Visa’s Mariano Dima confirms ”V.me sits at the heart of Visa’s future of payments. For the first time, consumers and retailers will have a streamlined online checkout experience through an acceptance mark that offers industry-leading security and, when a Visa card is used in a V.me wallet, the same protection and rights that come with any Visa card transaction.”

“Our intention is that V.me will ultimately be able to incorporate any or all of our new payment technologies, allowing our members to deliver the best possible payments experience whether face-to-face, online or in a mobile environment. This comprehensive service suite, delivered under the V.me umbrella, will offer an easy way to benefit from the scale, security and reliability of Visa.”

V.me will be live Autumn 2012.

David Chan, CEO of Barclaycard Consumer Europe explained ”More than half of us say that the item we’re most lost without is our mobile phone, so we’re giving people the option of using them to make easy, convenient, everyday payments without the need to upgrade their current handset. Barclaycard PayTag is another milestone on our journey to make paying easier, and sits alongside other easy ways to pay with your mobile such as those we offer in partnership with Orange.”

Barlycard says ”This will be the first time that Quick Tap will be available to those without accounts with Barclaycard, Barclays or the Orange credit card. Customers can transfer up to a limit of £150 simply and securely directly from their account onto the Quick Tap app. Once loaded with money, the mobile is then ready to make single payments of up to £15 (rising to £20 in June), by simply tapping their phone on a contactless terminal. The user friendly Barclaycard payment app, which sits on the home screen of all Quick Tap compatible handsets, contains information such as electronic statements detailing Quick Tap purchases so customers can keep an eye on their spending and manage finances easily on the go.”

“The joint venture and its three parent companies may have the technical and commercial ability and incentive to block future competitors from offering their own mobile-wallet services to customers in the UK, or to degrade the quality of these competing mobile wallets so that they become less attractive,” said the commission,  and added that the second phase of the investigation would determine “whether these initial concerns are confirmed or not.”

Ingersoll ‘s Jeremy Earles explained ”To turn these smartphones into an access control credential, you simply download the AptiQmobile app to your smart phone and use it to retrieve your secure mobile key that was set up by your access control site administrator. Once your mobile key is downloaded, open the app and tap it to the reader just like using a smart card. It’s very secure and extremely easy to use.”

“Today’s students are so technologically advanced that it is second nature for them to put everything on their phones and, most of the time, it’s already in their hands while walking across campus,” says Kathy Gallagher, Villanova’s director of card services. “We want to provide our students the utmost in convenience and flexibility through the technology we offer. It’s easier for students to use an app on their phone versus digging for their card.”

FujiFilm’s Peter Wigington says ”Tap’n'Print is a really exciting development both for FujiFilm and for the photo retailers who have SmartPix kiosks in their stores. Anything that encourages the public to print their images is a positive thing and, as Tap’n'Print is so simple and intuitive to use, I’m sure the public will find it even easier to use the SmartPix kiosk than they did before.”

Corey Benninger from Intrepidus confirms the details of the discovery “When you decompile an Android application, which isn’t obfuscated, you’re able to see the same class names, method names, variable names, and other identifiers as in the developer’s source code. In this case, Google Wallet includes a package called “wallet.proto” which contains parsers for any “Protocol Buffer” formatted data the application uses.

While the name “Protocol Buffers” sounds generic, it’s actually Google’s well-documented mechanism for serializing data (think of it as their version of XML orPLists). If you followed the Google Wallet PIN hashing issue, you’ll remember that the PIN hash is stored in a protocol buffer.

The “WalletShared” protocol buffers package in the current version of Google Wallet contains hints of iOS within the parsers definitions. This includes defining the “DeviceContext -> HardwareType” field with only two values: “ANDROID” and “IOS”. iOS strings are also found in two additional protocol buffers called ‘IosDevice’ and ‘IosWallet’.”

Bernard Vian, executive vice president of NFC and payment solutions at Inside Secure said ”The MicroPass 4101-2K solves this dilemma by hitting the NFC tag sweet spot, providing developers with a truly compliant NFC Forum Type 4 tag that has sufficient memory at an affordable price and that can be read by any NFC device. With this introduction, we are ending the problem of NFC tag incompatibility.”

“This is the first large-scale deployment of NFC technology on the street and is bringing the future of out of home to the here-and-now in Reading,” says Nick Mawditt, Kinetic’s director of insight and marketing. “NFC is widely regarded as a technology that could transform the way consumers use their mobile phones to interact with their environment… we will be looking closely to see how consumers engage and interact with the content during the trial.”

The partnership will also allow any Visa issuer to create and run their own services within the Vodafone mobile wallet that will allow payments to be made, run coupons, loyalty schemes and other relevant services.

“The Vodafone mobile wallet represents the next stage of the smartphone revolution,” says Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s group CEO. “It offers our customers the speed, simplicity and convenience of managing their everyday transactions with a single wave or tap of their smartphone, using innovative and reliable services developed by Vodafone and Visa — technology and providers they can trust. Our mobile wallet will be open to any service provider and we are committed to enable all partners to provide our joint customers the richest service portfolio possible.”

“Our partnership with Vodafone represents a huge stride forward for mobile payments,” adds Peter Ayliffe, CEO of Visa Europe. “Visa’s future of payments initiative is more than just a promise: These services are real, tangible and coming to the mainstream consumer market in the very near future. Any Visa issuer across these key markets will be able to work with Visa and Vodafone to enable mobile payments for their customers, backed by all the security, trust and global acceptance the Visa brand represents.”

“We are committed to continually enhance the performance of Shazam to ensure we deliver the best experience when people use the Shazam app,” says the company’s Alex Musil. “We believe that near instant identification creates the most efficient way possible to discover, purchase and share the music, television content and brand offers that our loyal users love.”