Chinese Internet giant Tencent, which already dominates online gaming in China, is now moving into Europe. The company has acquired a majority stake in Swiss mobile games company Miniclip, VentureBeat reported on Wednesday (Feb. 18). Tencent didn’t disclose how much it paid or how much...
Mobile payments in sub-Saharan Africa will generate $1.5 billion in fees for mobile-money providers by 2019, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group. The growth comes from a combination of a largely unbanked population and high mobile phone penetration. That has turned the...
Apple has ordered between 5 and 6 million Apple Watches for the device’s debut in April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday (Feb. 17). And it increasingly looks like Apple’s wearable will stand or fall on the strength of Apple Pay. Half of the...
Don’t miss the mobile moment. That’s one piece of advice Forrester Research CEO George Colony has for CIOs as they enter what he called the third or fourth inning of the “age of the customer.” His advice reflects a common theme in the payments and commerce space as...
Microsoft has been building better alternatives to passwords into its forthcoming version of Windows, including support for two-factor authentication and biometrics. Now the company is joining forces with the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance industry group to spread those technologies to other designs, according to...
Apple Pay is joining EMV chip-and-PIN as a standard for roughly 9 million Federal payment cards, including debit-card accounts used for distributing Social Security and Veterans benefits, Bloomberg News reported. On Friday (Feb. 13), the White House announced that “Apple, Visa, MasterCard, Comerica Bank and U.S. Bank are...
Home Depot has almost finished rolling out 40,000 of its custom FIRST Phone smartphones to in-store employees — and the new-generation devices are slowly beginning to line up with industry standards, according to employee descriptions of the phones. The home-improvement chain rolled out the first...
“Kill switches” are proving deadly to smartphone theft, which has dropped by half in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York City in the year after Apple added a kill switch to the iPhone, Reuters reported. Apple added the ability...
On the day that Apple became the first U.S. company to end its business day with a market capitalization above $700 billion, CEO Tim Cook told an investment-conference audience that Apple Pay is rolling out “much faster” than he expected, and that in April, Apple...
