PayPal Wooing SMB’s With Payments Service

PayPal is focusing on small businesses, service providers, and casual sellers on the move with its new PayPal Here service which allows vendors to process a variety of payments including checks and cards using their mobile phones.

The new service unveiled Thursday includes a free app and encrypted thumb-sized card reader, which allows merchants with an iPhone, and later Android smartphones, to process payments.

Merchants can accept payments by swiping cards in the card reader, scanning cards and checks using their phone cameras, or by entering card information manually into the app, the eBay unit said. They can also send an invoice and set payment terms, and accept PayPal payments from the app. The check facility is however only available in the U.S.

An iPhone version of the card reader and merchant app is available from Thursday to select merchants in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, with general availability in those countries scheduled for April. PayPal also plans to have an Android version of the merchant app by then. It will announce the availability of the service in more countries soon, it said.

Merchants pay a flat rate of 2.7 percent for card swipes and PayPal payments, while checks will be processed free of charge. Scanning of cards or typing the card information will be charged extra. PayPal Here merchants will also receive a business debit card for access to cash and 1 percent cash-back on eligible purchases.

PayPal will be competing with mobile payment systems from other providers such as Square and Intuit.

The key differentiator for PayPal Here in comparison to other small business mobile payment services is that it comes from a trusted brand in the online payments industry, with more than 100 million customers globally, David Marcus, vice president of mobile at PayPal said in a blog post.

Google Pressuring Developers

Google Inc has been leaning on applications and mobile game developers to use its more expensive in-house payment service, Google Wallet, as the Internet search giant tries to copy the financial success of Apple Inc’s iOS platform.

Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods – such as PayPal, Zong and Boku – their apps would be removed from Android Market, now known as Google Play, according to developers, executives and investors in mobile gaming and payment sectors.

Developers say the Internet search giant is trying to simplify consumer payments, hoping apps-buying will rise and offset their higher costs. Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering.

“Although this move by Google might seem high-handed, it reduces the friction for purchases inside Android apps and therefore makes users more valuable,” said Hugo Troche, chief executive of Appsperse, a cross-promotion network for app discovery.

Android Market, or Google Play as it is now known, is the company’s answer to Apple’s apps store, where consumers browse and buy or download everything from games and music to individual software or applications. Google wants Google Wallet to be the dominant way that people pay for anything on this platform.

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Remote Access Tools Threatens Smartphones

Malware tools that allow attackers to gain complete remote control of smartphones have become a major threat to owners around the world, security researchers say.

In a demonstration at the RSA Conference 2012 here Wednesday, former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who recently founded security firm CrowdStrike, installed a remote access tool on an Android 2.2-powered smartphone by taking advantage of an unpatched flaw in WebKit, the default browser in the OS.

The researchers showed an overflow audience how the malware can be delivered on a smartphone via an innocuous looking SMS message and then be used to intercept and record phone conversations, capture video, steal text messages, track dialed numbers and pinpoint a user’s physical location.

The tools used in the attack were obtained from easily available underground sources, Kurtz said. The WebKit bug, for instance, was one of 20 tools purchased from hackers for a collective $1,400.

The remote access Trojan used in the attack was a modified version of Nickispy a well-known Chinese malware tool.

Learning how to exploit the WebKit vulnerability and to modify the Trojan for the attack, was harder than expected, said Kurtz. He estimated that CrowdStrike spent about $14,000 in all to develop the attack.

But the key issue is that similar attacks are possible against any smartphone, not just those running Android, he said.

WebKit for instance, is widely used as a default browser in other mobile operating systems including Apple’s iOS and the BlackBerry Tablet OS. WebKit is also is used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers.

Several mobile remote access Trojans are already openly available from companies pitching them as tools that can be used to surreptitiously keep tabs on others.

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Europe Investigating Google’s Privacy Policy

France’s data protection watchdog is questioning the legality and fairness of Google’s new privacy policy, which it said breached European laws.

The CNIL regulator told Google in a letter dated February 27 it would lead a European-wide investigation of the web search giant’s latest policy and would send it questions by mid-March.

Google said in January it was simplifying its privacy policy, consolidating 60 guidelines into a single one that will apply for all its services, including YouTube, Gmail and its social network Google+.

The U.S. Internet company also said it will pool data it collects on individual users across its services, allowing it to better tailor search results and improve service.

Users cannot opt out of the new policy if they want to continue using Google’s services.

“The CNIL and EU data authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and its compliance with European data protection legislation,” the French regulator wrote to Google.

Google plans to put the changes into effect March 1 and has rebuffed two requests from European regulators for a delay.

The tussle over data privacy comes at a delicate time for Google, whose business model is based on giving away free search, email, and other services while making money by selling user-targeted advertising.

It is already being investigated by the EU’s competition authority and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how it ranks search results and whether it favors its own products over rival services.

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Google Had Developed Own Currency

Google once contemplated the idea of issuing its own currency, to be called Google Bucks, company Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said on stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,Spain on Tuesday.

At the end of his keynote speech, Schmidt hit on a wide array of topics in response to audience questions. “We’ve had various proposals to have our own currency we were going to call Google Bucks,” Schmidt said.

The idea was to implement a “peer-to-peer money” system. However, Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said. Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering with such proposals.

“Ultimately we decided we didn’t want to get into that because of these issues,” Schmidt said.

He also hinted that Google might be preparing for a battle in China once its acquisition of Motorola is complete.

