The London Olympics now has an official mobile payment app — payWave — courtesy of Samsung and Visa, which will allow owners of NFC-equipped smartphones to purchase tickets, merchandise and products at the Games.

The two companies are taking to Mobile World Congress (MWC) to debut the new mobile application, showcasing how mobile contactless payments operate and are likely to change how consumers pay for goods and services using their mobile device.

Visa’s payWave technology underpins collaboration, requiring customers to hold their NFC-enabled phone in front of one of its contactless readers (which are currently being outfitted across London in time for the Olympics) to purchase an item.

The app, which is likely to be embedded by default in devices like the Galaxy Nexus but also possibly a new line of NFC-enabled smartphones that could be launched at Mobile World Congress or shortly after, depending on the Korean smartphone giant’s plans for its upcoming flagship smartphone.

The app will not require interaction for payments under £15, anything above that will require a passcode. Users will also be able to check a list of their recent transactions and view their balance in real-time.

Visa has already accredited the Samsung Galaxy S II to utilise its payWave technology, so it may become available soon to customers owning that particular handset.

The financial giant has also accredited LG’s Optimus NET NFC, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Bold 9790, BlackBerry Curve 9360 and BlackBerry Curve 9380, adding it to the list of Visa compliant payments products that can be used by financial institutions to transmit payments.

We can expect more information to become available at MWC, where perhaps the two companies will detail their plans to roll out the application to existing Samsung devices and alert us to new smartphones that may be available to buy in time for the Olympic Games, commencing on July 27.

On the same day BBC Worldwide announced that its global iPlayer app was booming in Australia, the BBC’s commercial arm has revealed that its News app has launched internationally for larger screen Android Tablets.

Last month we reported that the tablet-focused app had been launched in the UK, with the international version touted to follow suit shortly after.

The Android News app launched in May last year and has been downloaded more than three million times since. It has always been available on all Android phones and tablets running software versions 1.6 and above, but it didn’t support those with Android 3.0.

This latest incarnation of the app gives an optimised experience for larger tablets – devices running Honeycomb and above. Smaller 7.1-inch tablets will still receive the non-optimized smartphone app.

On the same day Rupert Murdoch essentially kick-started a Sunday newspaper price war by announcing the all-new Sunday Sun would hit shelves for £0.50 (USD$0.79) – whilst simultaneously dropping the Saturday edition from £0.60 to the same price – it was announced the digital editions of his other News International titles, The Times and Sunday Times, will double in price to £4 ($6.28) a week beginning in March.

The Times’ UK paywall was erected back in June 2010, with readers initially having the choice of paying £1 ($1.57) per day for access to the site, or paying a promotional rate of £1 for 30 days’ access. Users who took this promotional rate were then bumped onto a £2 ($3.14) per week subscription once the trial period was over.

But, in a move to drive up subscriptions before this imminent price-hike, if you sign-up before March 1, you will remain on £2 a week until 2013, giving you unlimited access to the times.co.uk, thesundaytimes.co.uk, and the iPad and Android apps, not to mention access to The Times archive dating back more than two centuries. So the updated price-plan is just for new subscribers for the time-being.

As the Guardian notes, The Times has 119,255 subscribers to its digital service, whilst 114,000 access the Sunday Times. Despite rumours that Murdoch’s daily tabloid The Sun may fall behind a paywall too, last year the title denied it was planning on charging readers to access its content digitally. Back in October, The UK’s Independent newspaper moved behind a paywall for international readers, following a trend that has seen a number of publishers seek to drive revenues due to declining newspaper sales.

It’s an interesting move for sure – News International is basically undercutting its rivals by launching a new Sunday title for more than half the price of the competition. For context, rival newspapers the Sunday Mirror and People cost £1, while the Sunday Express and the Mail on Sunday cost £1.50.

Whilst it’s clear News International is serious about winning its share of the Sunday newspaper market, which it lost when Murdoch killed his flagship News of the World paper last July following serious phone-hacking allegations, it’s looking to claw back at least some of the money through hiking the prices of its other national titles.

