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.

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.

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…

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.…

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.

For years, Google’s pitch for the Nexus class of Android phones has been that they offer the “pure Google” experience, a version of its software uncluttered by interference from carriers and handset makers. But that won’t be the case for the Galaxy Nexus, as Verizon has decided to block Google…

We’ve observed a lot of western companies looking to cash in on the explosive growth of China’s mobile population by taking their products into the country. Now here’s an example of a Chinese giant looking shop its own mobile services abroad: the internet portal Tencent is now distributing its QQ…

Magazine and news publishers who have not yet joined iOS Newsstand have lost out to the system’s early adopters, according to research data.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has decided to fold Google Checkout into its newly launched Google Wallet, in what fits right in with the pare-down-and-focus strategy set by CEO Larry Page in the months since he returned to the leadership chair. Users will need to acknowledge the transfer the next time they…

The combined digital kiosk of eight French newspapers is adopting Google’s OnePass to facilitate all its customer payments beside iOS.

The Financial Times’ digital subscriber base grew by eight percent in the period during which it pulled its iOS app off iTunes Store, as our chart shows…

The Australian, which is owned by News Limited and is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS), is adding a paywall to its website, mobile site and apps starting on Monday. It will also relaunch redesigned versions of the website and mobile site that day.

In a weird way, the lack of enthusiasm around this week’s CTIA Enterprise and Applications show demonstrates just how consumer-driven the mobile industry is at the moment. The technology revolutions of the past were sparked by business demand for computing resources, while this time around businesses are struggling to figure…

If it seems like the mobile world has been talking nonstop about the potential for mobile payments all year, it’s because we have been. There are simply too many corners of the technology and financial worlds that want to see it happen, and even if consumers and retailers are skeptical,…

Students work for their college newspapers for all sorts of reasons—and while college papers are sheltered from the harsh realities facing national and local newspapers in many ways, it’s probably never too early for a crash course in revenue models. Hence the new collaboration between digital subscription company Press+ and…

Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is now turning its IPX mobile payment system to facilitate in-app payments for some mobile app types. That could mean virtual goods, levels, news and other mobile content could be billed for by mobile carriers rather than app stores.

We haven’t heard much lately about the Lodsys case against Apple, Android and RIM developers around the world, who have received letters and in some cases legal threats demanding royalty payments from the Texas-based patent holder over in-app purchasing technology. But the emergence of a new patent application from Apple…

As companies like Square and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) pitch themselves as the future of payment processing, they’ll need to remove as many obstacles as possible for businesses wondering why they should fix something that isn’t broken. Square took a step toward removing one of those barriers Monday, dropping a limit…

The Baltimore Sun is the latest newspaper to add a metered paywall, for both print and non-print subscribers. A digital subscription will cost $2.49 per week or $49.99 for 26 weeks (which works out to $99.84 per year) for non-print subscribers, and $0.75 per week or $29.99 per year for…