Amazon.com has announced that the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is now out of beta and also easier to use with Amazon FPS Quick Starts. Using FPS, developers can enable your applications with common payment transactions such as one time payments, recurring payments and pre-payments in hours rather than days. Amazon is also offering free payment processing for a limited time to developers who build an application using Amazon FPS. More info on the Amazon Payments Blog.

Glenbrook's Russ Jones will be on hand at this year's Direct Response Forum (DRF) to lead a session on August 12th entitled "What We're Watching in Emerging Payments". Looking beyond the current generation of payment alternatives, Russ will be discussing TrialPay, eBillme, Secure Vault Payments, Amazon Payments, RevolutionCard, eLayaway, PaidByCash, and the Green Dot MoneyPak.

Russ will also be participating in a round table discussion on best practices in recurring payments on August 13th. The DRF 2008 conference is being held in San Diego. The full agenda is available online. If you're going to be at the conference, - he'd love to meet you!

Amazon.com has made an equity investment in The Talk Market, "a user-generated TV shopping platform that allows businesses to create broadcast-quality product presentations and gives consumers an entertaining shopping experience."

In a press release, the two companies noted that "Integrated payment processing is provided by Amazon Web Services Flexible Payment Service (Amazon FPS). Using Amazon FPS, merchants at the Talk Market get free Amazon Payments Business accounts to process credit cards and tens of millions of Amazon customers can purchase anything on The Talk Market with the credit cards they have on file with Amazon." READ MORE »

Last wee, Amazon.com announced a new Amazon Flexible Payments Service Marketplace Widget that provides developers the ability to create a widget for moving money between two other parties, with complete control of fees paid to the developer. Money moves from buyer to seller, and the seller pays a fee to the developer. The fee can be a fixed amount and/or a percentage of the transaction. Amazon also added several other features to FPS including instant payment notification and new transaction details including providing the buyer's email address to the seller.

Are you interested in the future of mobile payments? Curious as to the
implications of Amazon's new payment platform - the Amazon Flexible Payment Service? If so, make plans now to join the first of Glenbrook's Roundtable on Emerging Payments being held on Friday, Februrary 22, in Santa Clara, CA. The roundtable is a half-day session (with brown bag lunch provided). Online registration and more information is available at Glenbrook's Payments Education website.

Amazon.com has introduced another new web services offering - this one called DevPay. "This new service allows entrepreneurial developers to wrap their own business models around Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, taking advantage of Amazon's existing customer base and billing infrastructure. With DevPay, developers can focus on being creative and innovative while dispatching the less-than-glamorous aspects of dealing with bank accounts, credit cards, and so forth to us."

Amazon's Web Services has introduced a new "Pay Now" widget "to make things very easy for web developers who would like to accept Amazon Payments on their site." More info available in the FAQ.

In an article titled 'Amazon’s Latest Coup: Thinking Small', Chris Dannen writes for FastCompany about Amazon.com's recently introduced Flexible Payments Service offering.

TextPayMe has a new website accessed via an Amazon.com subdomain URL that says its now "Powered by Amazon Payments". TextPayMe, still in beta, was one of the first person to person mobile payment companies to launch when it was initially introduced in December 2005.

Amazon Web Services has published a sample application called iBazaar that shows developers how build a marketplace application using Amazon Flexible Payments Service that enables movement of money between two third parties and how the developer can take a portion of each transaction in exchange for providing the marketplace.

Ina Steiner takes a look at the recently introduced Amazon's Flexible Payments Service from the standpoint of online sellers - comparing it with PayPal and Google Checkout with respect to how it works for sellers.

Buxfer, an online money tracking service, has announced they will be using Amazon's new Flexible Payment Service to make online payments between users in the US - and they're offering it free of charge (certain limitations) through the end of August. Going forward, Buxfer will be charging the receiver of funds for the payment by passing through the fees Amazon charges them for FPS. Buxfer only supports payments funded from the sender's Amazon Payments account balance or from the sender's bank account - but not from a sender's credit card (presumably because Amazon FPS, like PayPal, does not support personal account holders receiving credit card payments). See their blog post here. Jim Bruene also reports on Buxfer on his Netbanker blog.

FreshBooks, a "a provider of web based unaccounting services that help service based businesses look professional", will also soon be launching the use of Amazon's Flexible Payment Service. Their blog post tells the whole story.

The developers of JungleDisk, an application that allows you to store files securely on Amazon's S3 storage service, have introduced JunglePayments, a service built on top of Amazon's new Flexible Payment Service. JunglePayments "wraps" Amazon FPS and allows web site developers to quickly create links that can be used by their web site users for making payments using Amazon FPS. Here's a description of how it works.

Amazon has introduced Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) - calling it "the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure." The service has been introduced in "Limited Beta". More background - on the story behind Amazon FPS and some of the companies that will be using Amazon FPS - is available on the Amazon Web Services Blog.