Archive for March 22nd, 2007
Skype Gets Linked Financially to PayPal
Skype is moving into the transactions space, the companyâs CEO and founder Niklas Zennstrom announced Tuesday at VON. The company, which has more than 171 million users, now offers a variety of services and features including the ability for users to send money to each other, an online marketplace and a local business listing search [...]
Nearly 35 million people throughout Europe use PayPal to make online payments, the company announced today. PayPal, the online payment branch of auction website eBay, gave separate figures for Europe and the UK for the first time, having previously only separated its results into US and rest of the world. The figures show that in [...]
PayPal Makes eBay’s Growth Look Good
eBay Inc.’s (NASDAQ:EBAY) online payment system, PayPal, now has nearly 35 million accounts in Europe, about a quarter of the service’s worldwide total. Forrester Research also says that 23% of Europeans prefer PayPal to credit cards or alternate ways of making payments online.PayPal is looking more and more like the future driver of the company’s [...]
Australian Man Guilty of Hacking eBay Accounts
An Australian man pleaded guilty to breaking into eBay and a local bank to steal AU$42,000 (about $34,000), in a case that demonstrates the problem of account takeovers on the auction site. Dov Tenenboim, 21, of the Sydney suburb of North Bondi, stood accused of breaking into at least 90 different eBay seller accounts last [...]
Patent A Business Plan Or A Business Model?
San Francisco Chronicle: Is it possible to patent a business plan or a business model? Most people think of patents as covering inventions like better mousetraps, not business methods. And until eight years ago, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office rarely granted patents for business models or methods. But the high-tech revolution changed a lot [...]
Five Tips to Motivate Small-Biz Workers
SmartMoney: Large corporations with deep pockets can easily dangle bonuses, perks and an array of fancy reward programs (often created by outside consultants) to encourage employees to outperform. Yet, small businesses with limited budgets have a distinct advantage: Chances are, you probably know all your employees. So it’s easier to show ‘em you care. In [...]
IDG News Service: If you’re paying taxes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service there is only one URL you need to know: IRS.gov. That’s what the U.S. tax collecting department said this week in a note on its Web site, warning taxpayers of tax season scams and reminding them that Web sites like IRS.com are [...]
New Rules for Retirement Plans
BusinessWeek: What the 2006 Pension Reform Act guidelines, which went into effect on Jan. 1, mean for small-business owners and their employees. A recent survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Company Services (PCS) showed that a majority of chief executive officers of the nation’s fastest-growing private firms are not knowledgeable about the 2006 Pension Reform Act [...]
Tony Davis at BusinessWeek.com: Trim down your operating budget by reevaluating your communication tools. With the combined cost of smartphones (BlackBerries, Treos, etc.), the numerous service plans needed, and a constant flood of new devices saturating the market, keeping your company online has never been more expensive. But for an on-the-go small business, constant communication [...]
