Technology News Videos And Resources
Yahoo.com is down again for the second time in as many weeks. Which is news because Yahoo never goes down. Except recently. And they’re probably so busy dealing with that outage that no one noticed that Halloween is over, and so they should probably stop promoting it on Yahoo Shopping.
Will the last person out please turn the lights back on?
About a month ago, we noted that LeWeb would be getting a bit more TechCrunch flavor this year. For the seventh iteration of the popular tech conference based in Paris, France, organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur decided to make their startup competition a bit more like a mini-TechCrunch Disrupt. That is, of the 16 startups launching, 3 will get time on the big stage to present in front of everyone and a winner will be chosen. And that won’t be the only TechCrunch influence felt.
As you can see on the just-released program for LeWeb ’10, TechCrunch names are all over the agenda. A group of us are slated to interview some of the big names in tech on stage during the two-day conference, which takes place on December 8 and 9 this year. And there seem to be a range of other interesting talks and panels as well.
A taste of the highlights:
And, of course, the Disrupt-like startup competition finals with be hosted by our own Michael Arrington and August Capital partner David Hornik.
For a longer intro, be sure to check out Loic and Geraldine’s full rundown in the video below. And if you’re interested in attending, use this link for a 200 euro discount for TechCrunch readers. Hopefully we’ll see some of you in Paris in a few weeks.
In conjunction with the company’s developer conference, PayPal announced a slew of news and product releases this week, including a new micropayments product and an apps platform for businesses. But tucked away in a release was another piece of news from PayPal that could be huge. PayPal just released a new version of its popular iPhone app that allows users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. Launching in San Francisco initially, the feature encourages merchants to attract nearby customers to their stores by posting deals and promotions to the app as an incentive for customers to visit their businesses.
Customers can search by category and location, and find and select stores, services, or special offers. Users can pick up the goods or services in person, but pay the merchant using their PayPal app. Users can also use tags from Bling Nation, a startup that has partnered with PayPal to use the startup’s mobile payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.
One of the big selling points around using PayPal for merchants is the ability to offer deals as an incentive to drive buyers to a store or restaurant. Whether it be Groupon-like daily deals or just ordinary coupons, there’s no doubt that deals do help drive online to offline sales.
PayPal President Scott Thompson tells TechCrunch (see video below) that eventually this local feature will have “ubiquity,” meaning you’ll be able to access these merchant listings and pay with PayPal wherever you are in the world. Local is one of the key parts of PayPal’s future strategy, says Thompson. He’s confident that has the world becomes more connected, eventually all local merchants will accept PayPal as a payments option for in-store purchases.
For PayPal, local payments certainly makes sense. Online to offline sales is a big part of local commerce, and if PayPal can become a payments mechanism in the local market, it could be pay off in revenue for the company.
One competitor worth noting in the local payments space is Google Checkout. While Google Checkout doesn’t have as extensive of a reach as PayPal, Google Checkout has an ace in the hole when it comes to Google Places. Google Places allows local businesses to claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, “happy hour tonight”), post reviews, create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons. And Google indexes and highlights these pages in search results, most recently launching a more integrated placement of Places page within Google search.
Google could easily turn on a transaction (such as a daily deal) for these merchants, and use Google
Checkout as the payments mechanism. The same experience could extend to mobile phones.
The advantage Google has over PayPal is that with Places, these relationships with local merchants are already built into the search giants business. At last count a few months ago, Google had Places pages in place for over 4 million businesses but I’m sure this number is higher. PayPal on the other hand will have to forge new relationships with all these local businesses to get them on board with their payments platform. Not only do they have to find the businesses, but PayPal has to teach them how to use their mobile apps as a payment mechanism. Scaling PayPal’s local feature will be a huge endeavor for the company, which is why PayPal is testing the feature out in a limited market in the San Francisco.
This why it makes sense for PayPal to form partnerships on its local endeavor. Google is an unlikely partner considering that the company already has its own payments platform. Facebook Places could be a potential partner (PayPal is already a micropayments partner for the social network’s virtual currency platform Credits). Facebook is rumored to be turning on a deals feature for Places and PayPal could be a way to process these payments. And Groupon is rumored to be brokering a payments deal with PayPal as well.
So while Google Checkout still doesn’t have the sort of users numbers that PayPal does in the payments area, Google has much more in the war chest in terms of local. With local up for grabs, the battle between the two payments platform just got a whole lot more interesting.
Nearly a year ago, Microsoft pulled together a group of reporters for Bing Fall Release event. The highlight of the presentation was a demo showing off some nifty new features in Bing Maps. The problem? All of this stuff required Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in to work. I berated the company for once again pushing users towards a more proprietary web. So today it’s time to laud them, as they seem to be backing away from that strategy.
During last week’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley asked Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s SVP of the Server and Tools Business, why the company failed to highlight Silverlight in a meaningful way this year. His answer was rather surprising.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. And while he said that the technology has some “sweet spots” for media applications (presumably like Netflix, which uses Silverlight on the web), its role as a vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime appears to be over. “Our strategy has shifted,” is how Muglia put it.
Instead, as they made clear during PDC, Microsoft is putting their weight behind HTML5 going forward. Hallelujah.
Microsoft’s new IE9 web browser (which is in public beta testing) will be a big part of this strategy. And presumably, a lot of the things that currently require Silverlight, like some of those nifty Bing Maps features, will move to HTML5 going forward. Again, that’s great news.
So why is Microsoft doing this? It seems that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. They likely know that’s it’s going to be much harder to make a dent in the new developer world order with Silverlight, which still has a relatively small market penetration and no penetration in mobile, than with HTML5, which is (or shortly will be) everywhere — including all of Apple’s devices.
“HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia told Foley.
This is a very different tone than Muglia had just a year ago, when he and then Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie were out on the circuit drumming up support for Silverlight with hopes that it would become a new de-facto standard like Adobe’s Flash. It’s not clear if Ozzie’s imminent departure from the company has anything to do with this change of tone or vice versa.
Regardless, Silverlight will now be mainly known as the development platform for Windows Phone going forward. In other words, the way to make native apps for those devices. But for just about everything else, it will be HTML5 or bust. And that’s great news for all end users. It’s one less plug-in to download. And it’s another step towards a unified web.
