Report: Yahoo To Name PayPal Head As CEO. Sign Of A More Commercial Push?
Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) faced a pretty big whack of upheavals in 2011 — not least of which was the none-too-quiet departure of their outspoken f… Read more at paidContent »
Donahoe to lead PayPal for now, maybe forever
PayPal president Scott Thompson’s departure for Yahoo highlights the changing face of eBay, which increasingly looks at PayPal as its crown jewel. And who better to safeguard that than eBay CEO John Donohoe, who has announced he will take over PayPal as interim president. Read more »
Brand new CEO, same old messed up Yahoo
Yahoo has appointed a new CEO — Scott Thompson, a veteran of PayPal, a division of eBay, and he has his work clearly cut out for him. Despite choosing a new CEO, the company’s problems, including a troubled and toxic board, have not gone away. Read more »
Mobile payments: financial players are in the driver’s seat
The momentum behind mobile payments is picking up but many of the newest challengers in the space are going to have to get over one nagging reality: consumers still trust their banks and credit card companies to drive the mobile payments market. Read more »
PayPal: Mobile payments and location-based offers go hand-in-hand
PayPal isn’t just building out a point-of-sale transaction network. It’s looking to engage consumers well before they set foot in a store. The company says its WHERE location-based ad network will be key in helping merchants attract consumers into their stores with deals and offers. Read more »
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NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
Call it the year of lessons learned, if not quite bubbles burst. In 2011, several trends in the connected consumer space that appeared inexorable at the start of the year seemed disorganized by the end. What does that mean for the next 12 months? From cloud-based media storage to daily deals to the fight for the digital living room, 2012 will be a year of consolidation and integration. Both entrepreneurs and investors will figure out that many once-promising standalone business models need to be grounded on more solid, integrated platforms to create real value. Companies mentioned in this report include Hulu, LivingSocial, Netflix and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Virtual currencies: from coins to barter
How do virtual currencies work today and where, outside of gaming, might they be effective? Right now, practical alternative payments systems like Facebook’s and PayPal’s are still based on cash, though consumers might like bartering and loyalty programs rolled into the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
What the death of Cyber Monday says about our broadband habits
The effort to figure out the biggest online shopping day of the year is still in flux, with Thanksgiving so far seeing the peak traffic, according to Akamai. Will this year be the one where turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? Stay tuned. Read more »
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This holiday season shopping has gone mobile in a big way
The 2011 holiday season that was kicked off earlier today (Black Friday) is proving to be a big boost for m-commerce as shoppers are using their smartphones, mobile apps and other devices to go bargain hunting according to various sources. Its the season of couch commerce. Read more »
This Black Friday, eBay, PayPal are feeling flush
Forget hitting the mall. Holiday shopping is now all about lounging on your couch, missing the retail store madness, and ordering things online, And this Black Friday, the kickoff of the annual Holiday shopping frenzy, both Amazon and eBay are off to a great start Read more »
One More Step For Apple In China: It's Now Accepting App Payments In Yuan
China has become an increasingly important part of Apple’s empire, and today it looks like the company has taken one more step to growing th… Read more at paidContent »
PayPal lets Facebook users pay friends easier
PayPal began as a way to help people pay their friends easily online. Now, it’s taking the logical step of enabling Facebook users to pay their friends using a new Send Money Facebook app. Users can send free payments to each other accompanied by an e-card. Read more »
A surprising early investor in Nanosolar: Reid Hoffman
When PayPal went public in 2002, then executive vice president Reid Hoffman, spent some of his winnings on investing in an early round of Silicon Valley’s first solar thin film startup Nanosolar. Will the investment ever pay off? Read more »
The NFC Dance: One Step Closer With PayPal; One Step Further With Square
We are still far from seeing simple, wave-and-pay NFC as a ubiquitous technology for mobile payments, and even further from seeing consumers… Read more at paidContent »
PayPal softens its stance on NFC as it pitches retailers
PayPal has been down on near field communication for payments, saying it was avoiding NFC because it needs at least three to five years to get traction. But the company is softening its stance as it prepares to pitch retailers on its vision for in-store payments. Read more »
Super VC Michael Moritz headlines GigaOM RoadMap
Michael Moritz, general partner at white shoe venture firm, Sequoia Capital is going to be a headline speaker at our GigaOM RoadMap conference, on November 10 in San Francisco. Moritz, along with other tech luminaries will help us figure out how connectedness will change our future. Read more »
Facebook testing Credits outside of Facebook
Facebook isn’t a true PayPal competitor, but it’s taking some steps toward becoming an online payments provider outside of its Facebook properties. The social giant has begun testing the use of Facebook Credits on Uno Boost and Collapse! Blast, both available on gaming portal GameHouse. Read more »
PayPal, mobile commerce fuel strong quarter for eBay
Aided by growth in its PayPal business and mobile commerce, EBay recorded a strong quarter with revenue up 32 percent and income up 14 percent. In the third quarter ending Sept. 31, eBay’s generated $3 billion in revenue while earnings hit $490.5 million. Read more »
With X.commerce, eBay eyes a bigger prize as sales enabler
EBay and PayPal formally unveiled their X.commerce platform, an ambitious attempt to bridge online and offline commerce and arm developers and merchants with a host of tools to help them facilitate sales. X.commerce turns eBay into broader technology provider to merchants and developers. Read more »
Square readies for battle with PayPal
Square said today it’s up to $2 billion in annual payments processed and has activated 800,000 merchants for its payment system, up from half a million in May. And it’s made a key change in the way it process payments to appeal to larger merchants. Read more »
