depending on the format selected for payment, the transaction will either take place instantly, or generate a unique code for delivery to the recipient, allowing them to access their payment online at a convenient time.

David Lindberg, executive general manager cards, payments and retail strategy says: "The recent explosion in uptake of digital and smartphone technology has revolutionised how we all transact, interact and communicate with each other, and this new application will make the dream of mobile payments a reality."

Mobile handsets have a bad habit of oversharing with the networks they operate on, with some handsets being chattier than others. This signaling data, as it’s known in the industry, can congest mobile networks, and Traffix Systems, a six-year-old Israeli company wants to help operators solve that problem.

The company said Wednesday that it raised a first round of $7 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners to help it expand operations. Ben Volkow, the CEO, says that 60 percent of operators already have some Traffix gear on their networks to address and manage signaling traffic, but more operators are interested. As more operators began deploying LTE networks, which add to the complexity of signaling traffic and to the overall network, Volkow decided that his previous strategy of growing the business through bootstrapping it no longer made sense. “We needed to scale and grow the business,” he said in an interview.

Signaling traffic is the data the phone or device sends out to the network to tell it where it is, what is it is doing, how much it is allowed to do based on the subscriber’s plan and figure out when to hop to the next base station. Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst, issued a report last year noting that network congestion is generally caused by two big things: (1) signaling traffic caused by smartphones and superphones and (2) peak data traffic caused by data cards and embedded laptops.