Mobile Commerce

In a development that could long complicate the introduction of commercial services allowing consumers to make point-of-sale payments with their mobile phones, mobile network operators say they will derive POS payment revenue chiefly from consumer transaction fees. According to research released this week, some 83% of carriers responding to an …

Qualcomm Inc.'s $210 million cash deal for Firethorn Holdings Inc., announced on Wednesday, is expected to accelerate Firethorn's movement toward mobile payments and hands Qualcomm a significant stake in the rapidly developing markets for both banking and payments via handsets, according to Tripp Rackley, chief executive of Atlanta-based Firethorn. “All …

AT&T Inc., which on Tuesday announced it is launching a nationwide mobile-banking service, expects to have 500,000 mobile phones preloaded with the software necessary for the service by the end of the year and 10 million handsets so equipped by the close of 2008, according to a senior executive with …

BSG Clearing Solutions has started talking to sellers of digital merchandise about using a new service that would allow them to take payment for games, songs, and other such goods by charging the items to consumers' wireless bills. The targeted sellers for the new service are so-called off-deck merchants, or …

BB&T Corp. this week introduced a new mobile-banking service in which the Southeastern regional bank leaves little to chance. The bank will offer consumers three user interfaces for two-way interaction with BB&T through their cell phones or other mobile devices. And, in contrast to most banks' tech announcements, BB&T is …

Mobile-banking and payments application developer Firethorn Holdings LLC scored a coup this week when Verizon Wireless, the nation's No. 2 mobile-phone carrier, announced it had picked Firethorn as a strategic partner for mobile banking and would preload Firethorn's system onto newly issued phones. The agreement means the nation's two largest …

Data Insecurity Part 8 Few payment innovations have produced the stark schizophrenia that we are experiencing with mobile commerce. Normally somber business types are rubbing their hands together at the prospects of reaching consumers on a one-to-one basis, online, all the time, anywhere they happen to be. Meanwhile, typically apprehensive …

Cellular South expects to launch some time in the first quarter what would almost certainly be the first commercial application of near-field communication (NFC) technology for point-of-sale payment, and also the first driven by a wireless carrier rather than a payment network. The plan follows a three-month, two-city pilot in …

For the raft of processors either moving into mobile payments or hammering out business plans to make an entry, the top executive with one company that has been in the market for six years has some advice: Focus on the market made up of people who lack bank accounts, and …

At a time when companies as big and diverse as Google Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal, the bank card networks and others are all moving into mobile banking and payments, a regional bank in Mississippi has emerged as one of the more experienced players in the embryonic market. Tupelo-based BancorpSouth Inc. …