Fast, efficient mobile payments could be a huge boon to business but companies must ensure customer data is safe and provide users with recourse in case of fraudulent or incorrect billing, the Federal Trade Commission said in a report on Friday.

The commission also urged every company in the mobile payment chain to track payments so customers know who to contact if there is an error; to tell customers what data is collected and why; and allow customers to block all third-party charges.

As the world goes increasingly mobile, payment companies are getting into the act.

Max Levchin, co-founder of online payment giant PayPal, launched a rival business on Tuesday called Affirm that will compete in the crowded but fast-growing mobile payments business.

Affirm's technology helps shoppers complete online purchases more quickly and easily when they are using smart phones and other mobile devices, according to the firm's website.

PayPal launched a European version of its PayPal Here mobile payments service for small merchants on Thursday as the online payments division of eBay Inc steps up competition with rivals, including Square Inc.

PayPal (San Jose, USA) unveiled a new device, about the size of a smartphone, that allows small merchants to accept credit and debit cards under a more-stringent and complex system in Europe known as Chip and PIN.

The gadget connects to a new PayPal app that merchants can run on Apple Inc (Cupertino, USA) iPhones and Android-based smartphones.

German payment systems provider Wirecard said on Monday it had been chosen by Vodafone to introduce the British mobile operator's mobile payment system.

The Vodafone (Newbury, UK) payment service will be rolled out internationally from this year, Wirecard (Aschheim, Germany) said in a statement.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz)

The store of the future has arrived and it is threatening to leave technology laggards behind.

The modern store is equipped with cameras that look at you, guess your tastes based on your gender, age and behavior, and send deals to your smart phone accordingly.

It also has the technology to reduce endless check-out lines and speed up the process for picking up something ordered online.

Norwegian telecoms incumbent Telenor is to start offering mobile phone-based insurance products to its customers in Asia in partnership with UK-based MicroEnsure Holdings.

Set up in 2008 as a subsidiary of Opportunity International, a non-profit microfinance organization, MicroEnsure (Cheltenham, UK) already provides insurance services to more than 4 million people in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia.

When Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos got word of a project at Google Inc to scan and digitize product catalogs a decade ago, the seeds of a burgeoning rivalry were planted.

The news was a "wake-up" call to Bezos, an early investor in Google (Mountain View, USA). He saw it as a warning that the Web search engine could encroach upon his online retail empire, according to a former Amazon (Seattle, USA) executive.

Telekom Austria is reaching out to enterprise customers in central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with a new initiative aimed at spurring the adoption of M2M services.

Called ‘Unlock M2M’, the program is intended to facilitate the take-up of M2M technology by making it more accessible and affordable.

Pan-African mobile-phone operator Vodacom has reportedly launched an M2M service in Nigeria aimed at boosting the country’s retail and financial sectors.

The offering appears to be a mobile-payments service, using GSM network connectivity to link retailers’ terminals to central servers and banking systems.

According to press reports, Vodacom (Bloemfontein, South Africa), majority owned by Vodafone (Newbury, UK), is using a secondary GSM network as a backup in case of an outage, but says users will be oblivious to any changeover.

Two years ago, employees from the start-up Square Inc descended on farmers markets in San Francisco to hand out a new type of credit-card reader that let small, independent merchants accept plastic via their smartphones or tablets.

But this month, when Starbucks Inc (Seattle, USA) and Square (San Francisco, USA) announced that 7,000 coffee shops across the country would begin accepting payment through Square's smartphone app, the small white cubes that were Square's original calling card didn't merit a mention.