MasterCard Creates Payments API

The new MasterCard "Payments API," which suggests MasterCard sees creation of a developer ecosystem as crucial for its future payments efforts, will allow developers to create web and mobile applications that include the processing of credit card transactions around the world on the MasterCard network.

Developers can use the service to find their users deals and discounts. The Offers API also provides the ability to construct a more detailed search for an offer. For example, you can filter offers by category or display offers near a certain location or point on the map.

Ambitious MasterCard Includes Payments in Beta APIs

Mobile Users Increase Mobile Shopping, Mobile Payments

More mobile and Internet users are using existing online accounts to buy things, uploading credit card information to the phone to make purchases, using third-party accounts such as PayPal or Obopay to make purchases. Perhaps significantly, the percentage using their mobiles to access bank account information on the phone to make purchases from online retailers did not grow.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

Mobile Couponing Grew in 2010

Consumer use of mobile coupons has shifted radically from 2009 to 2010, say researchers at the Yankee Group. In 2009, just eight percent of respondents who expressed interest in mobile coupons using text messaging or multimedia message service had actually used a service such as Groupon.

Click on image for a larger view.

This figure more than doubled for 2010, to 19 percent of subscribers. Similarly, applications facilitating the real-time scanning of images or bar codes to receive more information or to compare prices increased in usage from five percent of consumers with an interest in mobile coupons in 2009 to 14 percent in 2010.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

Bill to Mobile Isn't That Popular with Consumers

Consumers do not seem especially anxious to make payments in a retail environment while adding those transactions to a monthly wireless bill.

This is not good news for mobile operators, which are universally struggling with how they will insert themselves into the well-established payments value chain, researchers at the Yankee Group say.

Yankee Group

Japanese and Korean Telcos Announce NFC Roaming

Japan’s biggest mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo, has agreed with Korea’s second-largest telco, KT Corp., to develop cross-border payment, ticketing and other services using standard NFC.

In the announcement, DoCoMo said that these are NFC services that the two telcos will 'launch in their respective markets of Japan and South Korea from around the end of 2012.

Data from the U.S. market is scanty, as few consumers yet have had a chance to use NFC or other mobile payment applications and services.

Researchers at the Yankee Group note that 2010 was the first year tests were run. Click on image for a larger view.

Japanese and Korean Telcos Announce NFC Roaming–Rollouts Expected

Sprint Kyocera Echo Launched

See segments two and three here: http://www.androidcentral.com/sprint-kyocera-echo-presentation

AT&T Introduces Unlimited Calling to any U.S. Mobile

AT&T has introduced unlimited mobile calling to any mobile number in America. "Unlimited Mobile to Any Mobile" is available to AT&T customers with an unlimited messaging plan and a qualifying voice plan, basically those voice plans that include unlimited messaging.

Existing customers with an unlimited messaging plan can activate "Mobile to Any Mobile" by visiting www.att.com/anymobile. The URL will be available beginning Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011.

It is likely no accident that the new offer becomes active on the day Verizon Wireless starts officially selling the Apple iPhone.