USPS Shipping Services, Supplies Available at Office Depot Stores
As an Approved Postal Provider, Office Depot is the first national retailer to offer Postal Service shipping products and services.
Acting president of Mailing and Shipping Services Susan Plonkey said, “We're excited to extend some of the best shipping values in the country to Office Depot customers, at a time and place that's convenient to them. Small businesses, especially, will be able to compare shipping companies side by side and see for themselves that Postal Service prices are very competitive and affordable.”
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Apple Hires Expert on Mobile Payments
Over the last decade Apple has expanded into a number of industries besides computers, including music, mobile phones, movies and books. Now Apple could be going after something else: cash.
As first reported by Near Field Communications World, a trade publication, Apple recently hired Benjamin Vigier, an expert in the mobile payments industry who works with a technology called near field communication.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Vigier is now Apple’s product manager for mobile commerce. Before joining Apple he worked with a company called mFoundry, developing mobile payment services for PayPal and Starbucks, and also worked on a project called the mobile wallet.
Investors Chide Michael Dell
In a regulatory filing released Tuesday, Dell disclosed that about 378 million of 1.5 billion votes opposed Mr. Dell’s continued presence on the company’s board. Dell held its annual meeting with shareholders earlier in the month.
“Mr. Dell is quite properly an iconic figure at the company,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance. “It is extremely rare to have that amount of shareholder disaffection directed toward an executive who is so central to the company’s past, present and future.”
India May Soon Resolve BlackBerry Dispute
Government officials, wireless phone companies and R.I.M. have been hashing out details of how the monitoring would work and are hopeful that they will have a plan in place by an Aug. 31 deadline set by New Delhi, a representative for cellular companies said Tuesday.
India has said it wants to be able to monitor encrypted corporate e-mail and messages sent over BlackBerry Messenger, a service that allows users to chat with one another. Officials here and in other countries like the United Arab Emirates have expressed concern that the services could be used by terrorists to plan and carry out attacks.
Billionaire Ellison blasts HP CEO's ouster
Ellison, Oracle's CEO and a friend of Hurd's, issued a statement Monday saying that the move to get rid of Hurd went against the best interests of HP's employees, shareholders, customers and partners. Oracle is one of those partners.
HP's decision to go public with a sexual harassment claim against Hurd, even though a company investigation found no basis for the claim, was an act of “cowardly corporate political correctness” by a divided board of directors, Ellison says.
HP repeated that the board voted unanimously for Hurd's resignation.
Google To Launch Deals Site?
I’ve been pushing the shopping engines, including Google Shopping, to talk about deals for years. The economy stinks and shopping engines can easily push bargains and savings. And many have done so. Yahoo! Shopping did this really early on. Become, Pronto, PriceGrabber, and the rest followed. But Google is still a holdout in that they don’t allow a merchant to submit a Sale Price in addition to a Regular Price, and thus allow a consumer to see a 10% off, 20% off, or 25% off sticker/star.
Deals. You hear about a hot new daily deal site every day. It’s hard to keep track. I used DailyCandy back in the day…and today the company launched DailyCandy Stylish alerts for Android (only for NYC). I’ve used Woot off and on for years…and now that it’s an Amazon company, expect to see Woot leverage Amazon’s relationship with millions of sellers (and buyers, of course). Twitter is experimenting with @earlybird. Groupon and the hundreds (is it thousands?) of clones around the country and around the world are the darlings of the media and the talk of the town. And for a good reason. Groupon is an incredible business making a boatload of money.
Amazon’s Prime Suspect
So it wasn’t easy to suppress despair the other night when someone casually mentioned that there might be something . . . a little . . . chumpy about Amazon Prime. He wasn’t even talking about the auto-renewal, though it’s true Amazon doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels to warn you that your card has been charged again, or about Amazon’s new program to draw students in by waiving the Prime membership fee for the first year. He hinted at something more sinister.
Apple Offers Free Cases to Address iPhone Issue
Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, acknowledged Friday that the company’s iPhone 4 had some problems with its antenna but said the same problems affected all smartphones and had been widely exaggerated by the media.
“This has been blown so out of proportion that it is incredible,” Mr. Jobs said at a news conference at the company’s headquarters here.
Mr. Jobs said that to put the problems behind it, Apple would give free bumpers — cases that wrap around the rim of the phone — to all iPhone 4 buyers who want them. And he said those who had already bought the cases would get a full refund. The price of the bumpers from Apple is $29.
Customers still unhappy can return the phones for a full refund. The cases will remain free until Sept. 30.
Google Buys Metaweb to Improve Search Results
Google said Friday that in an effort to improve these tricky types of search queries, it was buying Metaweb, a San Francisco start-up that says it makes Web sites smarter.
