—Mobile payments company Paymate has tied up with Akbar Car Rentals to enable car bookings via SMS. The service will be
available in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Trivandrum, Pune and Ahmedabad to begin with, and will be extended to Delhi, Kolkata and Vizag within a couple of weeks. Paymate intends to launch hotel booking via SMS shortly. Paymate has a tie-up with Citibank, and is funded by KPCP and Sherpalo Ventures [via release]

—As per an article in the Times of Inda, “companies are trying to encrypt card details onto SIM cards, to target people using even the entry-level handsets. Those with sophisticated handsets can download a software to facilitate the process.” Banks are keenly interested in mobile payments: ICICI and SBI have done pilot projects with Airtel and mChek. Standard Chartered and HSBC are also evaluating the m-payment option. The primary concern remains that of security.

I’m just wondering about how much an RFID chip would add to the cost of a handset, though there are security concerns with those as well.