Firethorn Mobile, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, and Burger King announced the launch of the BK Mobile Crown Card pilot program. The pilot is taking place in approximately 50 BURGER KING restaurants in Salt Lake City, Utah and surrounding metropolitan areas.

"We are pleased to collaborate with BURGER KING on this new program because it frees BK restaurant customers of the burden of carrying plastic," said Rocco Fabiano, president for Firethorn Mobile. "This unique solution works on any Android or iOS phone and does not require new hardware investments in order to deliver this experience to restaurant guests. Firethorn continues to be focused on mobile commerce and the creation of solutions that enable consumers to gain greater utility from their ever-present mobile devices."

The BK Mobile Crown Card app, which is aptly named BK, is powered by Firethorn Mobile payments service and can be found in the App Store and Google Play.

Firethorn Holdings has announced that it has expanded its mobile banking solution to allow consumers to now manage their checking, savings and credit card accounts with more than 3,700 U.S. financial institutions using a single mobile application. Firethorn says that "consumers can now go to http://www.mobilebanking.com to download the updated Mobile Banking application directly to their mobile devices and enroll their accounts with these newly added financial institutions. The application is available on a variety of smartphones and feature handsets offered by wireless operators working with Firethorn." READ MORE »

In an article titled "Qualcomm’s Mobile Payment Strategy: Fix the “Costanza Wallet", Colin Gibbs writes for GigaOm about Qualcomm's mobile payments strategy based on an interview with Tripp Rackley, Qualcomm senior vice president and division president of Firethorn. Gibbs writes that "Qualcomm is continuing to invest in a space that it hopes will become a pillar of its business several years down the road."

INSIDE Contactless has announced that it is working with Qualcomm to accelerate the growth of the Near Field Communication (NFC) handset market by jumpstarting the product development cycle, speeding time to market and significantly reducing development costs. As part of the collaboration, the two companies will develop two 3G handset reference designs-one each for UMTS and CDMA2000 networks-that combine Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem chipsets with INSIDE's MicroRead(r) multi-standard NFC chip. READ MORE »

Qualcomm has announced that it has added support for Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to certain chipsets in its product portfolio. "Qualcomm is helping accelerate the commercial availability of mobile handsets featuring the short-range technology and is engaged with leading NFC solutions providers to develop reference designs based on the Company's Mobile Station Modem chipsets. NFC technology is well suited for payment, mass transit, ticketing and other similar applications requiring a quick and secure contactless exchange of data between devices that are in close proximity to each other." READ MORE »