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Yelp and Groupon are both being sued by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework, an obscure patent troll that earlier filed a similar patent infringement suit against Foursquare.

On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO, for reasons unknown to mankind. In summary, this patent describes:

a subscription-based system for providing commerce information for one or more mobile devices for one or more merchants. Some techniques employed feature a subscription-based method for presenting commercial resources to a mobile device. The method involves receiving mobile device user information relating to a geographic location to locate one or more merchants within a subscription-based shopping network, and receiving mobile device user information relating to a merchant type within the subscription-based shopping network.

Amazon's cloud services are vulnerable to attack via a "massive security gap" that enables hackers to access user accounts and data, a team of German researchers has revealed.

Security researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) found that Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services was vulnerable to different methods of attack, including signature wrapping and cross site scripting, Those security holes have since been closed.

But similar security holes may still be open in other cloud infrastructure offerings, the RUB team found.

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.

Luxtera, which makes a optics chips that has characteristics of a standard silicon chip, has developed a hybrid chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. Those are the same speeds that telecommunications firms are enabling via long-haul cables to handle the massive demand for bandwidth worldwide, but in this case are designed to handle the next wave of big data and networking-intensive applications inside webscale and cloud data centers.

Luxtera was founded in 2001 and builds chips that allow messages to be sent at the speed of light, but instead of using specialty materials that optics chipmakers such as Infinera use, Luxtera uses traditional silicon chips made using the CMOS process. This cuts down on the cost of the chips and makes it possible to use them for high-volume jobs, such as switching in the data center.

Luxtera’s single chip opto-electronic transceiver includes four fully integrated 28Gbps transmit and receive channels powered from a single laser for an aggregate unencoded data rate of up to 112Gbps. The device is targeted for 100Gbps Ethernet, OTN and InfiniBand applications as well as emerging OIF (Optical Internetworking Forum) Short Reach (SR) and Very Short Reach (VSR) electrical interconnect to host systems. … The optical transceivers can be socketed directly onto the customers’ switch or server boards for both backplane and rack mount connectivity.

Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

However, adding flash is just par for the course for CloudSigma, which has been making a name for itself on high performance and customer choice since launching in the United States recently. The company’s U.S. presence is based out of the mind-blowing SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, and CloudSigma chose 10 GbE interconnects as its standard to ensure its cloud can fully utilize the throughput horsepower of new technologies like flash. A couple weeks ago, it announced support of Oracle’s Solaris operating system, which also is unique among cloud providers (although Amazon Web Services does support OpenSolaris).

Although SSDs in the cloud are cool enough by themselves, they’re part of a larger trend toward making cloud computing a more palatable delivery model for all types of workloads. What began as a platform for hosting web applications has expand to enterprise apps such as ERP software from SAP, and even into massively parallel HPC workloads. AWS even offers GPU instances on an HPC cluster, which has resulted in several companies benchmarking AWS as among the fastest supercomputers in the world. Jenkins said CloudSigma will “absolutely” offer GPUs at some point, and might even go as far as to expose specific processors for rendering digital media.

Google’s official Android Market is not available in China, leading to a plethora of independent markets – over 70 at last count. The system works – sort of – but users may find it annoying because you actually don’t know how to find the good stuff. China is still lacking any sort of innovative search mechanism to help people identify the apps they really need in daily life.

Discovering the apps should not be boring, and the core value of Qiuqiu is to bring the pleasure of discovering apps during different activities. Qiuqiu’s app search engine is unique because it offers results based on your location, the time of day, and the things you like and do. Each scenario is expressed by a series of apps – education apps for the school day and travel apps for your vacation. It’s a compelling and interesting change from the traditional “editor’s choice” and selected apps lists found in many markets.

Qiuqiu, the new app discovery engine is developed by AppChina, one of the leading third party Android markets. The founders are a group of very experienced senior engineers and product managers from STC Bing search technology centre and graduates from Tsinghua, Beijing and Fudan Universities. Being successful in the Android market, as Luo Chuan, the co-founder of AppChina, formerly CEO of MySpace China, said, means suppling the right apps at the right time. AppChina is moving forward to the field of search engine and data mining and try to develop a new way of discovering Android apps most suitable for you.

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of these visual search engines has reached levels that are beginning to be acceptable for eDiscovery, compliance, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

More and more electronically stored information (ESI) is non-text based or does not contain any searchable text components: sound recordings, video and pictures are growing exponentially in size and more and more collaborative and social network applications support (only) these information formats.

