Project Inspire asks, “Have you got 5 minutes to change the world?”

Project Inspire: 5 minutes to change the world is a joint initiative by UN Women Singapore and MasterCard to help young changemakers create a better world of opportunities for women and girls in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Read more

Singapore tops Mobile Payments Readiness Index, Philippines second in Southeast Asia

Singapore is the most mobile payment-ready nation in the world, according to the Mobile Payments Readiness Index by MasterCard. Philippines came in second in Southeast Asia, followed by Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

The Index gauges the readiness of 34 countries across the globe in three different categories: Peer-to-peer, mobile commerce, and point-of-sale. An overall score was given for each country, with a score of 60 indicating an inflection point where a country is ready for the mass adoption of mobile payment. Read more

Sony Ericsson jumps onto NFC bandwagon

Joining Internet behemoth Google in the increasingly crowded near-field communication (NFC) hot tub is mobile company Sony Ericsson, who is putting NFC chips into its Android phones, the Times of India revealed (see also uses for NFC).

A while back, we reported that a tech blogger discovered some NFC functionality on the Google+ mobile app. Google has also been actively implementing the technology for its Google Wallet and Google Places services. Read more

Interview with Aung, Founder of 2C2P

2C2P is a Singapore-based company which provides a platform for e-commerce payment processing service with a set of industry standards, real-time fraud monitoring, and business intelligence reports and utilizes latest web 2.0 technologies extensively to process payment faster and enhance user experiences. The company has also won the grand prize for the Nokia Calling All lnnovators competition in the emerging countries and mobile necessities category and have been featured in the recent Nokia One-Connected World. We sat down with Aung, the founder of 2C2P and go through a range of issues from how the idea of 2C2P is conceived to the product and finally his thoughts on entrepreneurs in general. Read more