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American Express is diving into the e-wallet space with Serve, a service that lets customers transfer money to others online and make payments with their mobile phones.

In its announcement Monday, AmEx said Serve is aimed at customers who use cash, checks and debit cards, rather than the company’s traditional credit card users.

Serve accounts will be available immediately in the U.S. and are expected to launch internationally over the coming year.

Mobile payments are a new direction for AmEx as it tries to get a toehold in a rapidly growing market. Research firm Generator Research expects mobile payments to reach $633 billion annually by 2014, with 490 million customers using them.

AmEx’s Serve is meant to capture some of that burgeoning market. It also puts the bank squarely in competition with e-payment king PayPal. Serve grew out of technology AmEx picked up last year through its $300 million acquisition of Revolution Money, a PayPal rival that focused on person-to-person payments.

Serve accounts can be funded with a bank account, debit card, credit card or from funds transferred by another user. The accounts can be accessed through iPhone and Android apps, or through Serve.com and Facebook.

In addition, each user will be given a reloadable prepaid card linked to their Serve account that can be used at any merchant or ATM that accepts AmEx.

Users can set up sub-accounts for children or family members and control where the funds are used.

AmEx is waiving Serve account fees for the next six months, but after that, loading money will cost 2.9% of the transaction amount plus 30 cents per load. However, Serve won’t charge a fee for loading through cash, debit or ACH (automated clearing house) transactions.

ATM cash withdrawals will cost $2, though users get one free withdrawal per month. Setting up accounts and sub-accounts is free, as are user-to-user transactions.

Meanwhile, Google is planning its own foray into the digital payment world. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is partnering with MasterCard and Citigroup to embed payment technology in Android smartphones. The goal is to allow customers make payments at stores by waving their phones in front of a reader device at the checkout.

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A group calling itself the “Deccan Mujahedeen” said it carried out the attacks late yesterday at several locations including the Oberoi Trident hotel and the iconic Taj Mahal Palace.

“We have seen that there is a global trend now to attack Western hotels,” said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.

“The threat to hotels has increased significantly.” Although the Taj and Oberoi are part of Indian-based hotel firms, witnesses said the gunmen had specifically chosen US and British citizens to take hostage.

Other recent attacks in the region have also targeted hotels belonging to Western companies and which are known to host foreigners.

These include: The September truck bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott hotel that killed at least 60; a January assault which killed eight people at Kabul’s top hotel, the Serena; suicide attacks on the Radisson SAS hotel, the Grand Hyatt and Days Inn in Amman, Jordan in 2005; the 2003 blast that killed 12 at Jakarta’s JW Marriott; and a 2002 car bombing that killed 11 French engineers outside Karachi’s Sheraton hotel.

“I think it’s very much an attack on the ‘West’,” said Nick O’Brien, an associate professor in counter-terrorism at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

Gunaratna said that with Western diplomatic compounds increasingly more secure against bombings or armed assaults, attackers have turned on hotels as “the second embassies”.

The Mumbai attacks are a reminder that any Western hotel in a place such as India which is prone to terrorism should improve its security or at least review it, said O’Brien.

Indonesia’s experience has shown that improving security works, analysts said.

Since the Marriott and other bombings in Jakarta, hotels, office buildings and other potential targets have installed metal detectors, guards with mirrors and other devices to search vehicles.

Some hotels have built special ramps and barriers that make it difficult to drive right up to the lobby.

“It has been a deterrent in Indonesia,” said Sidney Jones, Jakarta-based senior adviser to the International Crisis Group of political analysts.

She said bombers who struck Indonesia’s Bali island in 2005 rejected hotels as targets because of the tighter security. They chose instead open-air beachfront restaurants and another target, killing 23 people and injuring many more.

But while security measures have helped in Indonesia, Jones said “it seems like a hugely daunting task” to protect India’s hotels, partly because of their sheer numbers.

Gunaratna said countries like India and Pakistan that face a significant terrorism threat should ask the government to post armed guards at international hotels. There should generally be greater cooperation between hotel security and government forces, he said.

O’Brien said the best defence is distance and#8212; keeping the hotel well back from a secured perimeter.

But analysts said that unless a hotel is turned into a fortress it is difficult to completely guard against well-trained armed assailants and those who are prepared to die.

“It could in theory be done,” O’Brien said. “But complete security is very, very difficult.” – AFP

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One advantage of selling gazillions of MP3 players — each of them stuffed with random access memory — is that it gives you a lot of leverage in the chip market.

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