“Google’s been willing to take on China pretty well,” he said in response to a question about whether Google expected to continue to ignore theft of Motorola intellectual property in China, as Motorola has been doing. The acquisition hasn’t closed yet, Schmidt noted. “We’ve taken a pretty strong position on IP. We are well aware of the issues and we are considering your question,” he said.

Google is still waiting for some government approvals of its proposed acquisition of Motorola.

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Big Boys Sign Consumer Privacy Pact

Six of the world’s top consumer technology companies have agreed to provide greater privacy disclosures before customers download applications in order to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, California’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard — and developers on their platforms — to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Harris.

Currently 22 of the 30 most downloaded apps do not have privacy notices, said Harris. Some downloaded apps also download a consumer’s contact book.

Google said in a statement that under the California agreement, Android users will have “even more ways to make informed decisions when it comes to their privacy.”

Apple confirmed the agreement but did not elaborate.

Harris was also among U.S. state lawmakers who on Wednesday signed a letter to Google CEO Larry Page to express “serious concerns” over the web giant’s recent decision to consolidate its privacy policy.

The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 U.S. attorneys general in their letter.

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Did Google Bypass Privacy Rules?

In the wake of reports that Google had circumvented privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft announced today it had discovered that the Web giant had done the same with Internet Explorer.

“When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?” IE executive Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a blog post this morning. “We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”

The blog post, which details Microsoft’s findings and offers privacy protection tips, said it has contacted Google about its concerns and asked it to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.”

Google countered that Microsoft backs a system that is dated and impractical.

“It is well known–including by Microsoft–that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern Web functionality,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy for Google, said in a statement to CNET this evening. “We have been open about our approach, as have many other Web sites.”

P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium that sites use to summarize their privacy policies.

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Intel Wants To Deliver Cheap Smartphones

Intel has revealed some additional information on the 2012 mobile strategy to its partners and it even shared some pricing guidelines for mobile products.

According to a slide entitled Mobile Landscape in 2012, Intel wants to sell mobile phones powered by its CPUs for as little as $199 to $299. This is where Intel sees a market opportunity for its phones and the prices are surprisingly low.

It also places netbooks in the same price range $199 to $299 while Intel based tablets should float between $399 and $499. Naturally more expensive options are always a reality. Tablets can go up to 12.1 inches and the starting price for these bigger machines should be $299, and in the high end the sky is the limit.

Hybrid notebooks should stay at less than $699 and this is a category where you can twist the display, slide the keyboard or even take the keyboard off from the netbook, or tablet. Think Asus’ Eee Pad Slider, Transformer, this will give you an idea of what to expect, but with x86 support. Phones, netbooks, hybrids and tablets are all based on Atom architecture.

Intel plans to sell laptops starting at $3xx and up. Probably slightly more than $300, but less than $400 is what they have in mind. Top notch notebooks based on Core i7 chips will start at less than $799 and Ultrabooks with 11-inch or larger screens might be coming down to $599 to $699. Of course, high end models will end up a lot pricier.

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Adobe Says No To Android’s Chrome

Chrome for Android will not run Flash Player, the popular software that Apple has famously banned, Adobe confirmed Wednesday.

The acknowledgment was no surprise: Last November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers. In other words, Google missed the Flash boat by several months.

“Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content,” said Bill Howard, a group product manager on the Flash team, in an Adobe blog Tuesday.

The stock Android browser included with the operating system does support Flash, noted Howard.

Adobe explained its decision to halt work on Flash Player for mobile browsers as necessary to shift resources, notably to its efforts on HTML5, the still-developing standard that will ultimately replace many of the functions Flash has offered.

“We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible,” Danny Winokur, the Adobe executive in charge of interactive development, said last year. He was referring to the World Wide Web Consortium standards body and WebKit, the open-source browser engine that powers Chrome and Apple’s Safari. “And we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve.”

Analysts read the move as a tacit surrender to the trend, first seen at Apple, to skip support for Flash on smartphones and tablets. In 2010, former Apple Steve Jobs had famously dismissed Flash as unsuitable for mobile devices because it was slow, drained batteries and posed security problems.

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The U.S. Is Falling Behind

The U.S. government is losing a race in cyberspace — a social-networking race for the hearts and minds of the Internet community, a computer security expert said Wednesday.

Other countries — and many companies — are using social-networking tools to their advantage, while the U.S. government has taken tiny steps forward, said Rand Waltzman, a program manager focused on cybersecurity at the U.S.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Chinese government pays citizens to patrol social-networking sites and dispute negative talk about all levels of government or any aspect of Chinese life, and companies such as Dell and Best Buy are training workers to respond to complaints on Facebook and other social-networking services, Waltzman said at the Suits and Spooks security conference in Arlington, Virginia.

U.S. regulations prevent the government from undertaking similar campaigns, he said. “Any time you want to go to the bathroom, you need presidential approval,” he said.

The U.S. will not be able to protect its residents if it cannot engage in its own covert social-media operations, Waltzman said.

Waltzman told about a U.S. special forces unit in Iraq in 2009 that attacked an insurgent paramilitary group, killed 16 of the members of the group and seized a “huge” weapons cache. As soon as the U.S. unit left the scene, the Iraqi group returned, put the bodies on prayer mats, and uploaded a photograph from a cheap mobile phone, he said. The group put out a press release in English and Arabic.

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