NEW YORK (AP) — Cash is passe, say digital mavens. If you really want to pay your friends back for that pizza party, use an app to shoot money to their mobile-phone number — or their Facebook account. Such technology-enabled peer-to-peer payments are growing quickly. Forrester Research predicts mobile peer-to-peer payments will hit $17 billion…

NEW YORK (AP) — From American Eagle to Apple Stores, beacons are popping up everywhere. Are they a shopper’s best friend or another pesky Big Brother monitoring our every move? The square or rectangular devices, smaller than a smartphone, can hang on a wall or be placed on a machine and communicate with your phone…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon has long acted like an ideal customer on its own website: a freewheeling big spender with no worries about balancing a checkbook. Investors confident in founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ invest-and-expand strategy flooded into the stock as the company revolutionized shopping, upended the book industry and took on the cloud…

NEW YORK (AP) — Microsoft is giving its MSN news service a crisper look, new lifestyle tools and seamless syncing across devices. The company says the revamped site fits in with Microsoft’s overall strategy of making mobile phones and Internet-based services priorities as its traditional businesses — Windows and Office software installed on desktops —…