ReadWriteWeb

Imagine making credit card-based payment with your smartphone. Visions of dongles are go dancing through your head. This is a function of conditioning that companies like Square and Intuit have taught users to expect. But, what if you could make a payment just by scanning the card with your smartphone's camera? Ditch the dongle. That is the goal of payments startup card.io.

card.io is releasing a software-based payment app today for Android and iOS. In and of itself, that is only mildly interesting. There are dozens of startups and enterprises looking to evolve the mobile payments space. card.io is thinking bigger. It is giving mobile developers a new software developer kit to institute its payments platform into any application.

Most consumers probably do not know about a company called mBlox, but there is a good chance that it has served them at least once in their life. MBlox is a text aggregation company that handles a lion's share of text messages worldwide, having touched on nearly 95% of users cellphones across the globe at one point or another. MBlox is also helping to shape the nature of mobile payments in the digital and physical realms.

The story of how mBlox envisions mobile payments is best told through the app for Premier League soccer star Rio Ferdinand. The center back for the Manchester United is at the tail end of his career but his earning power has perhaps never been higher.

This is the second installation in ReadWriteWeb's series on mobile payments. See the first segment, How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In The Next Several Years.

This afternoon at Web 2.0, host John Battelle sat down with John Partridge from Visa and Dan Schulman at American Express, to talk about the future of payments. "It's a little bit like having Coke and Pepsi up here," Battelle said.

The unlikely duo discussed how the Web has transformed the industry. Value is shifting constantly, and new opportunities are popping up everywhere. Partridge and Shulman showed repeatedly that sometimes, payment companies are better off partnering rather than competing to create the most value. It was fitting that these two leaders from competing payment processors had such an agreeable conversation.

Google and MasterCard have announced the official launch of Google Wallet, their joint effort in mobile payments using near-field communications (NFC).

Google Wallet is rolling out in a limited fashion, but there aren't enough NFC-capable phones out there to really call this a "launch." And that's just the hardware part; customer behavior will have to adjust, too. Industry insiders say the era of NFC payments is still a year or two away.

American Express' new digital payments platform Serve has just announced its second operator partnership here in the U.S. will be with Verizon Wireless. This news follows last month's report that Sprint would also integrate the Serve platform into select Android phones on its network.

According to Verizon, its customers will be able to sign up for Serve accounts on both Verizon phones and tablets, although it did not specify which devices those would be.

This week, Citibank released a new banking application for iPad, designed to give customers access to common banking tasks (balance checks, bill pay, transfers, etc.) as well as financial analysis tools. While we don't (and can't) cover all mobile application launches individually, the new Citibank iPad is an interesting case study that shows how a large organization has thoughtfully developed a platform-specific application instead of simply repackaging its mobile app for the bigger tablet-sized screen.

In addition, the financial tools now available in the Citi iPad app seem to take inspiration from similar online services, like Intuit's money management suite at Mint.com, for example. And, says the company, the iPad app's progress won't stop here. It will be under constant evolution, getting "smarter" over the coming weeks, and may even help users manage offers and rewards in the future.

Payments company Jumio is today launching a new technology called Netswipe that turns any webcam into a credit card reader, both on the desktop and on mobile. The service aims to bridge the convenience of online and mobile shopping with the security inherent in face-to-face transactions. It also makes it incredibly easy to shop — you just hold up your credit card in front of your webcam to complete the transaction.

Today, mobile application development vendor appMobi launched a new 1-Click payment technology called cloudKey which secures users' credit card information for online purchases on their device, not on remote servers. With the wave of recent high-profile hacking attacks on companies like Sony, Citi and AT&T, even non-security minded folks have become aware of the need for improvements to the current system.

Until now, credit card accounts and personal information have been stored in centralized, online databases, making them vulnerable to attacks. With the new cloudKey system, which uses standard encryption technology and a "distributed key" topology, appMobi aims to deliver a more secure solution.

Recognizing what a true pain setting up an eCommerce solution can be for small businesses, a number of startups have launched products that aim to simplify the process. PintPay, Chargify, Recurly and CheddarGetter are a few of the that enable sites to accept payments without having to deal with merchant accounts, complex fees and hiring developers for implementation.

Another option for accepting payments online is WePay, which recently launched a basic online shopping cart tool called. It comes in two flavors: WePay Stores, a fully hosted storefront and Embeddable Stores, which offers the same functionality but allows you to embed it directly into your company's site for a more seamless user experience.

Today at the MobileBeat 2011 conference, payments leader PayPal announced it would support NFC (near field communications) on mobile as a new way to both shop and pay. The company demonstrated its solution in the form of a new NFC-enabled Android widget that lets people send payments just by tapping two phones together.

The widget will arrive later this summer, the company said.