MasterCard is the latest company to throw its hat into the ring for digital payments with a new suite of services intended to simplify the use of making purchases on smartphones.

We are confused with what to call private and what to call public, what to sanction and what not to sanction. How can we solve small-screen privacy when we haven’t solved our digital angst on the PC?

Barclays person-to-person mobile payments application Pingit was download more than 400,000 times in the first eight weeks following its February launch.

Why the shock and awe of an app that helps guys find girls around them – an app which uses publicly available data from Facebook and foursquare’s APIs, data which is completely permission-based?

Starbucks is building on the significant success of its mobile payments app with several new capabilities, including making drive-thru payments available for the first time and extending its PayPal integration to Canada.

Regal Entertainment Group has rolled out a mobile application that lets users buy movie tickets while on the go.

The shape that Apple’s rumored mobile payments solution will eventually take became a little clearer this week when the manufacturing giant was awarded a patent that covers mobile payment controls.

Shoppers are natively an impulse consumer. They buy, in what retailers call, “5 by 5” (five seconds by five feet). At home they may write out lengthy shopping lists and do hours of research on products, but in the store, 80 percent of their basket is full of products bought on pure impulse.

Two Google employees closely associated with its Google Wallet initiative have recently either left the company or moved on to other projects in a possible reflection of the challenges that Google is facing in the mobile payments space.

Last week NRF in New York hosted retail folk, but it seemed as if every show vendor was hawking technology solutions to help retailers track product lifecycle from factory to sale.