More Singaporeans using smart phones to shop online

The number of Singaporeans shopping using their smart phones jumped nine times this year, a local news channel reported on Monday. Statistics from online payment service provider PayPal show that mobile transactions this year in the city state of five million people totaled some 43 million Singapore dollars (33.3 million U.S. dollars). The transactions made on smart phones were growing quickly worldwide, too, despite the threat of smart phone viruses. Elias Ghanem, managing director of PayPal Southeast Asia, said the mobile payment worldwide jumped from 750 million U.S. dollars last year to 3.5 billion U.S. dollars. "That is really a significant jump. Mobile commerce is really the way that people are progressing in their spending," Ghanem said.