In addition, a whole generation is growing up that no longer uses written communication forms such as letters or emails: they only use social networks and other new media forms for communication and collaboration.

Google Maps is a big part of Milk’s first mobile app, Oink. And Rose wants to build in more Google technology in future updates.

Oink lets people rate and discover things in the places around them. It is a first step at creating a directory and recommendation system for things in the physical world.

Twitter has just announced a key engineering hire today. Adam Messinger will be joining the company as Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.

Messinger was previously Vice President Development at Oracle, where he was responsible for managing the Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

At Oracle he was responsible, for the development Exalogic, Java SE, FX, ME, and Card, Coherence, Virtual Assembly Builder, Middleware Lifecycle and Applications Lifecycle. Prior to his time as a VC, he founded Gauntlet Systems Corp., which was acquired Borland.

How do you compete with Google's new Wallet mobile payment system? Well, a $100 million cash infusion certainly couldn't hurt. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to invest just that amount in Isis, sources told Businessweek. That sum is likely to grow, since taking on Google is no small feat, especially considering Wallet is already off the ground, with nationwide retail partners and support for MasterCard PayPass. Though Isis first made its debut last year, Google Wallet, which was announced in May, has clearly taken the lead. Isis is little more than a top-level website at this point, though with three of the nation's largest carriers providing support, it could have a chance to catch up -- especially if the carriers elect not to partner with Google, leaving Sprint as the sole wireless provider. We're glad to see some potential healthy competition for Wallet, especially considering that it was looking like Google was poised to create a monopoly. We expect much more to come on the Isis front, but in the meantime, hold on to those wallets -- cell phone payments may be in your future, but for now, paper and plastic are where it's at.

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.

China's leading location-based social service is distributing NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchants in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong

Jiepang is to distribute NFC window stickers to more than 3,000 merchant partners in six cities in Greater China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei and Hong Kong.

Jiepang is China's leading location-based social service. Its users currently check in and earn rewards via a GPS-enabled smartphone app which comes preloaded on all new HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and other smartphone brands in China, including all three of the new Nokia NFC smartphones announced earlier this week.

Mobile payments company Boku is letting French consumers pay for virtual goods and services via their handsets.

The company is partnering with French carriers Bouygues Telecom and SFR. The deal will reach 32 million French consumers.

“France is a top priority for us in international markets, and we decided we wanted to tap into it in 2010,” said Ron Hirson, cofounder/president of Boku, San Francisco.

Shares of Amazon were down about 1% $202.52 by mid-morning Friday. The stock is up about 13% for the year to date. The Kindle Fire is estimated to cost a total of $201.70 to build each unit, a number that includes a bill of materials — or BOM — of $185.60, with another $16.10 in manufacturing costs for each unit, iSuppli estimates. The tear-down estimate does not include cost figures for software, licensing or royalties that Amazon may pay on the device.

Amazon began shipping the Kindle Fire on Monday, after first unveiling the device in late September. The tablet costs $199 — about 60% less than the cheapest iPad from Apple Inc. /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -0.16% , which currently dominates the tablet market. Analysts expect the Kindle Fire to make the largest dent in the tablet market next to the iPad, after other devices using Google’s /quotes/zigman/93888/quotes/nls/goog GOOG -0.89%  Android operating system have largely failed to generate strong sales. The low price of the device, along with Amazon’s large library of books and other digital content, are expected to contribute to the appeal of the Kindle Fire. But Amazon does not break out data on its device sales.

At the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop (NEXT) conference in Aarhus, Denmark today, Clark Dodsworth gave a talk about how contextual awareness will transform our usage of devices such as mobile phones. Contextual awareness uses a variety of sensors in a device to give you information that’s relevant to what you’re doing. Imagine your phone being able to offer relevant alerts for traffic when it knows you’re driving, for example. As Dodsworth notes, Apple’s purchase of ‘virtual assistant’ service Siri last year is one example of how this is set to become a reality. He believes contextual awareness features will soon be built into mobile operating systems as standard.

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.

Bank of New Zealand has launched a trial of a phone with an embedded chip that is able to make payments by swiping the phone against a card reader.

The three month trial is being done by 44 BNZ and Vodafone staff using a Samsung Galaxy S2 phone with a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, similar to one used by Google in its Google Wallet trial in America.

The trial is using a system set up in conjunction with Visa and Paymark, BNZ said.