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Beginning this week, New Yorkers won't have to pull out cash or credit to pay for their bus, subway, train or taxi fares. Instead, they'll be able to pay using their iPhones as part of a pilot program for Visa's payWave program, which allows users to make contactless payments.

The system makes it as easy as waving your payWave-enabled phone in front of a sensor, which then securely completes the transaction.

As news breaks this morning about the Intuit/Mophie partnership that aims to bring a complete credit card solution to the iPhone, the focus has been how this new product - an attachment that snaps onto the bottom of the phone - competes directly with the startup Square, co-founded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey.

Like Square, the new solution allows you to physically swipe credit cards while processing the transaction over an Internet-connected iPhone. But isn't toting around a physical plastic card soon going to be a thing of the past? Maybe, as makers of other new mobile payment solutions, including "contactless" technology and money-transfer apps, would have you believe. Then again, maybe not.

In a press release this morning, MasterCard has announced that desktop and mobile developers will have access to an API from the credit card giant later this year. The company hopes that by opening its technology to developers, new and innovative e-commerce applications that leverage the MasterCard network will be created, potentially competing with the likes of Visa, PayPal and Square.

Want to pay for purchases by waving your iPhone in front of a payment terminal at checkout? That will soon be a reality thanks to a new partnership between Visa Inc. and DeviceFidelity, which has teamed up to launch a mobile payment technology for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS devices.

The news comes by way of a leaked press release that temporarily appeared on MarketWatch, but has since been taken down. Several versions remain on the Web, however, thanks to Google's cache.

Back in September, Visa announced that their Visa Mobile Application would become the first financial application for Google Android-powered handsets. The application, launched only days ago, lets users receive notifications on their mobile phone about their account activity, receive offers from merchants, and use GPS to map out where those mobile offers can be redeemed or to find ATMs that accept Visa.