Two months after BBC Worldwide launched its global iPlayer app to 11 Western European countries in July, the app arrived in Australia, followed swiftly by Canada and then Scandinavia.

The global BBC iPlayer app is a Video-on-Demand (VoD) pilot (paid) subscription service that differs from the UK version of iPlayer, in that it gives international users access to an extensive archive of classic and contemporary British TV programmes. Whilst it was initially restricted to iPads, it was finally rolled out to the iPhone and iPod Touch too.

For comparison, the UK version of iPlayer is free (well, if you don’t count the licence fee…), and it’s more geared towards catch-up TV, with a short window to watch programmes following their initial broadcast.

Whilst the global iPlayer service is now available in 16 international territories, it seems it’s doing particularly well ‘Down Under’, with Aussies taking to the service in their droves. Matthew Littleford, General Manager for the global BBC iPlayer, presented at the tenth annual Australian Broadcasting Summit earlier today

iPlayer in Australia

Australia is now the biggest market for global iPlayer, and is giving BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, significant consumer insight as the company begins to look beyond the current pilot phase.

Access to BBC iPlayer content in Australia costs AU$9.49 a month, or AU$89.99 a year, and an equivalent figure in Euros and Canadian dollars.

In terms of subscription numbers, Australia’s global BBC iPlayer is now larger than the second and third countries combined (Germany and Holland), and it accounts for 20% of its global revenue.

Moreover, Littleford revealed that twenty three percent of global BBC iPlayer’s subscribers and 19% of the title downloads are in Australia. While the app itself is free to download, he revealed that of all the major territories, conversions to a paid service were higher in Australia than anywhere else, across all devices.

Littleford added that Australia was in line with other territories in terms of the way the global iPlayer was consumed.  Thirteen per cent of Australian users access the app on multiple devices and 7% of subscribers don’t have an iPad, implying that they are watching content solely on iPhone and iPod touch. Also in line with other markets, the average Australian subscriber watches just over four shows a week.

However there are some differences in how Australians are consuming iPlayer content. Littleford noted that there was more demand for content to be viewed ‘out of home,’ with Australians particularly keen on the download-to-view offline feature. This likely means that Aussies are accessing content to view whilst traveling, or perhaps commuting to work. Over a fifth of the content is being accessed in this way, compared to an average of 16% in other countries.

In Australia the most popular genres are Science Fiction, Family and Kids, and Comedy, with Doctor Who, Charlie and Lola and cult comedy Gavin and Stacey particularly popular.

“This graphically demonstrates the fact that VoD gives us a unique consumer insight,” said Littleford. “It clearly shows how a VoD service can quickly optimize itself to different territories by simply listening to its viewers.  Editorial decisions are already being made on a whole range of completely measurable new insight gained directly from existing viewer interaction and localised for each territory.”

The service’s success in Australia perhaps makes sense, not only because English is the native language, but also because of the high number of Brits living Down Under, thought to be in the region of 1.3million. It’s also a popular destination for gap-year students, with working-holiday schemes in place to make it easier for UK travelers to live and work there for up to a year.

Have you ever bought tickets on a fan-to-fan reselling website? Well, maybe you should cross ‘fan-to-fan’; if the UK’s Channel 4 is to be believed, many of these sellers are not who they think they are.

This is what British viewers will discover watching in the next episode of the investigative documentary ‘Dispatches’ this Thursday. Yet, ‘The Great Ticket Scandal’ went within hair’s breadth of not airing, as the website viagogo made an injunction attempt.

As Channel 4′s Dispatches announced, the application was dismissed on all counts at the High Court today. This means the program will be broadcast as planned, but leaves us with a question: why is viagogo so worried about the show?

Well, it seems the program contains juicy accusations that are likely to generate a large amount of bad press for the website. Here’s  an excerpt from Dispatches’ release:

“viagogo say they are websites where “real fans” can resell tickets they can no longer use.

