Coffee chain Starbucks has partnered with mobile payment company Square to introduce the ‘Pay with Square’ app at around 7.000 US Starbucks stores. In addition, Square will process Starbucks’ US credit and debit card transactions.

Starbucks is investing $25 million in Square with its chairman, Howard Schultz, joining Square’s Board of Directors.

We start this week's edition of The Fonecast with a new product from RIM: the mobile-enabled BlackBerry PlayBook. Next comes Vodafone's move to Tech City and Google moving its mobile wallet into the cloud.

You'll also find the latest batch of quarterly results, some mobile data research and a story about sheep sending SMS text messages.

American technology retailer Best Buy Co. Inc. has confirmed that it’s received a letter from Richard Schulze, the company’s founder and former chairman, outlining an offer to acquire all the Best Buy shares he doesn’t already own. Mr Schulze resigned as chairman in June this year.

His offer of $24 to $26 per share is significantly above the current trading price for the company’s shares, which are trading at around $20.

Mark Powell, who started his mobile career at Technophone Ltd before working for Nokia, Motorola and Kineto Wireless, has been appointed as the new executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.

Mr Powell co-founded Kineto Wireless in 2001, working as vice president of the company’s client software business before joining the Bluetooth SIG.

A new report from healthcare industry analysts GlobalData forecasts that the value of the global mobile health (m-Health) market will grow from $1.2 billion last year to $11.8 billion by 2018, the equivalent of 39% growth every year.

mHealth, which involves the use of mobile applications and devices to monitor a patient’s health remotely, is growing as the adoption of smartphones and tablets increases.