“We realize that when it comes to payments, no single wallet will rule them all," says Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer at MasterCard, which today launched its PayPass Wallet Services.

The U.K. bank has just introduced a secure app that lets you transfer out, and receive money, directly onto your smartphone. It's not NFC--but it's close. Is the mobile payments future already here?

The hot news doctrine, created a century ago to prevent telegraphy from spoiling the prospects of East Coast newspapers, is having a resurgence in the digital era. It's just been used to squash publications by financial news aggregator Web sites.

Computer science might still be a boys club, but women like Rebecca Parsons are kicking in the back door. Companies such as Siemens, Barclays, and Cisco Systems rely on global consultancy Thoughtworks to build, fix, and improve their computer networks.