Tech Services

Sometime this fall, your favorite Starbucks will be accepting mobile payments using the popular Square system for customer transactions. Square uses a free credit card reader for smartphones and allows anyone to accept credit cards anywhere using iPhone and Android apps. The coffee shop powerhouse will use Square's "Pay with Square" app for transactions. Customers also will need to download and set up an account on their smartphone. Starbucks hopes to give their customers a seamless payment experience at 7,000 stores in the U.S. Square is only available in the U.S. at this time, where "more than two million individual and businesses" use the service. Contact us: earnesthart@live.com | Follow on Twitter @ehart

I predict that very soon, we'll all be using our smartphones to pay for merchandise at various retailers. It'll become as common pulling out cash or a credit card. The folks behind Google Wallet have been steadily marching toward this goal and recently released a "cloud-based version of the Google Wallet app" that'll have more support for credit and debit cards. The card vendors include MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express. According to Google, this new version also includes includes a feature to remotely disable your mobile wallet app. This should help to ease some of the security concerns in the first version of Google Wallet. To further address security concerns and streamline how banks implement the technology, Google has revamped how account data for credit cards is stored in the Google Wallet app. Instead of the storing the data on your phone, Google now uses their secure servers, which also allows banks to add their cards in a few weeks. Goo...

As the mobile payments technology continues to emerge, several of the key players are banking on NFC , or Near Field Communication, to entice consumers to pay for merchandise and services with their smartphones. Google has their Google Wallet, Mastercard has their PayPass Wallet and Visa is pushing their V.me digital wallet service. But PayPal , who has been around over 10 years in the online payments arena, is now turning their attention to offline retailers and small business. According to PayPal executives, this market is 17 times larger than the online sector. They launched "PayPal Here" in March as a mobile payment solution that allows small business to accept almost any form of payment by using a free app and a small credit card reader for the iPhone and Android devices. PayPal, who now list 110 million users, recently announced on their blog that they have joined forces with VeriFone and Equinox, the number one and number three point-of-sale terminal manufact...

As the International CTIA Wireless show was winding down, I left New Orleans with a feeling that I experienced the future of technology. It was happening all over the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and let me tell you, that is one big place. I didn't take long to run into bumper-to-bumper traffic as I tried to make my way home and I had plenty of time to think about all the cool gadgets and software applications as I snaked along the interstate past the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. This was an international show and the guys from Japan, China, Germany, South America and other locations certainly had good technology to show off. I think their 20-hour-plus flights were worth the time and effort to share their innovative ideas with us. I didn't know much about them before, but I am now a fan of international tech companies like NTT Docomo and Huawei . I have an avatar coming via email, which was created by a couple of sharp guys with Docomo, whose 3D modeling applica...