London's transit agency, Transportation for London, announced the rollout of contactless credit card readers on all of the city's 8,500 buses last month, allowing riders to charge their bus fare directly to their bank accounts. But the bright future credit card companies see in contactless payments could be cut short by the rapidly developing mobile payments market, which tech gurus see as a huge area for future growth.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey challenged his team to create a solution for accepting payments at Starbucks, which the mobile-payments company had partnered with in August. When an engineer worked out a solution (using QR codes within the Square Wallet app that could tap into Starbucks' preexisting system), Dorsey was so giddy that he grabbed a high-end bottle of scotch off his desk and gave it to the engineer as a reward. The only catch? As both would soon learn, the bottle of alcohol was worth a lot more than Dorsey had initially realized--roughly $2,000.

T-Mobile isn't shying away from bold pledges of making NFC a reality this year. The company says it is working with a number of partners to bring a variety of NFC technologies to market

NFC (near field communication) is finding other ways to make itself useful. In fact, paying for items with one's phone seems to be the least common use for the close-range connectivity technology, at least based on gadgets unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show. Rather, essentially all products using NFC shown at the recent confab employed the technology in one of two ways: To set up a sort of digital handshake between a mobile device and another gadget or as a way to share information between products with just a tap.

According to Ofcom, smartphone penetration in the UK now stands at 58% while 19% of the population owns a tablet, so websites have no choice but to adapt to accommodate the ensuing changes in consumer behavior. With this in mind, here are some of the most useful stats and surveys from the past 12 months.

It's safe to expect a dramatic increases in mobile shoppers and buyers this year and well into the future, based on new research. Whether at home or on the go, eMarketer says consumers are relying on their phones to browse and research products before buying.

Over the next five years, in-store mobile payments will far outpace the growth of mCommerce (representing 90% of the total mobile payments market in 2012), says Forrester. By the end of 2017, Forrester forecasts mCommerce to drop from 90% to 50% share, while in-store payments will jump from 4% to 45% share.

A third of mobile users said they planned to use their device more this year than last and mobile users have plans to use their devices for more online shopping in 2013 and 23% want to up their use of mobile payments.

Last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight sees large growth since its 2001 launch. The company said today that it has reached four million downloads over the past two years, and is now expanding the service further into Europe.

Mobile payments service provider Bango will develop a direct-to-bill mobile payment platform with Telefnica. The global framework deal will see Bango's platform combined with Telefnica's BlueVia payment APIs following successful trials of direct-to-bill in the Spanish operator's businesses.