Why Mobile Payments Might Still Be A Few Years Away In A Few Years
Are mobile payments the new speech recognition technologies? One of the bigger stories in mobile this year has been the growing investment a… Read more at paidContent »
Mobile payments won’t sell itself, it requires added value
It’s still too early to say when they Year of Mobile payments will happen. But the important lesson is that mobile payments can’t rely on payments alone to sell itself; it will take a lot of new valuable services to convince consumers and merchants. Read more »
Couch commerce kicks off on Thanksgiving Night
PayPal said consumers aren’t going to wait until Black Friday to get their shopping started. They’ll begin their gift hunting the day before on Thanksgiving using a mobile device. PayPal said this couch commerce will be the first holiday shopping spike this year. Read more »
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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Appcelerator opens a market for mobile back-end services
Appcelerator has built up a community of 1.5 million developers that have used its cross-platform development tool to build more than 25,000 apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Now it’s looking to turn that community into a selling opportunity by launching a marketplace for software modules. Read more »
PayPal pitches its wider vision for mobile payments
PayPal, which has been a powerhouse in online payments but hasn’t really cracked the market for real-world payments of goods, is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments. Read more »
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Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content
The impact of digital technology has shattered long-established monopolies and ways of making money in the newspaper publishing industry. Today, publishers must find ways to subsidize content-creation costs directly, and this report examines a few different approaches, from more flexible paywalls to charging users directly for access and mimicking the business models of other industries, such as online gaming. Companies mentioned in this report include Ford, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunities
Mobile payments — payments initiated by a phone for a transaction at a physical point of sale or online — will total over $750 billion worldwide by 2015, and many predict they will soon begin to replace a typical credit card transaction. This report analyzes and forecasts the mobile payments industry, from its current technologies to the companies implementing them and the trends we can expect in the coming months. Much of the near-term growth of mobile payments will be driven by near-field communication (NFC) technology, but QR and 2D bar codes, mobile POS systems and SMS transactions are also important platforms for companies to consider when creating business models and strategies. Meanwhile, services from the likes of MasterCard, Nokia, Amazon and Google offer examples for others to follow and clues into the future of the industry. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Research in Motion, T-Mobile, Zong and Groupon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
SavingStar’s digital coupons rack up half million users in three months
The future of coupons is moving toward digital and mobile, something that startup SavingStar is taking full advantage of. The company told me it has hit half a million users since it launched its ecoupon product in April, putting it on a faster pace than Groupon’s. Read more »
FinTech startups wield data and smarts
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there’s room for new approaches in the financial sector. Read more »
PayPal unveils NFC Android-to-Android payments
PayPal today unveiled a new peer-to-peer payment functionality that allows Android users to pay each other by tapping two near field communication (NFC)-enabled devices together. The feature shows how PayPal is gearing up for NFC as part of its larger push on mobile payments. Read more »
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Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
The second quarter of 2011 in mobile was all about smartphones, thanks to Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and mobile data consumption ramping up. In the tablet space, the iPad lacked any real competition, though that dominance will surely fade as more and more alternatives — from Cisco, HP and others — emerge. Elsewhere, location-based marketing finally made some headlines, and the groundwork for near-field communications looks to be finally falling into place. Additional companies in this report include Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Research In Motion. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
EBay buys Zong to bolster PayPal mobile payments
EBay is getting more serious with its mobile payments ambitions with PayPal, announcing today that it is buying Zong for $240 million. The move bolsters PayPal’s existing payment system and allows it to offer users an additional way to pay via carrier billing. Read more »
$3B in mobile payments for PayPal this year but bigger prize at stake
PayPal’s mobile payments business is now expected to do $3 billion in volume this year, double what the company predicted last fall. But the bigger challenge and opportunity awaits in mobile payments for offline goods, something PayPal is gearing up for. Read more »
PayPal serves up mobile payments with Pizza Express
Starting today, diners at all 370 of the U.K.’s Pizza Express restaurants will be able to use the chain’s iPhone app to pay for their meals at the table via PayPal in “less than a minute.” No wait-staff intervention needed. Read more »
EBay acquires Magento, builds a commerce OS
EBay said it’s buying up the rest of e-commerce platform Magento in a bid to build a broader commerce operating system that spans online, mobile, social and local. EBay is looking to be the go-to resource for online and offline retailers, helping connect them to consumers. Read more »
In Legal Battle With Google, PayPal Faces Uphill Battle in California
Here’s a phrase PayPal might want to keep in mind as it wages a civil battle against two former executives who defected to Google. Location, location, location. When it comes to employment breach of contract and trade-secret cases, California is a hard state to win in. Read more »
Keith Rabois: Square Will Be Way More Valuable Than PayPal
Even with the rising competition from heavyweights Google and PayPal, Square isn’t sweating the added competition. I talked Square COO Keith Rabois about the increasingly busy mobile payments space, how Square will fare over time and the challenges facing both Google and PayPal. Read more »
