Visa Europe says the adoption of NFC contactless payments has reached a ‘critical point’ across Europe.

More than 19 million transactions took place in March 2013, driving the total spend on contactless cards and smartphones equipped with a Visa payWave app to over €1 billion (£856 million).

The eighth annual Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ Top 100 ranking of the most valuable global brands still has Apple at the top, despite a slight drop in the total value of technology brands.

Apple’s brand value was calculated at $185 billion, just 1% up from 2012. Google retained second place but closed the gap slightly.

Vodafone has announced its results for the financial year that ended on 31st March 2013.

Revenue for the group was down 4.2% to £44.4 billion, while a drop in the value of the company’s Italian and Spanish businesses meant profits fell from over £7 billion last year to £673 million.

Finnish smartphone company Jolla has started taking pre-orders of its first device.

Its phone, which runs the Sailfish OS and has a 4.5-inch display, is currently priced at €399 (£337) plus shipping. Full details aren’t known but it’ll run a dual-core chip and will support 4G.

Yahoo! has agreed a deal to acquire blogging and media sharing platform Tumblr for approximately $1.1 billion (£724 million).

Tumblr will continue to operate as a separate business with David Karp as CEO.