Metaweb, as the company explains in this video, helps Web sites link information based on connections between people, places and things, instead of words. Web sites can tap into and use Metaweb’s technology. For instance, a movie review site could pull in a trailer video, a list of showtimes and a movie poster image.
Running an Ecommerce Business from the Road
That's just what Tina Sutherland did a little more than six years ago. She and her husband Dennis have no permanent address. They travel the country in their RV, and while they do, she runs an online sewing patterns store called What-I-Found from it.
Amazon buys deal-a-day website Woot
Amazon.com Inc. has purchased deal-a-day website Woot.com.
In a joke-tinged message on the company blog, Woot CEO Matt Rutledge said the deal won't change how the site is run _ “with a wall of ideas and a dartboard.”
“For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk,” Rutledge wrote.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said the Seattle-based online retailer expects to finalize the deal by the end of September.
Symantec Is Said to Agree to Buy VeriSign Unit
An agreement over the business, which provides security technology for online payments, could be reached this week, these people said, cautioning that talks were continuing and might fall apart.
The deal, if consummated, would be the latest step by VeriSign as the company sells off divisions to focus on its core business: maintaining tens of millions of Internet domain names. It would also bolster Symantec’s standing as the world’s biggest provider of technology security.
Dell Posts a 52% Increase in Profit, but Still Awaits a Wave of Corporate PC Buying
Like the others, Dell has depended on improving demand for computing equipment to climb out of the recession. Its first-quarter results showed rising sales across its major product lines and a much higher profit than at the same time last year.
Dell, however, continues to rely on large companies to buy new PCs, more than do other PC makers, and large companies still seem content with their old machines.
“Until corporate spending really comes back, Dell will remain in the penalty box,” said Ashok Kumar, a technology analyst with Rodman & Renshaw.
Rakuten Acquires Buy.com for $250 Million
In Japan, Rakuten has approximately 64 million registered members and sales in 2009 totaled $3.2 billion. Its core business, Rakuten Ichiba, combines shopping and entertainment and is Japan's largest Internet shopping mall, offering over 50 million products by over 33,000 merchants, some of whom have turnover of more than $1 million per month.
Online Sellers Can Use PayPal to Source Product on Alibaba's AliExpress
When asked if there were any plans to extend such an agreement into China, an Alibaba spokesperson said the agreement only pertains to AliExpress and said she did not have any information about any other potential plans.
Alibaba to Invest $100 Million in AliExpress Product-Sourcing Platform
Alibaba.com is formally launching AliExpress this week, a product-sourcing ecommerce platform for retailers and online sellers that it had launched in beta in September. While Alibaba.com focuses on larger quantity orders including prototype and custom manufacturing, AliExpress offers smaller-quantity orders available for immediate shipment along with an escrow service designed to protect buyers and sellers.
H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip
The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.
They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.
China’s Censors Tackle and Trip Over the Internet
Don’t blame Google, however. The fault lies with China’s censors — who are increasingly a model for countries around the world that want to control an unrestricted Internet.
Since late March, when Google moved its search operations out of mainland China to Hong Kong, each response to a Chinese citizen’s search request has been met at the border by government computers, programmed to censor any forbidden information Google might turn up.
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal
Apple sees Android phones like the Motorola Droid, right, as iPhone clones. Google says some prototypes predate the iPhone, left.
IT looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo.
Visa's New Rightcliq Payment Service Offers Online Shopping Features
Rightcliq allows consumers to store multiple payment accounts and easily select the payment account they prefer. Consumers will also be able to store and organize online merchant discount codes/offers in Rightcliq for easy redemption at checkout. In addition to storing Visa credit, debit and prepaid accounts, consumers will be able to store other payment options, including competing brands.
Alibaba says Yahoo 'reckless' on Google stance
Google has promised to stop censoring its search results in China, threatening to pull out of the country altogether if it can't operate an unfiltered search engine. Yahoo has said it was “aligned” with Google's position, though it's not clear what that means.
AT&T to Sell Smartphones Using the Android System
AT&T said on Wednesday that it planned to sell smartphones running the Android mobile operating system by the second half of the year, including Dell’s first smartphone.
The company said it expected to sell five new devices created by handset manufacturers that also included Motorola and HTC.
AT&T is the last major wireless carrier in the United States to add an Android-powered smartphone to its lineup.
Jeff Bradley, senior vice president of devices at AT&T, said that the carrier had been slow to adopt the Android system.
Apple's stock hits new high as gadget buzz builds
Apple Inc. shares hit an all-time high Thursday after a published report suggested the intensely scrutinized yet secretive company may be getting ready for a major product announcement.
Citing unnamed people familiar with the preparations, the Financial Times reported on its Web site Wednesday that Apple has rented space for several days in late January at an arts center in San Francisco.
The company is famed for its highly staged launches. CEO Steve Jobs has used past events to introduce groundbreaking — and lucrative — gadgets such as the iPod and the iPhone.
