The US and European businesses of SEGA Corporation have formed a new publishing initiative that’s focussed on publishing mobile games made by independent developers.

It’s called the SEGA Alliance and will offer marketing support, production support and creative consultation.

Three UK is relaunching its SIM-only tariffs, describing the new deals as ‘built for the internet’.

Pricing starts from £6.90 per month for a 12-month minimum term contract that includes 200 minutes of calls, 5000 text messages and 500MB of data. The deal offers a guarantee of no surprise UK ‘out of bundle’ data charges when the allowance is used.

New figures from digital security company Kaspersky Lab show that the number of new malicious programs targeting the Android platform has almost trebled in the past three months.

The second quarter of 2012 has seen over 14,900 new malicious programs targeting the Android OS. In Q1 2012 there were just under 5,450.

UK consumer organisation Which? has found that mobile phone sales staff are giving inaccurate information about the possibility of price increases on ‘pay monthly’ contracts.

When asked whether the price would stay the same throughout the contract term, 82% of shop assistants said the price was fixed. However, the past 12 months have seen four of the five major mobile networks increasing their charges.

A new report from Juniper Research expects mobile payment transactions to increase nearly four-fold in the next five years, exceeding $1.3tn (£829 billion) by 2017.

This growth will mainly be driven by sales of physical goods by a combination of remote purchases and in-store NFC transactions. However, physical goods purchases via mobile phones will still only account for around 4% of all retail transactions by 2017.