However, ‘The Great Ticket Scandal: Dispatches’ which airs Thu 23 Feb at 9pm on Channel 4 reveals that:

• “The majority of tickets offered for sale through viagogo are not from individual fans but from large scale professional ticket resellers or tickets allocated by promoters to viagogo.
• viagogo staff compete directly with real fans to buy tickets from primary ticket sellers, like Ticketmaster, for in demand events as soon as they go on sale. To get around systems put in place to prevent bulk buying of tickets, viagogo staff use multiple credit cards registered to different addresses.
• viagogo has a special team dealing with large scale professional ticket resellers – known as “power sellers”, or “brokers” who account for a significant percentage of overall ticket sales on their exchange.
• Large-scale ticket reselling has spread beyond the traditional rock and pop gigs. Dispatches found tickets offered for resale way above face value on ‘fan to fan’ exchanges for England’s 6 Nations rugby games; Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor live tours; West End shows; National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci exhibition; and even The Last Night of the Proms.
• Secondary websites like viagogo have obligations to be honest to the public under consumer legislation and a leading expert says that some viagogo practices contravene legislation.”

In other words, Dispatches claims disintermediation isn’t quite working, as most of the tickets are sold by professional resellers. Even more appallingly, viagogo staff themselves are accused of taking part in these distortions.

While buyers think they are getting fair and transparent access to second-hand tickets, this could be very far from reality. This could also explain the claim that many shows go on sale at high prices on ticket reselling websites minutes after they have sold out.

In this context, viagogo could appear as the bad guy when trying to silence a show instead of engaging in a public debate and making constructive answers.

However, viagogo’s discontent may also have to do with Dispatches’ methods; as a matter of fact, its injunction application was brought on the grounds of ‘breach of confidence’.

In a preemptive letter to its customers, the CEO of the ticket reselling platform Seatwave, Joe Cohen, also criticized undercover filming as unjustified in the development of this program. However, Seatwave decided to take the high road and not openly criticize the documentary’s content before it airs.

Do you think there such a thing as a ‘great ticket scandal’? Let us know in the comments.

Startup incubators are all the rage these days, but few can hold a candle to Europe’s Seedcamp, an early-stage micro seed investment program that we’ve written about quite a few times at The Next Web.

Seedcamp first popped up on my radar last July, when it announced 4 winning teams from its Mini Seedcamp New York trip. This year, 20 entrepreneurs from Seedcamp, led by Reshma Sohoni, Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Kirsten Campbell and Philipp Moehring are embarking on their 4th annual U.S. tour, which begins in New York City and culminates in Austin at SXSW.

“There’s really no better time of the year for a startup tour of North America,” Philipp Moehring, Seedcamp’s Associate told me yesterday at a Seedcamp mentoring event at Google’s Chelsea Market offices.

This year, Seedcamp is touring with a record number of 19 teams with plans to meet investors (including Andreesen Horowitz, AOL Ventures, Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners), connect with partners (including Google, eBay/PayPal), discover local ecosystems, meet “the big boys” from companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Tumblr and Etsy and and generally just have a good time.

“We have learned in the past years that the connections to the US do not simply come from emailing and Skype calls, but much more so from spending time in the right places with the right people. Some of the earlier Seedcamp alumni like ERPLY, Zemanta, Rentmineonline, Vox.io, and Farmeron have already shown what the jump to the US makes possible,” writes Seedcamp’s Reshma Sohoni.

A number of noteworthy teams took the stage to provide the room with quick snapshots of their startups. The Spanish startup 24 Symbols was the first to present its one-click, cloud based reading service. “Please switch off your TV and read with us,” they said.

AppExtras was up next with its cross-promotion marketplace for mobile app publishers. The startup that aids in app discovery is already driving 10% of Merriam Webster’s paid app downloads. Next, two entrepreneurs from Paris, France spoke about their startup Archivme, which is “Tripit for invoices”, and how they plan to tackle the invoice billing system from a very different angle than what’s been seen before.

