After quickly gaining a warm reception and a rapid post-launch investment from BSkyB, the social TV app startup co-founded by ex BBC iPlayer head honcho Anthony Rose is making its first real play at monetisation.

It would be dramatic to say that independent booksellers nationwide are boycotting Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Publishing titles en masse—and hey, it could still happen. But a new decision from the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce—which comes as bookstore chains Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Indigo are making similar decisions—is not so…

Microsoft’s plan for Windows Phone 8—which appears to be moving in step with its overall Windows 8 launch strategy—has been leaked, and the company is planning to take some big steps forward in terms of overall performance, mobile payments, and voice calling.

It’s an election year, which means politicians are frantically trying to raise money for their campaigns. President Obama’s re-election campaign has decided to add Square’s mobile payments technology to its arsenal and is deploying the company’s credit-card readers to its staff.

Square, the high-profile mobile payments company started by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, has yet to launch outside the U.S. But in the meantime, another, similar-looking competitor has sprung up in the UK: mPowa.

Polar Mobile—the Canadian startup that develops apps for big-name publishers like CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS), Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated (NYSE: TWX), Shanghai Daily, Future Publishing (LSE: FUTR) and the WSJ—today announced two steps up in its growth: it has picked up an additional $6 million in funding and has launched…

Losing your phone is never fun. But losing your wallet is much worse, and that’s one argument where those trying to roll the mobile-payments boulder up the mountain might find some help.

Dorling Kindersley, the division of Penguin that publishes children, travel and reference titles, made a strong case for how it is moving to a “flat” content model, where a printed book is only one of many output options. The digital publisher of DK also said that companies like his need…

The consumer draw of free apps over paid apps has been well-documented, and so has the rise of in-app payments as a route to making money from those free apps. New research out today predicts that in-app purchases will, in fact, become the most dominant way that app developers will…

Back in July, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and other content providers pulled the purchasing options from their iOS apps, in order to comply with Apple’s new in-app purchasing restrictions. Today Amazon launched a workaround—a Web-based HTML5 Kindle store specifically optimized for the iPad.

Online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter raised just shy of $100 million in pledges in 2011, and successfully funded nearly 12,000 projects, or 46 percent of those launched. The categories that raised the most funding were film, with $32.5 million in pledges, and music, with $19.8 million pledged.

Wal-Mart’s digital labs arm has snapped up a small but influential mobile software-development team, adding Small Society to its group of technologists trying to help the retailing behemoth deal with the shift to mobile computing.

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) this morning confirmed that it has appointed a new CEO, Scott Thompson, formerly the president of eBay’s payment division, PayPal. His appointment comes four months after Carol Bartz was fired from the job.

I asked publishers and authors how they’re promoting their e-books for the holidays and got answers from bundling and free samplers to Kindle Fire giveaways. Click through to see who’s doing what.

A year ago, Forrester stated that 2011 would—finally—be the year that Near Field Communications (NFC) began to matter. We predicted that dozens of millions of NFC devices would ship and that the market would start moving away from being niche, although it would still be years away from becoming mainstream.…

Among the Target, Best Buy and Radio Shack ads bundled with my Saturday New York Times this morning is a surprise: an 8-page circular from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) advertising the company’s new free one-day shipping offer. Update: Some readers tell me they have seen Amazon circulars in their Sunday papers…

TinyPass, a startup that aims to streamline the process of charging for content online by using existing platforms like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and PayPal, has signed its first four publishers: DJ Booth, Hedge Tracker, Seattleite and Accent Pro.

Andrew Rhomberg thinks discovering new books online isn’t much fun. It’s great if you already know what you’re looking for, but if you’re hoping for the well-curated serendipity of a bookstore to lead you to something unique and unexpected, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) recommendations often fall flat. It’s because “people who…

Book-readers’ social commerce site aNobii has got the relaunch for which three book publishers invested in it back in March.