Updated: PayPal opening up its payment processing API to developers, hoping to unleash new apps that use its electronic payment service, sounds somewhat anti-climactic. After all, most of the other brand-name web companies that emerged in the late 90s — including PayPal’s parent, eBay — have been doing that for years.

But the strategy puts PayPal at an important crossroads: One path leads to PayPal being just one of many e-payment companies vying for attention as online commerce evolves; the other gives PayPal what may be its last serious shot at unseating the credit card companies. What direction PayPal takes isn’t really up to the company — rather it will come down to the apps that developers build using the company’s technology, and how common they become. Continue »

Google said this week it might buy a big company “every year or two,” targeting “some accelerant that it would provide for revenue, some major, major user base that we did not currently have access to.” What’s surprising isn’t that Google is thinking this way, but that it’s admitting it so publicly. In the sometimes feverish world of M&A (and right now is one of those times), those are rousing words. Continue »

The past week was one of the best eBay has seen in a long time. AT&T said it will soon allow VoIP calls over its 3G network, a move that will boost Skype’s allure as eBay moves to sell it. And a federal appeals court dismissed patent claims against the voice, video and messaging application. But more importantly, evidence is emerging that the long, awkward and painful turnaround of the marketplace business is really underway. Continue »

Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe is hooking up with Omniture and Intuit with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon. But is a wave of mergers necessarily a good thing? Continue »

Raising $100 million is newsworthy for any company, but when it happened to Twitter this week, it also seemed to raise a hundred million eyebrows. Most notable was the company’s $1 billion valuation, which was labeled “exospheric” and “a new manifestation of the dot-com bubble” and invoked numerous comparisons to 1999 — aka, the Year of Investing Dangerously. But are Twitter’s new investors really crazy? Not at all. Continue »

Here’s a confession I’m a little uneasy making: I still read the newspaper every day. Not an online version, but an old-school, physical newspaper — the New York Times lands on my lawn each morning. I won’t leaf through the pages until the evening, digging into stories I missed during the day’s chaotic rush. But while the same stories have been online for hours, sometimes a day or more, there’s something about the newspaper — its layout, its tried-and-true design, even its faint scent of dried pulp and ink — that makes the print product simpler, and more pleasurable, to devour. The Internet may be killing print papers, but it’s miles from replicating the experience of them.

So much energy is needed to tailor web pages to myriad platforms — rival browsers, news feeds, mobile devices and, soon, tablets — that there is little time left to do the harder work of making the experience of consuming news online an emotionally satisfying one. Which it isn’t yet. And that’s why Google’s Fast Flip announcement this week was so interesting. It’s time, the company was saying, for the web to offer a news interface that rivals magazines and newsprint. Fast Flip isn’t anywhere near to doing that; its gallery of pre-loaded news page images is so crude that initial reviews were pretty harsh. But with Fast Flip, Google tipped its hand to a much broader, ambitious strategy: Google has said for years it doesn’t want to be a media company, and it doesn’t. Google wants to be the media company. Continue »

Two weeks ago, an appeals court shot down an FCC rule that had prevented any single cable company from controlling more than 30 percent of U.S. TV subscriptions. While a few reports noted then that the decision could spur consolidation in the cable industry, the discussion didn’t gain much traction until this week, when a Citigroup analyst argued in favor of a merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But there was also this comment from Steve Burke, Comcast’s chief operating officer, who after noting that while the company might make a modest acquisition at the right price, said, “We don’t wake up every day saying, how do we get bigger in cable?”

Right. And drug addicts don’t wake up every morning saying, “How do I get a fix?” After all, what company wouldn’t want more revenue, or a bigger market share? It was in Comcast’s interest to fight this case to an appeals court, just as it’s in its interest to dampen speculation of any pending deal, which could spark a rally in the companies’ shares and as such, make a tie-up that much more expensive. But in the end, Comcast, as well as other pay-TV companies that might see the ruling as a green light for acquisitions, may not be helped by being bigger. Broadband cable and satellite companies are already facing competition from the web as more video content, and more eyeballs, migrate there. Continue »