Lauren Azulay wants to help her customers flirt faster. Azulay is head of billing and payments for U.K.-based social-networking site Flirtomatic, used by 3 million people in Britain, the U.S., and Germany to meet others and purchase virtual goods online.
For the growing number of Web surfers who use the service via mobile phones, making payments on Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is a breeze, Azulay says. Not so when it comes to devices that run Google's (GOOG) Android operating system. "It's a huge frustration," Azulay says.
With the iPhone, it takes a single click, using a credit card linked to an iTunes account. On Android, purchasers have to enter a credit-card number directly on the phone, via Google's payment service, Google Checkout, or use account with eBay's PayPal (EBAY) , which requires entering a user name and password. "All of these options rely on the user having to enter too many details," Azulay says. "They create a funnel where they give up on the process because it takes too much time and effort."
Monday, October 25, 2010
Google 'mortified' that Street View cars privacy criticism intensifies
t turns out Google’s Street View cars found out more about Internet users than previously acknowledged. Last Friday, the company said the cars, which roam the world taking pictures for its location-based applications, scarfed up e-mail addresses, URLs and passwords from residential Wi-Fi networks they passed by in dozens of countries.
And while Google said it was "mortified" by its discovery, apologized again, and announced some measures to beef up privacy awareness within its ranks, the admission could expose the company to greater global scrutiny, fines and potential lawsuits, experts said.
Over the weekend, the British government launched a fresh investigation into the Street Cars data breach. Italy demanded that Google give residents several days notice before its cars roam their neighborhoods, Reuters reported. Regulators in France, Germany and Spain have begun inverstigations of their own. More than 30 state attorneys general in the United States also have launched a joint probe. And Epic, a privacy advocacy group, urged the Federal Communications Commission to initiate a breach of privacy investigation of Wi-Fi communications networks.
Sony says NO to cassette walkman
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Sony Walkman: The Walkman, the clunky portable cassette player, has been named the best musical invention of the last 50 years, by a leading gadget magazine.
The cassette-based Walkman was hugely popular in the 1908s, but was superseded by CD, miniDisc and MP3 players Photo: AFP
Sony has signalled the end of an era by ceasing production of its Walkman range of portable cassette music players.
The personal music devices – which were hugely popular in the 1980s, and enabled people to listen to their music on the move – have since lost out to iPods and other MP3 music players that use digital tracks rather than physical media.
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Sony said that its April shipment will be its last. The Japanese electronics giant has sold more than 200 million Walkmans since the device first went on sale in 1979.
Although the Walkman was superseded by Sony’s portable CD player, the Discman, and its range of miniDisc players, the Walkman still sold in modest numbers until the turn of the century, when the introduction of the iPod, and the shift towards MP3 files rather than cassettes and CDs, contributed to the Walkman’s demise.
Sony said that it would continue to sell some cassette Walkmans in parts of Asia and the Middle East where there remains some demand, and the Walkman brand lives on as part of Sony Ericsson’s range of music phones, as well as new digital music players.
The Walkman was the brainchild of Nobutoshi Kihara, an engineer in the audio division at Sony. He had been asked by his chairman, Akio Morita, to design a device that would help the executive to pass the time on his frequent business trips, and enable him to listen to his favourite operas.