China :: Science & Technology

MasterCard and mFoundry, a mobile banking specialist, are poised to help banks launch potentially hundreds of NFC-based mobile wallets with a new partnership. The collaboration will allow banks that use mFoundry for their mobile banking apps to add support for contactless NFC MasterCard PayPass payments, turning those mobile banking apps into digital wallet payment tools. MFoundry counts more than 500 banks, credit unions and other financial institutions as customers including two of the biggest banks, Banks of American and PNC. More than seven million users turn to apps and services built by mFoundry. Next year, these customers will be able to make touch-and-go payments at thousands of point-of-sale terminals with their mobile phones right through the app they use regularly to check their bank statements, pay bills and transfer funds. MFoundry said it will update its mobile apps most likely in the first half of 2012 to include NFC support and it will be up to banks to turn on the capa

VANCL , the Chinese online apparel retailer which was supposed to get started its IPO process was said to delay its offering due to investors disagreements on the timing as some of the Beijing-based companys investors thought Vancl should get listed ASAP and the opposition believed holding on the offering till next year after Chinese Lunar New Year to avoid the volatile market for a better valuation would be a better choice. After seven rounds of funding, venture capitals who made it to Vancls investor lists includes IDG, Ceyuan Capital, Leijun, Qiming Venture Partners, Tiger Fund, SAIF and Temasek Holdings. The company was planning to raise as much as US$ 15 million (RMB 1 billion) when news first broke its IPO plan. And Vancls vice-president, Wu Sheng has just left the company and was said to join 360buy. As the market volatilization goes on, public market hasnt shown a welcome sign for Chinese companies and a bunch of companies deciding to put off their IPOs until things getting bet

In China, guanxi (relationships) means everything, especially for climbing your way up the social career ladder. Thats why any service that gives you the extra edge will be super valuable. Back in June, we interviewed Derek Ling, CEO and Founder of one of the leading online professional social networking services in China, Tianji.com . The Chinese based company is owned by the French Viadeo.com . Just yesterday, Viadeo announced that it acquired an Amsterdam based contact management company called Soocial for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will help all of its worldwide members, including Tianji , an easy way to manage, organize, back up and easily and safely share their address books. Above all, the features will allow members to synchronise their contacts across more than 500 platforms and messaging services and devices including PCs and smartphones. Soocial is a start-up founded in 2007 in Holland. It specializes in contact management and universal contact synchronisation. As p

Holidays are a good time to test mobile networks because they invariable require driving on crowded highways to visit the in-laws in the far-flung suburbs. So the long Thanksgiving weekend was the perfect opportunity to run AT&Ts Chicago LTE network and its new smartphones through the paces. I did my tests in outbound and inbound stages. On my way from central Chicago to Arlington Heights, I basically tried to break the HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket with video. While on the way back into town, I ran a barrage of speed tests. In general, I was impressed with overall experience as well as the speeds I clocked, though I did have some concerns about how LTEs inner-city network will perform when its truly loaded. But onto the results! Flawless video Starting at home, I turned off Wi-Fi on both phones and then downloaded the Netflix streaming app on the Samsung. It handled the 6-MB download almost instantaneously, but the real test would be how it actually handled watching a

The Pulitzer board, which administers the journalism awards named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, has changed the terms of submission to require digital entries only , and has also changed the description of the breaking news category to stress that real-time reporting will be the main criteria for that award. That has led some including the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard to speculate that we could see a Pulitzer Prize for live-tweeting of the news . Whether that ever comes to pass or not, there is a case to be made that Twitter is the best tool for breaking news that the world of journalism has seen in a long time. Although the Pulitzer board didnt say why it made the changes to the criteria for the breaking-news award, it may have done so in part because the award went without a winner in 2011 although there were three finalists nominated by the judges, including the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald , none were chosen. Reporting that captures news as quickly as

Spotify launched its app platform Wednesday , making it possible for third-party developers to run apps right within the music service. This move was predicted by some ahead of the companys mystery event, but few had gotten it completely right and many will be left disappointed by the details. Spotifys new app platform may be a smart move for the company, but its underwhelming for end users and doesnt offer potential partners much value. Here are some of the biggest shortcomings: Spotify apps only run within the companys desktop client. Some had speculated that Spotifys new platform would make it possible to bring the services music everywhere and empower third-party developers to finally build commercial offerings based on Spotifys API. However, thats not the case. Spotifys apps are simple HTML5 web apps that can only be launched within the companys desktop client. Thats particularly disappointing after we have seen how much the web can do for Spotify: The companys Facebook integra