TC Roundup: China's Alibaba finance arm, Xiaomi partner in wearable payments

China's Alibaba finance arm, Xiaomi partner in wearable payments: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's (BABA.N) finance arm and smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc said on Thursday they will jointly develop mobile payment systems using wearable technology, a first for China's major tech firms.

Xiaomi and Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliate which includes China's most popular online payment service Alipay, will enable the Alipay Wallet mobile app to link with Xiaomi's Mi Band smart fitness bracelet. That will let users smooth the process of making payments, bypassing the need for passwords. (Reuters)

GoDaddy opens at $26.15 on first day of trading, up 31 per cent from IPO price: Hosting and web domain-registration company GoDaddy made its debut today on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GDDY, with shares becoming available at $26.15, up about 30.8 percent from the $20 price at which the company sold shares for its initial public offering.

The debut price is also higher than the $17-19 range that GoDaddy set for its stock shares two weeks ago. (Venture Beat)

Google bans China's website certificate authority after security breach: Google has announced that its web browser Chrome and other products will no longer recognize security certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center(CNNIC), the government agency that oversees China's domain name registry.

This is significant because CNNIC administers security certificates for the .cn country code, as well as Chinese-language domain names, which are open to businesses registered within China. (Tech Crunch)

Apple under EU scrutiny over streaming: European regulators are scrutinising Apple's dealings with record labels, amid an intensifying battle over the future of free, ad-supported music streaming services such as Spotify.

Several labels and digital music companies have been contacted by the European Commission, according to people familiar with the matter. (Financial Times)

Watch Amazon's store of the future previewed in this 2006 commercial: Amazon's store of the future actually comes from the past. Earlier this week, I reported on a patent application Amazon filed recently that described a store of the future in which shoppers can walk out of a store without paying a cashier, and still get automatically charged for the right stuff.

The patent application seemed like an extra juicy find because two of the three inventors have close relationships with CEO Jeff Bezos and are said to be working on a top-secret project. To me, that was a signal that Amazon might seriously be working on the store of the future described in the patent, though Amazon hasn't responded to requests for comment. (Recode)