Registration is about to close for a special two-day focus workshop titled "eB2B Payments at the Tipping Point" being held in the San Francisco Bay Area next week on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 4-5. This special workshop is being taught by Glenbrook's Carol Coye Benson in partnership with Erin McCune of Forte Financial. The workshop is approved for up to 17 CTP/CCM recertification credits by the Association for Financial Professionals. Please register ASAP if you'd like to attend this new workshop.

Availity, an e-health information exchange, and TRANSFIRST have announced the general availability of the Availity CareCollect solution for all physicians and health care providers nationwide. According to the two companies, the CareCollect solution is being offered through a partnership with TRANSFIRST, and will provide Availity customers fully integrated payment processing capabilities.

Yodlee has announced that its proprietary DirectPay card payment network now supports over 300 national and regional billers, enabling new revenue generating credit and debit card based electronic bill payments. Yodless says that "the 300 DirectPay billers represent over 40 percent of major U.S. billers by volume and give most consumers the opportunity to pay nearly half of their bills by card each month."

Wondering whether the cell phone is about to replace the wallet? Will the disappearance of international border constraints from the payments landscape open as many doors to potential risk as it does to business growth opportunities?Financial institutions and businesses can choose from more than 130 sessions addressing these and other key industry issues at NACHA’s annual conference, PAYMENTS 08, May 18–21 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

The Airline Payment Summit is being held in Toronto, Ontario on April 9-10, 2008. "As airline yields come under downward pressure, Airline Payment Summit (APS) will examine leading-edge low-cost payment solutions within the landscape of traditional forms of payments such as credit cards."

In an article titled 'Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business', Chris Anderson writes for Wired Magazine about how more and more things are trending toward free. Here's his view about why micropayments failed: 'The huge psychological gap between 'almost zero' and 'zero' is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.'

In an article titled 'Visa IPO success hinges on share price', Sam Zuckerman writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes: 'Visa Inc.'s upcoming initial public offering is shaping up to be this year's hottest ticket on Wall Street. But should individual investors try to crash the party?'

• Equifax Data Reveals More Canadians Paying Bills on Time
• New Mercator Advisory Group Reports: P2P Lending: Why Not P2B2P?, Mobile Payment Case Studies: UMPay and China's Mobile Payment Market, A Seamless POS Future: Moving Order Entry and Payments into an iPod, Mobile Banking: Just Getting of the Ground.
• CardinalCommerce Now Offers UK-Based Payment Brand Ukash to Their eCommerce Merchants Through Cardinal Centinel
• The Berkman Center Announces Formation of Internet Safety Task Force to Identify and Develop Online Safety Tools
• Global Cash Access to Discontinue Arriva Credit Card
• Global Cash Access to Acquire Certegy Gaming Services for $25 Million