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Will eBay Cozy Up With Facebook?
October 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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EBay Inc is attempting to strengthen its relationship with social network leader Facebook at a developer conference this week, a person familiar with the e-commerce company said on Tuesday.
EBay will also debut a new online identification service for shoppers named PayPal Access, the source added.
The company expects almost 4,000 people to attend its X.commerce conference in San Francisco on October 12, 13 and 14. The event marks the official launch of the company’s new X.commerce division, which will target e-commerce software developers.
EBay is trying to encourage outside developers to create applications for its e-commerce platforms and is making a particularly strong push in mobile commerce.
At the end of September, Katie Mitic, head of Platform and Mobile Marketing at Facebook, joined eBay’s board of directors, sparking speculation that the two companies were working on new partnerships.
Mitic is scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the X.commerce conference on Wednesday. Facebook Platform, which Mitic helps run, is the company’s developer unit, so any new partnership will focus on this area, the person said on condition of anonymity because the plans aren’t public yet.
PayPal Unveils New Payment System
PayPal has unveiled a mobile payment product for customers that doesn’t require near-field communication (NFC) technology inside smartphones.
The system relies instead on using smartphones and other mobile devices to scan product bar codes and to authorize payments through PayPal mobile accounts. Shoppers will also be able to use credit-card scanning terminals commonly seen in grocery stores: The user inputs a phone number and PIN on the terminal’s keypad instead of swiping a credit or debit card.
PayPal President Scott Thompson laid out the basics of the plan in a blog posted Wednesday. In the blog, he also took a swipe at competitors, including Google, MasterCard, Visa and others, who are working with NFC in smartphones for a mobile wallet.
“Let’s be clear about something — we’re not just shoving a credit card on a phone,” Thompson said in his blog.
PayPal is already a major global force in online payments, with 100 million customers. While PayPal’s new payment technologies don’t rely on NFC, they do propose making in-store payments possible from any device and support GPS-based offers, according to Thompson’s blog. PayPal will even allow for customers to set up payments on credit after they’ve checked out.
Dozens of merchants got a sneak peak of the technology Wednesday at an event PayPal sponsored. The event was covered by All Things D, which was not allowed to take photographs, but posted a story. In addition to the payment methods shown in the PayPal video, that story said PayPal will allow customers to continue using plastic cards, issued by PayPal, for payment.
In an interview posted on AllThingsD, Thompson said the PayPal approach doesn’t require merchants to install new terminals, nor does it require customers to buy a new smartphone.
Nokia Puts Free M$ Apps On Symbian Phones
September 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Several of Microsoft’s business productivity applications will be available free of charge on Nokia’s latest Symbian Belle smartphones later this year, Nokia stated Thursday.
The move comes at the same time Nokia is developing its first smartphone on the Windows “Mango” Phone platform. That phone is rumored to be scheduled for a November debut.
The free apps will run on Symbian Belle smartphones announced in August; they’re designed to keep customers buying Nokia products while Nokia ramps up to Windows Phone smartphones.
The free apps for Symbian Belle phones will include: Microsoft PowerPoint Broadcast for broadcasting presentations from a desktop to a smartphone;Microsoft OneNote for taking notes with images by syncing with Microsoft SkyDrive;And Microsoft Document Connection, which provides a single view of documents stored on a smartphone including email attachments and documents on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites.
Early next year, Nokia said it will provide OneNote synchronization with SharePoint and will add Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications for the first time outside the Windows platform.
Some critics of Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft wonder how successful Windows Phone Mango (version 7.5) will be and said the addition of Microsoft apps to Nokia’s older Symbian line is a way for Nokia to hedge its bets if the Microsoft partnership doesn’t pay off quickly.
The free productivity apps could also be a way to introduce a large number of Symbian users to Microsoft software. There are many more Symbian users outside the U.S. than inside and Symbian until this year had been the world’s largest smartphone platform.
Making the free apps available on the Symbian Belle phones doesn’t cost either company much and the Belle phone users “get something to sweeten the deal to stay with symbian,” Gold said.
Nokia Had Horrible Quarter
July 27, 2011 by admin
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Nokia has just posted very disturbing quarterly results this morning. The European smartphone giant outlook appears to be getting worse and CEO Stephen Elop has acknowledged that things will not turn around overnight.
Elop is reporting that Nokia’s operating profit is down 44 percent since Q1 and sales of mobile devices are down 23 percent consecutively. While the overall sales of mobile phones and smartphones are down, along with average selling prices.
Elop labelled the results as “clearly disappointing” and went on to say that competitive pressures are continuing. He tried to paint a somewhat more positive outlook for the rest of the year, thanks to Nokia’s clear strategy and several major product launches.
Nokia Expects Windows Phone Before EOY
June 3, 2011 by admin
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Nokia has “increased confidence” that the first of its smartphone devices to run on the Windows Phone platform will ship by the fourth quarter, the company said on Tuesday.
Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop is putting his full weight behind getting a Windows Phone-based product out for the important end-of-year holiday shopping season, in order to help turn around the company’s smartphone fortunes. The company’s teams are aligned around that goal, he said in a statement.
The company won’t reveal ship dates until closer to when the first phones arrive, but the pressure is on to deliver the devices this year, Elop said when the company announced its first quarter results.
Nokia will have several more opportunities to divulge more information shortly. On June 21, Elop will give a presentation at the Connection 2011 Conference, which is organized in conjunction with CommunicAsia 2011 in Singapore. He will give an update on the company’s partnership with Microsoft, and set the stage for a number of product and service launches, according to the program.
Skype Gives Asterisk The Boot
The Internet is buzzing with news that Skype is in the process of giving Asterisk the boot by no longer offering Skype for Asterisk starting in July. Skype for Asterisk is proprietary software that was developed by Digium with Skype’s approval. The software was unique in that it allowed Asterisk based systems to join Skype’s VoIP Network. We assume this will not negatively impact current users for the next couple of years.
We wonder if Microsoft had a hand in killing this deal with Asterisk since they have a competing product. One could also assume that Skype wanted to develop a native application and not use Asterisk for SIP implementations. I guess we will need the executives at Skype to fill us in on the details one day.
Bill Had A Hand In Microsoft Buying Skype
One of the world’s richest people, Bill Gates had given his blessing for Microsoft to buy Skype for $8.5 billion dollars. Actually, Bill Gates pressed other executives on the board of directors to support or back the idea of gobbling Sky which has yet to turn a profit.
Word on the street is that Bill told the Gates BBC in an interview which will be televised this weekend that he played an instrumental role in getting this deal approved by the board of directors. So this really squashes any rumors that Steve Ballmer was the force behind the deal getting approved by the executive team.