Oracle And Nokia Make A Deal

Nokia Oyj has agreed to grant Oracle Corp’s customers access to its mapping products, as the wireless phone company attempts to expand its location services business.

The Finnish company, which bought the world’s largest digital mapping firm, Navteq, in 2008, has been looking for ways to boost the business and recently signed mapping deals with Groupon Inc and Amazon.Com Inc.

In stark contrast with Nokia’s troubled mobile phone operation, sales at the location business grew last quarter, though it still generates only 4 percent of group revenue.

Oracle has developed a link between its own software and the Nokia Location Platform software, Nokia said on Monday. This enables the U.S. company’s business users to access the mapping services through its products.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but Nokia said Oracle users would license Location Platform from Nokia for use in Oracle applications.

“Nokia has been on a mission for the last 18 months to sign mapping and location deals with large internet players. The deal with Oracle extends this,” CCS Insight analyst Martin Garner said.

Last week Apple publicly apologized after customer complaints about errors in its maps, which have been put on its latest phone operating system instead of Google Inc’s mapping service.

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Woman Sues LinkedIn

An Illinois woman has filed a $5 million lawsuit against LinkedIn Corp, claiming that the social network violated promises to consumers by not having better security in place when more than 6 million customer passwords were stolen.

The lawsuit, which was introduced in federal court in San Jose, California, on June 15 and seeks class-action status, was filed less than two weeks after the stolen passwords turned up on websites frequented by computer hackers.

The attack on Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, an employment and professional networking site with more than 160 million members, was the latest massive corporate data breach to have attracted the attention of class-action lawyers.

A federal judicial panel last week consolidated nine proposed class-action lawsuits in Nevada federal court against online shoe retailer Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com, over its January disclosure that hackers had siphoned information affecting 24 million customers.

The LinkedIn lawsuit was filed by Katie Szpyrka, a user of the website from Illinois. In court papers, her Chicago-based law firm, Edelson McGuire, said LinkedIn had “deceived customers” by having a security policy “in clear contradiction of accepted industry standards for database security.”

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Is E-Commerce Next For Facebook?

A group of e-commerce start-ups, backed by some of the tech world’s most respected financiers, are hoping that Facebook Inc will become an e-commerce powerhouse to rival Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc.

As the world’s largest social network moves toward a $5 billion initial public offering, it will come under more pressure from Wall Street to generate new sources of profit growth and reduce its reliance on advertising, which accounted for 85 percent of its 2011 revenue.

Some entrepreneurs and investors increasingly think “f-commerce” – meaning e-commerce on Facebook – is the answer. Start-ups such as BeachMint, Yardsellr, Oodle and Fab.com are coming up with novel ways to persuade Facebook users to not just connect with friends on the social network, but to shop as well.

Backed by tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms like Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and other big investors like Goldman Sachs, these start-ups are pushing out shopping apps, hosting online garage sales and testing out new business models on Facebook.

“E-commerce is a huge category with very strong tailwinds and it’s a natural move for Facebook,” said Sam Schwerin of Millennium Technology Value Partners, which owns Facebook shares and has a stake in BeachMint.

Amazon revolutionized online shopping by crunching lots of customer and purchase data to come up with relevant, personalized recommendations. In the same vein, Facebook’s combination of data, analytics and payment technology could fuel the next generation of e-commerce, Schwerin said.

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Kindle Fire Raises Privacy Concerns

Amazon told a Massachusetts congressman that the Silk browser in its Kindle Fire tablet doesn’t pose a privacy threat to customers, but the lawmaker wasn’t satisfied with that statement.

U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the co-chairman of a congressional caucus on consumer privacy, on Tuesday released the results of questions he had put to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in October about Silk and the data it collected.

Markey wasn’t happy with Amazon’s answers.

“Amazon’s responses to my inquiries do not provide enough detail about how the company intends to use customer information, beyond acknowledging that the company uses this valuable information,” said Markey in a statement.

“Amazon states ‘Customer information is an important part of our business,’ but it is also important for customers to know how the company uses their personal information,” Markey continued. “Amazon is collecting a massive amount of information about Kindle Fire users, and it has a responsibility to be transparent with its customers. I plan to follow-up with the company for additional answers on this issue.”

Silk, which is based on the open-source WebKit engine, connects to Amazon’s cloud service and servers by default. The service will handle much of the work of composing Web pages, pre-rendering and pre-fetching content, and squeezing the size of page components, a way, claimed Amazon, to speed up browsing on low-powered devices like the Kindle Fire.

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Microsoft Eyeing More Software For The iPad

The current rumor on the street is that Microsoft might be looking beyond the recently released OneNote for iPad. Insiders are saying Microsoft is closely monitoring the number of downloads of OneNote for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch to perhaps gauge the possible interest in adding more productivity software for Apple iOS suite of products. Read More…..

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