Starbucks’ $25 million investment in and deployment of Square for mobile payments, signed Tuesday by Square CEO Jack Dorsey and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, will help spur adoption of mobile commerce in the US, with a halo effect that will be felt beyond.

Square will begin processing all credit and debit card transactions at Starbucks’ nearly 7,000 company-owned shops in the United States this fall via Pay With Square, and soon, customers will order their café du jour and charge it to their credit card just by saying their name. 

“Starbucks is one of the largest organizations in the world, taking technology like Square — simple, fast and focused on customer experience — and bringing it to a massive scale,” commented Dorsey to the New York Times.

The Twitter co-founder and executive chairman (naturally) tweeted the whole deal, sharing the big news late Tuesday night in New York and subsequently posting photos of Adam Brotman, Starbucks' chief digital officer, using Square (and tipping 30%) in a NYC taxi; the deal-signing with Schultz taken Tuesday night in New York; and a twitpic on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning.

It's a huge week for Square: it's also receiving some cross-promotional love from Apple. Check out the new TV commercial for the iPad (being swiped as the voiceover says "make a sale") that debuted Tuesday night, below.Continue reading...

Google released this video ode to how it's reinventing the wallet with Google Wallet for mobile the same day it announced it's moving to the cloud and supporting all major U.S. credit and debit cards (ending its exclusive Citi partnership) — and on the day it killed its 506,000+ follower strong Google Mobile Twitter feed. The Google Mobile Blog is also pushing followers to the Google Android blog, where the details on today's news can be found.

The race for NFC-based mobile payments is heating up with projections for 2013 exceeding $13 billion globally, up from just over $7 billion in 2011, according to Gartner research.

Isis, the mobile-payments joint venture backed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, has signed up Coca-Cola, Macy’s, Aéropostale, Dillard’s, Foot Locker (and its subsidiary Champs Sports) and Jamba Juice, as well as hundreds of local retailers in Texas and Utah who will start accepting Isis payments by this summer.

Both Isis and competitor Google Wallet use NFC chips that store user’s credit card data or pre-loaded digital cash. Both companies are also working with check-out scanners and retailers including Gap, Office Max, Toys ‘R’ Us and Walgreens. 

Google Wallet is currently available on four Sprint handsets and none from the mobile operators backing Isis. Sprint is the only U.S. carrier backing Google Wallet and to that end just released the LG Optimus Elite for Virgin Mobile.Continue reading...

Barclays continues to innovate by taking a leading role in mobile payments in Europe. Having just launched the Pingit mobile payments app, it's now bringing contactless payments to Barclaycard, the UK's first credit card. Now, its 12 million Visa Barclaycard credit card customers can look forward to PayTag, a free sticker that enables mobile contactless transactions at more than 100,000 terminals. 

The easy-to-use PayTag sticker aims to spur the usage use of smartphones for small purchases, increasing the reach of the Quick Tap NFC (Near Field Communication) service the bank operates in partnership with mobile network operator Orange.Continue reading...

Isis may be the ancient Egyptian goddess of nature and magic, but she would surely have her lid flipped if she were given a digital wallet that only needs to be tapped in order to pay for something.

Such is the power of Isis, the name of the mobile commerce joint venture launched by a trio of U.S. mobile operators — AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless — to bring financial services brands' credit, prepaid, and banking customers to mobile. The venture this week signed Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard US, expanding on charter credit card members Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

It's a "testament to the vision and commitment of Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard to make mobile commerce a real and positive experience for their customers," stated Michael Abbott, CEO of Isis. "Mobile commerce is more than a new way to pay; it's about extending the relationships consumers enjoy with their banks and merchants into a powerful and convenient new form factor."

Sprint, the fourth major player in the U.S. mobile-phone industry, has instead partnered with Google on its Google Wallet, which PC Mag notes has some kinks to work out. PayPal is also promoting its digital wallet to retailers and other businesses.Continue reading...

Two years ago, we reported that the Salvation Army, a charitable brand best known for its red kettles and bell ringers that appear outside stores during the holiday shopping season, was implementing credit card processing in 120 U.S. cities. The reason? Shoppers just didn't seem to carry much disposable cash around anymore.

The experiment was a bold one for an organization that started 150 years ago. Truth be told, it wasn't a smashing success. Major George Hood of the Salvation Army tells the New York Times, "The credit card terminals really haven't been a blockbuster, I'll be candid. The winter elements have been a negative, people have to go through a process of entering data, and it's just generally more cumbersome."

But that isn't stopping the Salvation Army from keeping up with the times. During this year's holiday shopping season, the kettles will be ever-present, but the Salvation Army hopes to cash in on a new idea — a variation on accepting credit cards that should make it much easier for the consumer.

In ten locations in Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco, Salvation Army bell ringers will be equipped with Android smartphones, donated by Sprint Nextel, that have a kind of micro-terminal attached to them powered by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's Square.

Consumers simply swipe their debit or credit card through Square and their donation of any amount they choose goes to the Salvation Army. The tiny reader is portable and allows secure transactions, just like any retail credit card terminal. As the Salvation Army noted in a blog post, "With more families in need of Salvation Army services this year than ever before, we hope implementing this new technology will provide ease and incentive for new and existing donors."Continue reading...

With 13 years of e-commerce payments and processing more than $10,000 per minute in mobile payments, PayPal is jumping offline. The company plans to introduce PayPal Wallet next year as a service to merchants, and to replace credit cards burning a hole in consumers' wallets.

The pitch: PayPal Wallet is NFC-free and only requires that participating merchants upgrade software instead of investing in a hardware change. Users pay at PayPal-enabled terminals with a PayPal credit card and PIN – or down the road, an NFC-enabled tap. It's also competing with competitors like Square and NFC solution-based wallets from cell phone carriers and Google Wallet, and even social check-in services such as Foursquare and group discount providers such as Groupon.

Unveiling the service in New York for the official opening of PayPal’s Shopping Showcase this week, where the brand is wooing local businesses to check out its mobile payments, PayPal President Scott Thompson blogged: 

“Over the next 12-24 months, we’ll introduce technologies that give consumers the choice to “swipe, enter, or tap” when they pay… And no matter how you pay, you can go back and change the payment terms, even after the purchase…In short, we’re not just making a smarter wallet, we’re making money smarter.”Continue reading...

Self-scanning checkouts in grocery stores have proved only a mixed success, so it's only natural that some supermarket chains now want to create even more "opportunity" for customers to handle the tedious checkout chore themselves.

Kroger, Stop and Shop and Giant grocery chains in the US are in various stages of testing or rolling out handheld wands that you wave at bar codes as you take stuff off the shelves and then bag things yourself in the cart. It keeps a running tally, and — presto! Because most of those nasty traditional functions of the checkout process already have been taken care of, exiting the store becomes almost as quick as swiping your credit or debit card at the cashier.

At least that's the idea, Kroger executives told WCPO in Cincinnati. Not surprisingly, other retailers are testing how to use smartphones to do the scanning, to eliminate the cost and complication of the wands.Continue reading...