Posts Tagged ‘Visa’

Foursqare and American Express aren’t the only companies to team up to promote holiday buying. Shopkick and Visa are also in the retail rewards game.
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Global payment giant Visa consolidates its position in mobile payment market with the acquisition of South African firm Fundamo for a staggering $110 million. Visa has also reiterated an agreement with Monitise, to help existing Visa accounts on mobile devices and offer Visa account holders a new way to make payments.  According to Visa, the deals will accelerate the company’s recently-announced strategy to “provide the next generation of payment solutions”. With Fundamo and partnership with Monitise, Visa is envisioned to deliver mobile financial services and payment capabilities to the users across the globe.

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Sage Payment Solutions, the payments division for Sage North America, has launched Sage Mobile Payments service that allows small businesses to expand their payment options by credit and debit cards on mobile devices. Sage’s solution is usable across 400 different mobile phones and wireless computing devices and across all major carriers in the US.

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Visa Europe, is planning to launch an iPhone based contactless mobile payment service for its customers across Europe and has partnered with Wireless Dynamics to develop the system.

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In light of the number of attacks that WikiLeaks has undergone in the past week an organization known as Anonymous has begun Operation: Payback to bring retribution down on the companies that would, in their words, censor WikiLeaks’ information.

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While major online financing services such as PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa have shut down their dealings with the embattled WikiLeaks, one microfinancing startup is still hanging on. Flattr, a micropayment startup created by Peter Sunde, co-founder of the infamous BitTorrent sharing site The Pirate Bay, still accepts donations on behalf of the document-leaking non-profit.

WikiLeaks, which has come under intense international pressure after publishing leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, has seen its most of its major funding sources dry up (the big ones are U.S.-based). PayPal, owned by online auction giant eBay, restricted WikiLeaks’ account on Saturday, saying the organization violated its policy on facilitating illegal activity. MasterCard began denying donations to WikiLeaks on Monday, followed by Visa a day later.

PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss postal system also shut down a bank account owned by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was using it to collect donations. Assange was arrested in London on unrelated criminal allegations Tuesday.

Sunde has been a public advocate for Assange and WikiLeaks. He has also proposed a peer-to-peer DNS system that would prevent domain name registrations from being revoked, as was done with the WikiLeaks.org domain.

His company Flattr, based in Sweden, allows users to vote on content they like, much like Digg or Condé Nast’s Reddit, except each vote is actually a micro amount of cash. Users pay a monthly donation to Flattr (minimum €2). At the end of the month, that fee is split between all the content providers that user has Flattr’d.

Sunde started Flattr in March along with Linus Olsson. WikiLeaks, which has experienced funding problems in 2009, was among its first financing partners, although any company can now sign up to accept Flattr payments. At the time, he told TechCrunch that Flattr was “prepared for the controversy.”