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Yahoo! Inc. ended months of speculation and named Scott Thompson, president of eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, its new Chief Executive.

Thompson, who officially starts on Monday, replaces Tim Morse, Yahoo's chief financial officer, who had been interim chief executive since September. Carol Batz was fired in September after two-and-a-half years on the job after failing to raise revenue or gain ground on Facebook, Google and other rivals.

Mobile payment has become a mainstream tech topic in the last couple of years, mirroring the rise of smartphones and application stores. E-commerce is becoming m-commerce. The focus point of the buzz has been the evolution of near-field communications as related to smartphones. The thing is, nobody in the payments industry expects NFC to be a player in mobile payments for years, if ever. In that case, what does the mobile payments ecosystem look like in the short term?

The current mobile payments market centers around several cores: direct carrier billing, mobile wallets, online and offline sales, mobile credit card readers and application stores. During meetings with various mobile payments experts and executives at CTIA last week, the most uttered phrase was: "This is not something I would use to buy a fridge." Where are mobile payments going?

Online retailers were expecting hoards of shoppers on Black Friday, the biggest shopping holiday of the year. Earlier today PayPal released data that proves the "couch commerce" predictions right. More people were shopping from their smartphones and tablets than ever before. As of 11am PT, PayPal found that mobile payment volume was up 538% from Black Friday 2010.

PayPal is aiming its peer-to-peer Facebook app, SendMoney, not only to Facebook users who want to send money to each other, but to those who want to drop an e-card in, too. According to a recent study from Pew, 64 percent of online adults use social media to stay in touch with family. Grandma can send her Facebook-addicted granddaugther a birthday card along with a nice chunk of change. Dad can pass along a nice "have fun on me" $50 to his college-aged son after the lad finishes a hard week of finals.

PayPal and Facebook want to bring together the world's biggest social network, and the world's largest online payments company - and e-cards may be the bridge to making that happen.

PayPal and eBay really want you to know that it is a player in the mobile payments realm. Especially with the holidays coming up and more consumers than ever expected to make purchases from mobile devices. PayPal believes there is a lot of horizontal movement to be made in the mobile payments space and with the power of eBay behind it, the company thinks it will be the leader in the ecosystem for years to come.

PayPal and eBay have come out with new infographics today to show just how well the companies are doing in the mobile realm. It is really kind of ostentatious actually. PayPal specifically realizes that it has lost a lot of the consumer mindshare in mobile payments with everybody talking about how NFC may or may not change how payments fundamentally work. Check out the stats and infographics below.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A project or person decides to ask for donations or in some other way to raise money via PayPal. A few days go by, things look great and then – suddenly – PayPal freezes the account. Sound familiar? It's happened once again with the Diaspora Project.

Mobile payments has become a mainstream tech topic in the last couple of years, mirroring the rise of smartphones and application stores. E-commerce is becoming m-commerce. The focus point of the buzz has been the evolution of near-field communications as related to smartphones. The thing is, nobody in the payments industry expects NFC to be a player in mobile payments for years, if ever. In that case, what does the mobile payments ecosystem look like in the short term?

The current mobile payments market centers around several cores: direct carrier billing, mobile wallets, online and offline sales, mobile credit card readers and application stores. During meetings with various mobile payments experts and executives at CTIA last week, the most uttered phrase was: "This is not something I would use to buy a fridge." Where are mobile payments going?

Payments company PayPal wants to make sure that it stays in the conversation when it comes to mobile payments. In the last couple of weeks we have heard from innovations coming out of MasterCard and Intuit. PayPal is one of the leaders in mobile payments, especially on the peer-to-peer front. With the holiday season coming, PayPal wants to position itself as the go-to resource for shoppers looking to beat the retail rush and congestion of digital deals.

PayPal is predicting that mobile payments is going to boom come time for the holiday shopping spree. In a survey conducted by PayPal and research firm Ipsos, half of mobile payments users plan on making a purchase with their device when the holiday shopping season starts after Thanksgiving. Check out the infographic below for more details.

Our original WikiLeaks timeline, including every story we had written about the organization, spanned a period of almost three years, from February 18, 2008 to December 29, 2010. It listed almost 70 posts.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

Alleged members of Anonymous arrested. In December of last year, three Dutch teenagers were arrested; in January of this year, British police arrested five alleged members of the hacking collective; another British teen was arrested in June; and now, in the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested 16 people across the country and served 35 search warrants in the course of a series of raids. Those arrests were followed up by that of "Topiary," an alleged Anonymous spokesperson with connection to LulzSec, at his home in Scotland's Shetland Islands.

Those arrested have been charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.