One Austrian based startup, Blossom.io was very impressive in describing its lean product development tool. But by far, the one startup that captured my attention was Teleportd, billed as the “Getty for the Instagram generation”, Teleportd is a platform for realtime social photo licensing. Founder Gabriel Hubert (pictured right) hails from Paris, France.

The Brussels-based startup CheckThis showed us its platform to make posters in the cloud (think flyers + Tumblr + a dash of OnePager) and shouted out to one of its advisors, our very own Robin Wauters.

A heap of London startups presented including fintech startup Bilbus, amateur sports startup Bluefields, sales analytics startup Mopapp, Twitter management tool SocialBro, money conversion app TransferWise and the “Airbnb for skills”, Milk.ly.

And finally the social media management suite Campalyst presented, along with Canadian based Compilr, Helnsinki’s Holvi (which essentially built itself into a bank in 10 months), Boston’s Zingl, Estonia’s Pult and Qminder and the cleverly named geo-location gaming platform Oust.me.

Next up on the tour is Boston, followed by San Francisco and the Bay Area, Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles, followed by Austin at SXSW until March 13th. Keep up with all of Seedcamp’s news on their new beautiful Tumblr page and on Twitter.

upthebanner via shutterstock

It could be a bit idealistic to call a self-publishing platform whose success is primarily based on Justin Bieber fan-fiction ‘the next sanctuary for the hopes and dreams of teenagers’. But the young people using a new platform called Movellas write about divorce, heartache, homosexuality, discrimination, pressure and angst. While some of them involve ‘Justin Bieber to the rescue’ themes, serious issues are at the core.

The publishing industry is quickly picking up on this sparking sensation that holds a pool of new talent. The young writers themselves don’t seem to even think about being spotted by a talent scout – they’re happy to be part of a community that reads, understands and responds to their thoughts and fears.

The concept of Movellas is based on ‘Keitai Shousetsu‘ – literature distributed through texting. This concept spread like a phenomenon in Japan. Movellas founder Per Larsen brought it to Denmark first before reaching out to the rest of the world. Instead of texting, the writers on Movellas publish their novels, poems or diaries online, one chapter at a time. Readers can subscribe to individual movellas or writers and receive the next chapter via email or have it sent to their phones through the Movellas app.

The platform has grown quite significantly since it kicked off last year. By now it counts about 5,500 movellas and 39,000 chapters published, from vampire novels (more bad-ass than Twilight) to love poems.

The individual movellas have started to reach out in all sorts of directions, many of them not even intended. Schools in Denmark, where the startup was founded, picked up on its effect among youngsters and began integrating it into their writing classes.

“Some [teachers] use it to teach English, as an opportunity to use tech in the classroom and to teach about social networks, how to behave online and just as a platform to collaborate,” founder Per Larsen told The Next Web.

Per (pictured right) said the team never expected their idea to be used to this extent. They are preparing for the demand and hope that schools in the UK will soon join the teaching-through-writing movement.

We now have to develop some new features which will give the teachers more control. Most teachers want to be able to go about the teaching in a more closed way.

The big question is of course how do the pupils feel about that? As Per told me, writing in Denmark isn’t exactly the equivalent to winning that school football game and having the most friends on Facebook. But looking at the conversations between writers and readers on Movellas you see they are full of encouragement, empathy and solidarity, even admiration for another’s talent.

More than being encouraged to share what’s on their mind, the young users of Movellas often show real talent. The publishing industry is picking up on that, well aware how the Japanese phenomenon led to best-selling teenage authors.

What’s more significant though is how appropriate the movella style is for literature in the digital age. More than ever, we want what we consume to be fast, instant, as new and as little time-consuming as possible. Instead of a 500-page novel, Movellas sends us pieces of the story in nice little bites fresh from the writer’s pen (well, keyboard). Also, the writer is right there online waiting to hear our feedback.

