micropayments

PayPal is aiming to launch an improved micropayments service by the end of this year. It hopes a bigger volume of tiny online purchases will be unleashed if buyers can pay as they go, instead of making a big upfront payment to be debited down.

Hardly a day goes by without some piece of news about newspapers trying to devise fresh ways to get consumers to pay for all the free content they're currently pushing out over the web. Just last week, for instance, The New York Times asked subscribers if they'd pay $5 a month for website access,...

Google (GOOG) has money. The New York Times Co. (NYT) needs it. And Google needs The New York Times. According to the media columnist Howard Kurtz, executives from these two companies -- as well as from his own Washington Post (WPO) -- have been holding talks about how they might work together to...

The airports are catching the micropayment disease from the airlines. Luton Airport, just north of London, is about to start charging motorists £1 ($1.47) to allow them to drop off passengers at the departures terminal. That money buys up to 10 minutes at the front curb.Luton is hardly the...