The latest addition to the company’s availability is in Spain, raising its number of E.U. countries to seven.

The increasingly popular mobile payments startup from Sweden, iZettle, has just announced that it is taking its first steps into Spain, which has boosted its availability in the European Union to include seven different countries.

The service provides small businesses with a way to receive credit card transactions over smartphones.

The company is already offering mobile payments options to small businesses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. It has also brought Visa transactions to Finland, Norway, and Denmark as of November 2012. They were able to accomplish this goal following the settlement of an issue between the two companies that had been outstanding.

The mobile payments will be expanding to Spain with an eye on small and struggling businesses.

The expansion into Spain is meant to provide small business owners who “are hurting” with new mobile payments options, said an mcommerce news release by the company. At the moment, there is no subscription fee for the company’s services and there is no minimum monthly fee. Instead, it charges a flat 2.75 percent per transaction.

The service works for either Android or iOS devices, and the mobile payments are compatible with all of the major credit cards including Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. This places iZettle in direct competition with a number of other companies that are offering comparable services within the European small business marketplace.

For example, there is a German startup called Payleven that is providing mobile payments services for Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Another example is Elavon, which is also headquartered in Europe and has just recently expanded into Ireland as of October, after being active exclusively in the United Kingdom until then.

Among the most recent mobile payments companies to make its way into the European marketplace is a company from Holland called Adyen. It is similar to iZettle in that it functions on both iOS and Android, but it is designed for large retailers so that they can make a point of sale in any location that there is an employee, in order to reduce lineups at the checkout counters.

Security firms highlight spike in malware targeting Android

Android is one of the most popular smart phone platforms in the world. Tech-savvy consumers praise Android for its variety of features and ease of use, but consumers are not the only ones interested in the platform. According to two firms specializing in mobile security — Eset and Lookout Mobile Security –, Android has become rampantly popular among hackers. These hackers are expected to put a great deal of attention on the Android platform in 2013, introducing a veritable tide of new malware that specifically targets the operating system.

Hackers target Android as operating system becomes more capable of mobile commerce

Google’s Android operating system is among the most powerful and widely used in the world. As such, it is often the subject of interest among hackers who are keen on exploiting the information found on Android mobile devices. Over the years, malware has become more sophisticated in order to adapt to the changes being made to the Android platform. While activity in the hacking community remains high, mobile security firms expect hacking activity to spike in the coming year as Android devices become more popular and capable of participating in mobile commerce.

18 million users expected to fall victim to malware

Lookout Mobile Security predicts that some 18 million Android users throughout the world will have their device affected by malware of some kind. Consumers outside of the U.S. are expected to encounter malware more frequently than those within the U.S. This may be due to the fact that most major hacking groups are located outside of the U.S. in order to avoid some of the harsh penalties the U.S. government has in place to deter hackers.

Mobile security to become a major issue in 2013

While 18 million is certainly a high number, Robert Nelson of Android Community suggests that this number is small when compared to the total number of consumers with Android mobile devices. Nonetheless, mobile security is expected to be a major concern for Android consumers in the coming year. There are various applications that consumers can download to help protect their devices from exploitation, however, and these applications are likely to become more capable as hackers attempt to adopt more sophisticated methods of breaching Android security.