John Adams

Mobile commerce and digital payments are producing a staggering amount of information about consumers. Making the best use of this data is a challenge that some companies are trying overcome with technology and analytics.

Instawallet, a Bitcoin wallet service, has "suspended indefinitely" because of fraudulent access, according to a notice on the company’s website today. It is the latest in a series of attacks and glitches to afflict businesses that work with the digital currency.

MokiMobility, which offers outsourced tablet management, monitoring and security services, is partnering with iPad point of sale service provider Revel Systems to sell technology that meets new Payment Card Industry data security guidance for mobile transactions.

Online bill payment provider Allied Payment Network has hired Gary Daniel as an executive vice president and board member.

TV chef Jamie Oliver is the latest celebrity to lend his name to a payments product, tying his image to charity fundraising through Prizeo.

Xoom is extending its new Pay Only When Received remittance procedure, or POWR, to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Balanced, a startup that allows developers and entrepreneurs to build payments technology, has raised an additional $3.4 million round of seed capital.

Small-business payment company WePay has named Susan Dunn as general counsel and Susan Oda as vice president of finance.

Starbucks has hit some snags in its attempt to maintain momentum for its mobile card app and its deepening partnership with Square, but for the coffee giant, such issues are an expected part of its aggressive expansion plan.

Virtual Piggy has hired former PayPal executive Iain Herd to be its new global mobile product director.

American Express and Dwolla suffered website outages, which the companies attributed to distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Such attacks are designed to knock out a website by flooding it with more traffic than it is designed to handle.

EBay and its payments subsidiary PayPal are aggressively mining consumers' spending data, which they say is vital as shopping expands across mobile, online and physical shopping channels.

Barclaycard US, a unit of Barclays PLC, has multiple projects developing in mobile payments. In addition to its Barclays-branded bPay mobile wallet, Barclaycard is involved in some capacity in the Google Wallet and Isis initiatives. Each of these programs takes a different approach to mobile payments.

Global Payments and edo have started a pilot program to integrate edo's card-linked offer product with Global Payments’ marketing services.

The United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) has accredited Payleven, a mobile payments acceptance company, as a payments institution. Payleven is also now part of MasterCard’s mPOS program.

NCR is launching NCR Aloha Mobile, which allows restaurants to deploy tableside mobile systems for handling meal orders and payments.

Plastiq's service asks consumers to pick up the cost of card acceptance. It presents a service fee that is added to the transaction amount, much like sales tax is typically added at the point of sale.

For the two-year-old LevelUp, the national expansion of a pilot the mobile-payment provider ran with the 16-year-old processor Heartland Payment Systems is nothing short of a godsend.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Media unit is partnering with mobile payment provider Fortumo to allow app developers to sell digital content in the Nook Store, which provides digital content for Nook tablets.

When remittance company Xoom decided to not withdraw money from its customers' bank accounts until the funds reach the recipient, it was betting the added goodwill from users would outweigh the added risk of fraud.