Ebay’s online payment subsidiary PayPal has finally come out with its upgraded service for cellular users. Mobile Checkout facilitates secure payments directly from mobile Internet sites; similar to PayPal, buyers and sellers will need to have PayPal accounts—either a regular account or one activated specifically for mobile use—in order to use the service. PayPal has been offering services via mobile since 2006, although in the past it was restricted to more rudimentary SMS-based transactions. (This will remain operational for the mobile-payment luddites out there.) Some, including Information Week’s Eric Zeman, argue that SMS payments are actually very lucrative. For example, Jupiter Research predicts the P2P m-payment market will bring in $22 billion by 2011. One new m-payment initiative, appropriately called mPayments, will be based on near-field communication (NFC) and SMS, and plans a 2009 launch. Mobile Checkout meanwhile is available now in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, coincidentally three top markets for eBay as well.

—A new-ish service that sends out emergency announcements to mobile subscribers got a try-out last month in San Francisco when smoke started to come out of one of the city’s subway tunnels. It sounds like a great use of mobile technology to alert people on the move, but an article in InfoWorld points out that perhaps AlertSF isn’t going far enough in what it offers to those who want to be kept in the know. The service sends out either SMS or email alerts to registered users, but the text messages are too short to provide enough detail on how to deal with the crisis at hand. Moreover, there are questions over what exactly constitutes a “disaster”: the service is confined to events that have taken place, not those that may be predicted—such as an impending earthquake or other natural event; and it doesn’t cover problems that are relatively minor but can still hold up a person’s day with delays, such as a closed transport line. Currently 8,800 people have registered for AlertSF.