V-Key, a security software maker for mobile apps, has raised $12 million from Alibaba Groupaffiliate Ant Financial Services and IPV Capital, a venture capital firm based in China. The Series B round means that Ant Financial now has a minority stake in V-Key, which is based in Redwood City, California. V-Key’s V-OS technology is supposed to provide a user-friendly way to protect data including identity verification and e-commerce transactions. The company, which also has offices in Singapore, says that V-OS is already deployed on “millions” of devices throughout the world.”

Marketing automation company Kahuna is introducing RevIQ to brands and marketers looking to implement a solution that combats mobile shopping cart abandonment by determining the right type of push notification to send to consumers. Coupons.com and Overstock.com are two of the brands that are already leveraging Kahuna’s previous mobile marketing automation solutions to maximize sales and boost use of their mobile applications. 

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is looking to break into the mobile payments space. The company has announced the expansion of its cloud-based payment platform and chip-based payment cards. HP is making a security upgrade for its Atalla software, which is designed to help merchants protect consumer financial information. The HP Network Security Processor has also been upgraded to supper Apple Pay and new Visa payment services, such as PayWave. The mobile commerce space is quite crowded with a wide variety of mobile services. Many of these services have been having security problems, which has made mobile commerce somewhat risky for merchants and consumers alike.

Snapchat is integrating P2P (peer-to-peer) payments into its messaging app. The company has added a “Snapcash” payment option to its app as part of a deal with Square Cash. Now Snapchat users can add a debit card, type a dollar amount in the text-chat interface and hit the pay button to send money to their peers. The new feature is currently available on Android platform and would arrive for iOS users later. Earlier this year, Snapchat had filed for two trademarks related to payments, as was reported by TechCrunch. Specifically, the two trademarks were:

Walmart is attracting tech-savvy consumers this holiday season by giving them an option of using image recognition technology when building their annual photo cards. The average holiday photo card can now feature interactive video when scanned with mobile devices. A constant innovator, Walmart sets itself apart from other retailers that offer holiday photo card capabilities by adding interactivity.

Harvey Norman’s omni-channel strategy has come a long way since it launched an e-commerce website in 2011, says CDO Gary Wheelhouse. “I don’t think anyone would suggest that Harvey Norman was an early adopter of online. In fact, I would say there is a last mover advantage strategy,” he told delegates at MagentoLive in Sydney. “The fact is that we needed a website that connected to our 180 stores.”

Westpac New Zealand has now announced the release of an original type of mobile banking app that allows customers to be able to manage their money through the use of augmented reality. This crowdsourcing occurred through the Westpac Global App Challenge – UK. This augmented reality mobile app brought together a 3D technology with a simple platform that provided a new level of dimension to the user’s ability to manage money. 

Domino’s is allowing customers to easily track orders from the time they are taken to the point of delivery by integrating its Domino’s Tracker application with the Pebble smartwatch. While the Domino’s Tracker was initially introduced seven years ago, this marks the first time that it is available on any smartwatch device. 

Despite reports that consumers still worry about security and privacy when it comes to mobile commerce, it turns out that they aren't letting those fears slow them down. Still, just how fully consumers will embrace mobile device shopping remains to be seen, since projections vary widely. One new study by Juniper Research predicts that "just over two billion mobile phone or tablet users will make some form of mobile commerce transaction by the end of 2017, up from 1.6 billion this year."

Google recently revealed plans to discontinue the Wallet API support for digital goods by March 2nd 2015. Google would continue supporting the sales of apps on Google Play and other in-app payments as well. But these purchases won’t be possible through Google Wallet in 2015. There has been no official announcement regarding this but Google had posted regarding this on Wallet support page. When the particular actually becomes inactive, users would simply get an error if they try to pay via Google Wallet for digital goods. Google currently has no plans of offering a replacement processing solution for digital goods on …