We don't have one of those fancy contactless payment chips in our debit card yet, but the world seems hellbent into sticking them into everyone's mobile phones. Just a month ago Google launched Wallet, a new service to bring mobile phone payments to stores across America. But like too many Google products, it's US-only for now.

But don't despair - it seems mobile payments could be coming to the UK soon. The four big UK mobile networks - Everything Everywhere, which runs Orange and T-Mobile; Telefonica UK, which runs O2; and Vodafone, have announced they're getting together to work on developing a single UK system for processing mobile payments.

There's no particular reason why this is something that has to be done by networks, of course; it's manufacturers who'll need to put the required NFC chips into their phones. But this at least makes it seem unlikely they'll be an unseemly and irritating battle of mobile-payment systems. Anything the US can do, we can do better, albeit quite a lot slower!