Per explains that Movellas is trying to democratize publishing, but whether the model itself will generate any significant revenue we are yet to find out. While most users so far are aged between 13 and 20, Movellas was created for all ages. If Movellas and models like it wake the interest of older and possibly more established writers, it could do more than just encourage teenagers to explore their hidden talents. We might just see the rise of a modern style of publishing.

Photo courtesy lenifuzhead via flickr

Britain isn’t known for handling poor weather well; an inch of snow can be enough to grind the transport network to a halt. Now a project run by business and technology community Cambridge Wireless aims to explore how the Internet of Things could help the UK cope with severe weather conditions.

The organisation wants to discover how data collected from a wide range of Internet-connected objects, such as buildings, vehicles, clothing and portable devices could be used to help the country adapt dynamically to fast-changing scenarios such as heavy snowfall or a hurricane.

The project will look at how information from sources such as traffic cameras, smart meters, and even medical records could be used to generate a constantly updating report of the state of the weather and the country’s response to it.

Of course, some types of data can be valuable or sensitive, so Cambridge Wireless, which has been awarded an initial £50,000 ($78,500 USD) in funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board’s Internet of Things Convergence initiative for the scheme, is to investigate the possibility of an ‘information broker’ system. This would create a system whereby data could be passed between companies that request it via a secure data interchange market.

The Internet of Things has a wide range of potential benefits, from those that can benefit the public at large, to more commercial applications such as Evrythng, the startup we covered earlier this week, which aims to offer a platform for any physical object to have an online presence.

UK regulators haven’t even announced the auction date for Britain’s 4G network coverage, and already it is costing operators hundreds of millions of pounds to ensure the new wireless networks don’t interfere with television signals, reports The Telegraph.

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said that a fund has already been set up to collect money from mobile operators, which will go towards helping customers switch from satellite to digital television, fit a filter or in a worst case scenario, provide up to £10,000 per household to find a solution.

In January, Ofcom, the UK regulatory body for the broadcasting and telecommunications industries, announced proposals that extend 4G coverage to at least 98% of the UK population, with revised plans to promote competition.

All of this will go towards an auction for the spectrum later this year, with new network services launching in 2013.

The Beatles’ music eventually arrived on iTunes back in 2010, but from today fans of the Liverpool band can, for the first time, buy ringtones for 27 of the Beatles number one hits, available exclusively on iTunes.

As one of the biggest-selling bands of all time, The Beatles was one of the greatest omissions from Apple’s music repository until they eventually struck a deal to include its catalogue a little over a year ago. Within a couple of months, they had shipped over five million songs and one million albums through the service.

This Christmas past, Apple sought to promote The Beatles by creating a ‘Covers’ iTunes advert and made the Yellow Submarine iBook free to download.

The Beatles ringtones have, of course, been available unofficially as mp3 downloads for years. The 27 official ringtones are based on the chart-topping hits as they appeared on The Beatles’ 1 album, which made its debut in digital format back in September. So what Fab Four ringtones can you now have on your ‘phone? Well…

1. “Love Me Do”
2. “From Me To You”
3. “She Loves You”
4. “I Want To Hold Your Hand”
5. “Can’t Buy Me Love”
6. “A Hard Day’s Night”
7. “I Feel Fine”
8. “Eight Days a Week”
9. “Ticket to Ride”
10. “Help!”
11. “Yesterday”
12. “Day Tripper”
13. “We Can Work It Out”
14. “Paperback Writer”
15. “Yellow Submarine”
16. “Eleanor Rigby”
17. “Penny Lane”
18. “All You Need Is Love”
19. “Hello, Goodbye”
20. “Lady Madonna”
21. “Hey Jude”
22. “Get Back”
23. “The Ballad of John and Yoko”
24. “Something”
25. “Come Together”
26. “Let It Be”
27. “The Long and Winding Road”