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MasterCard is bringing contactless acceptance to ballpark food and beverage concessions at the 2014 World Series through a partnership with mobile technology leader MLB Advanced Media, enabling fans to make payments using a variety of NFC-enabled devices and services, including the newly introduced Apple Pay.

MasterCard and Zwipe have announced their partnership for the launch of the world’s first contactless payment card featuring an integrated fingerprint sensor. The launch of the card comes after a successful live pilot with Norway’s Sparebanken DIN, aligned to the Eika Group, as an answer to the complex challenge of providing a fast, convenient payment solution that does not compromise on security.

Apple Inc. is known for setting trends, if not defining whole new market categories, as represented by the iPhone and iPad. But now, with the Sept. 9, 2014, launch of the iPhone 6, and Apple's first foray into the wearable device market with the Apple Watch, the tech giant has come out with a mobile contactless payment system called Apple Pay that could potentially set the standard for mobile security for the entire marketplace. By defining the security standard that wary consumers buy in to, the market for mobile contactless payments at the POS may finally take off.

In the payments industry, we are always interested in profitability and the margins, and the wine industry is no different. A recent article in Wine-X magazine by Brendan Eliason, Assistant Winemaker at David Coffaro Winery, identifies the cost of making a bottle of ultra-premium wine. He breaks it down by the cost of the grapes, oak barrels, packaging (label, cork foil), bottling, overhead including utilities and marketing, and employee compensation. His total cost amounts to $28 a bottle.