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Friday, March 24, 2006
The new MTV
Send $$$: PayPal to offer paying by text message
Send $$$: PayPal to offer paying by text message
Online payment company PayPal is preparing to offer a service that will let consumers make purchases or money transfers using simple text messaging via mobile phones, the company said on Wednesday.
The move by PayPal, a unit of online auctioneer eBay, marks a big step in bridging the worlds of e-commerce and the physical world of brick-and-mortar stores by giving consumers a pay-as-you-go option via phones, analysts said.
The service, known as PayPal Mobile, will be launched in the next couple of weeks in the United States, Canada and Britain. Other markets worldwide will follow for the world's biggest online payments service.
"PayPal is going to be launching a mobile-payments product," PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt told Reuters.
Word of the service had leaked out earlier on Wednesday when bloggers found links to test pages on PayPal's Web site describing it. Details can be found here.
Over time, the company may look to extend the service to the more than 55 countries and regions where PayPal is registered to transfer funds online, Bettencourt said. However, she stressed that PayPal has no specific plans to do so yet.
While designed to make online payments more convenient for the nearly 100 million existing PayPal users, the move to offer a mobile payment service holds out the prospect of reaching vast markets in the developing world where phones, rather than computers, are the main way to connect to the Internet.
PayPal Mobile will offer customers two options for transferring funds, be it for gifts or purchases, by phone to nearly anyone they choose, whether individuals or retailers.
Payments can be sent over a phone via text message or by calling an automated customer service system and using voice commands to transmit funds, according to PayPal's site.
"This is very important because it is going to create an awareness that your mobile phone is much more than just a device for talk," said Dan Schatt, an analyst with financial consulting firm Celent. "It allows you to make transactions."
In effect, the phone has become an electronic wallet.
In the United States, start-up TextPayMe now offers a PayPal-like service that allows consumers to send payments via text messages. Obopay is set to launch mobile payments with a companion debit card for purchases or cash withdrawls.
A leg up on other services Operators of mobile-phone systems in Britain, Europe, Australia, Japan and many other parts of Asia are well ahead in investing in mobile payment services. But PayPal's stringent verification system gives it a leg up on independent services as it appeals to a huge base of existing users, Schatt said.
One feature, called Text to Buy, would allow magazine readers, for example, to buy advertised items such as clothes, concert tickets or music or movie-video discs using their mobile phones, by sending product codes located in the ads.
A merchant receiving such a payment would then ship the product to the address stored in the PayPal user's account.
"It's basically just another way to access PayPal," Bettencourt said. "It's just like in the online world when you send a payment," she said. "All you are doing is sending a payment using your phone instead of your computer."
When introduced, mobile-phone users will be able to send a text message to 729725 (the spelling of PayPal on a numeric handset keypad) with the amount of money the sender wishes to transfer and the recipient's phone number. On the PayPal Web site, the company uses the example: "Send 5 to 4150001234".
A PayPal computer then calls back the text message sender on the phone and asks the user to enter a secret PIN to confirm the transaction. PayPal immediately notifies the recipient and tells how to claim the payment online.
The Web site shows a second option where the customer calls 1-800-4PAYPAL, enters a secret PIN, the amount of the transfer and the phone number where the payment is to be sent.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Bloggers on the go will soon have a new tool to help them keep their blogs up to date
Sony Ericsson teams with Google By Marguerite Reardon URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6044057.html
Bloggers on the go will soon have a new tool to help them keep their blogs up to date.
On Tuesday, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications announced a deal with Google to integrate the search company's Blogger and Web search features into Sony Ericsson mobile phones.
Using software preloaded on the phones, subscribers of Blogger.com will be able to update their personal blogs from their cell phones. Sony Ericsson claims it is the first company to offer an integrated blogging tool on its phones.
New products from Sony Ericsson
"We are seeing exponential growth in blogging, and consumers are turning more and more often to the Internet as a means of sharing information or images in personal blogs," Jan Wareby, corporate executive vice president for Sony Ericsson, said in a statement. "By working with Google, we're able to offer a quick and easy way for people to blog as they discover how convenient it is as a way to share words and pictures with friends, family and beyond."
The first phones to offer the new feature are the K610 UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) phone and the K800 and K790 imaging phones, which were announced Tuesday. These phones come with integrated 3.2-megapixel digital cameras with Autofocus, Xenon flash and a unique imaging technology developed by Sony Ericsson. The K800 is a dual-mode UMTS/GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) phone, and the K790 is a Tri Band EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) phone. Both will be available in the second quarter of 2006, the company said.
Sony Ericsson also announced that the Google search engine will become the standard search engine for all of its Internet phones. The search feature has been tightly integrated into the phones, so that consumers can directly activate a Google Web search option from whichever page they are viewing but without launching a new Web page to complete a search. Other phone manufacturers, such as Vodafone and Motorola, also have announced that their phones will use Google's search tool.
Sony Ericsson made several other announcements on Tuesday. It announced three new Bluetooth headsets: the HBH-IV835, HBH-GV435 and HBH-PV705 and a Bluetooth car speakerphone, the HCB-100, which offers up to 20 hours of talk time and 600 hours of standby time.
In addition to the new K800 and K790 phones, Sony Ericsson announced three new camera phones, the K510, Z530 Clamshell and the K310, as well as a new Walkman phone, the W300.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Nokia updates mobile blogging software
Nokia updates mobile blogging software Lifeblog 2.0 now lets users attach audio clips to their blogs
By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
March 08, 2006
Mobile bloggers using a new version of Nokia's Lifeblog software can automatically attach location, time, and relevant calendar information to photos, videos, and audio clips, Nokia said Wednesday. The new software, Lifeblog 2.0, will also allow users to attach audio clips to their blogs.
Lifeblog 2.0 comes in two parts: software that is loaded onto phones plus compatible software for PCs. Users can take photos and videos and make audio recordings on their Nokia Nseries phones, then upload the files wirelessly from their phones to an online blog, provided they have a blog set up through Six Apart. The PC software is designed to make it easier for users to organize and share the files, Nokia said in an announcement a day before the Bebit trade show opens in Hanover, Germany.
The Lifeblog 2.0 PC software is available for download now and the compatible phone software is expected to become available in April.
A new tagging capability can make it easier for users to find photos and other files, said Andreas Myka, research and development manager for Lifeblog at Nokia. Software on the phone detects photos as soon as they are taken and then looks for certain information to attach to the photo as a tag, Myka said in a phone interview. For example, the software finds information in the nearest cell tower that indicates which country the phone is in and attaches a tag with the country name as well as the time to the photo, he said.
The software also looks in the user's calendar and attaches any calendar entries as tags, he said. That could later help users identify the files based on the calendar entry, which could indicate that a photo was taken at a conference or during a holiday, for example.
While the tags can be automatically attached to the photos, for privacy reasons, they aren't automatically uploaded if a user then posts the photo to a blog, Myka said. The tags are primarily useful in making it easier for users to search for photos, videos or audio clips on their PCs or phones, he said.
Lifeblog 2.0 also improves the user interface of the PC software, Myka said. The software now works within Windows, making it easier for users to drag and drop files between programs, he said.
The first version of Nokia's mobile blogging software came out in 2004 but other phone makers have recently made announcements of services designed to make mobile blogging easier. Last week, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications introduced a new phone that is integrated with Google's Blogger application. Users can set up a new blog using the phone and take and upload photos from the phone to the blog.
Samsung Electronics is featuring photo blogging in a section of its Samsung Mobile stand at Cebit, but until the show floor officially opens on Thursday it's unclear exactly what type of mobile blogging capabilities Samsung will display.
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