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Facebook's first few days on the stock market are in the books: Shares closed Tuesday at $31, down significantly from their $38 issue price.

You may wonder: How does Facebook make money? Sure, 900 million users and billions of photos, but how is this a business? It's pretty simple, actually.

Amazon is notorious for sharing very little information about how its products and business units perform. Its new Kindle Fire tablet is no different.

Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn't disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold.

Instead, Amazon just shared a few statistics designed to make it seem like the Kindle business is doing really well, without actually proving it.

There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple's December quarter earnings report, such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit.

But Apple's most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate: Apple is not only huge, but it is growing at a rate far greater than its peers. And, even more incredible, its growth rate is accelerating.

As a company gets bigger, or as a market matures, its growth rate typically falls. It's only natural: The numbers get bigger, so the percentage of change eventually shrinks. But for Apple, during the Christmas quarter — its busiest time of the year — that hasn't happened yet.

Visa is beginning to make its move in the mobile payments space. While MasterCard has heavily featured its near field communications capabilities and exclusive partnership with the Google Wallet, Visa has been working behind the scenes to set up mobile payments strategy. Visa announced today that its payWave NFC mobile wallet application has been certified for a variety of smartphones giving the payments giant its first real steps into unleashing NFC wallets.

The Visa payWave certification is only coming to a limited of handsets at this point but the bigger news is the certification process itself. Visa is setting itself up to be a ubiquitous mobile payments option. As one of the leading payment processors in the world, this is a major step in the evolution of using smartphones for real world transactions.

This was more or less an inevitable outcome: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon is not going to launch with the Google Wallet. Verizon has said that it is not blocking the application but rather that the company is working with Google to make sure that Google Wallet is up Verizon's technical and security standards. Does that mean we will see the Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus eventually? Perhaps, but the whole scenario is a series of convoluted partnerships and expectations.

This is exactly what we thought would happen to the Google Wallet. As we noted earlier this year, the first partners are losing their exclusivity by the end of the year. It looks more likely now that the exclusivity lasted until the Galaxy Nexus was launched. Either way, there are too many players in the ecosystem and all want a piece of the action.

LevelUp, the mobile payments wing of location-based gaming startup SCVNGR, is launching a mobile Web app today to compliment its Android and iOS apps. LevelUp has been available in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Philadelphia and the Web app should help make it one of the most ubiquitous options for mobile payments available.

This is a smart move for LevelUp because it will free it from the confines of the native platforms. The company uses QR codes instead of NFC or other mobile payments methods to combine merchants and users meaning that any screen that can display black and white and connect to the Internet.

MasterCard is continuing its big push to become known as a technology innovator and today it announced a strategic partnership and investment with mFoundry, a software-as-a-service mobile banking solution serving more than 560 banks and credit unions in the United States. MasterCard's announcement comes on the heels of its partnership with Intel and is yet another step in the confluence of the technology and payments industries.

SCVNGR, by its nature, is a social-based location game. It has partnerships with brands and universities, but, as CEO Seth Priebatsch will admit, it does not inherently lead to sales at the register. Location-based social game mechanics are not inherently transactional. That is where the company's newest product, LevelUp comes into play. Take merchant offers, location, game mechanics and make then transactional and you have an idea what LevelUp is trying to do in the mobile payments space.

SCVNGR takes a lot of heat for not having a direction. Yesterday article on SCVNGR's "path" got some sneers from the Boston startup community because the "path" is apparently that there is no path. LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.

Several years ago, three location check-in based startups stormed the tech world. Since then, Foursquare has taken off to somewhere near 15 million users, Gowalla has essentially died and the third and always the little sister, SCVNGR, has quietly maintained. Now two million with two million users and some strong brand partnerships, SCVNGR is not going to fade away. Will it thrive though? That remains to be seen.

The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone's type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company's new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.

MasterCard, the longtime credit card and payments processor, wants to reposition itself as a technology company. Throughout the latter half of 2011, it has been pushing hard on the technosphere to make sure that journalists and bloggers know the company is doing some cool stuff around payments research and the cutting edge of technology, like NFC, audio signals and QR codes that can lead to purchases through smartphones.

It now comes as no surprise that MasterCard has announced a partnership with Intel on a multi-year strategic partnership that is intended to enhance the security and payment experience for digital commerce. These are two titans in the tech and financial industries and shows one of the first steps of these two industries merging in the future.