Amazon.com Inc. launched hosted e-commerce payment services for merchants that want to use a third party solution for their online transaction processing tasks.

These services namely, Checkout By Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay, are the latest services for businesses introduced by Amazon, which is best known for its massive online retailing operation.

The products is going to compete with other established online payment services, which includes providers such as eBay PayPal and Google Checkout.

Amazon have described Checkout By Amazon as a “complete checkout solution” equivalent to the one that the company provides at its own online store.

MasterCard has announced that its PayPass chip technology will soon be available in cell phone form as a mobile contactless payment pilot across Canada.

They will be testing near-field communications (NFC) technology on the Bell network with phones from an unnamed vendor. The closed trial will be done with MasterCard Canada and Bell Canada employees.

The phones will be set up to PayPass accounts and will be used for small transactions at participating PayPass-enabled merchants like Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s, Loblaws, Cineplex Odeon, and plenty of gas chains.

The application is built into the NFC devices’ secure area, according to Nagesh Devata of MasterCard Canada’s Acceptance Development and New Products space. Secure over-the-air (OTA) provisioning of payment card credentials and the security of transactions on mobile phones will be tested during this test.

It’s December and best time for online sales, its right time to exploit the holiday season and make the best out of it by improving your sales and website offerings.

Currently I am working on some landing pages and I thought of sharing few ideas with you, there are few considerations that need to be kept in mind while creating a landing page. As landing pages are the specialized pages that your website visitors are directed to once they have clicked on an advertised link or via your sales newsletter.

Such a web page is focused on a particular product or service aiming at the visitor to quickly buy or take some instant of action that will ultimately lead to a conversion. It is based on my observation that although maximum percentage of your website visitors come on your homepage, but best conversions happen on website inner pages where visitors land directly through search engines. So each page is important.

There are varieties of approaches on different landing pages that you would see on most ecommerce or service based websites. Most common found are the landing pages which are based on offering deals just on product or service. Another type of landing pages will have one main offer and other penetration links that will lead them to other areas on your website, this approach helps if visitor is not interested in the main offering but it paves a way for them to explore more offers on your website.
Creating a successful Landing page is not child’s play it involves research and some introspection. You must know what your product offer is and who the potential buyers are. Then you must strategize on how to make it appealing and interesting enough. The Last thing but most important thing is to know what is going to be their “call to action”
How can they purchase or get more info.

Call to action
It is important that for your website visitor the call to action is clear and simple. Do not expect your website visitor to spend much time looking on the offer, if you are providing a link to a sign up form, or a buy now page it must be just that. The call to action if not linked to the order page or subscription form and has few more clicks in between it makes the process lengthy.

Concise & Crisp Message
There is no need to put a lot of content and add too may bells and whistles on your landing page. It should be focused at just what it is meant to do. Keep you message brief & crisp, but it should have clear information. It is important that you let them know that more information and clarification is available as few of your website visitors may need to inquire further more before they would like to make a purchase.

Rewards, Giveaways & Bonuses
Usually the landing page also seems to carry a ‘free’ or ‘add-on bonus’ along with the main offer. This is an effective way to delight your customer. One must try to either add a free give away along with the main offer. Either ways one can be creative at rolling out an offer which is a bundle or package deal and makes it value added for your website visitor.

Clean, Easy to Load
As you all know with increase in the use of handhelds you must create a page which is easy to open and works on all browser types and is compatible with all kinds of devices & screen sizes. Moreover, not everyone browses internet on broadband so the page must be easy to load and should not have too many images. Creating an appealing landing page is important but it is even more important to let it perfectly load on any browser and internet connection.

A tech savvy friend of mine asked me to try out Eloops, it is a collaboration suite that allows you to manage your work groups, back up your content, share data, calendars, files and much more from a single interface…its another web2.0 collaboration applications that have cropped up in recent times.

Eloops provides you with a neat application for sharing project information. Eloops has everything that your workplace needs to get collaboration rolling. Eloops includes a calendar, project list, task list, notes, a discussion board and file storage. It also includes a basic quoting and invoicing feature.

You can use Eloops to connect with your family or colleagues at your workplace as well as with your online stored data whenever you wish to access it. Eloops also offers synchronization with Outlook and your calendar items can be sent via SMS to your phone or pager.

Eloops can also create private and public groups for you to interact with. And undertake periodic data backups with Eloops to ensure that none of your precious data goes missing. Maintain multiple project information, and contact lists and assign specific projects to customers for billing purposes.

Share your Data in the form of calendars, pictures, documents, RSS feeds with your collaborators using Eloops. You can harness productivity and save a whole lot of time with Eloop’s integrated services by applying the Eloops both for personal as well as business use.

Qloud, a Washington, DC based startup, recently launched a music search with social networking features and tagging. Qloud music search allows a number of search options as users can search for music by artist, song, keyword, genre or a number of other criteria.

Upon finding a song it can be previewed, added to a wishlist, sent to a friend or purchased from a number of different music services (including AOL Music, Amazon and iTunes).

An interesting feature is the ability to export any search to an RSS feed, an email, or most importantly, a playlist to get onto your iPod.

Qloudscreenshot
Qloud uses social networking to allow users to add friends, view their music preferences and their recent activities. Qloud enables users to better organize music collections with tagging via the use of the Qloud iTunes Plugin. Upon installing the Qloud iTunes Plugin I found it could definitely help to find music within iTunes. Though I did not experience it myself, I have heard that the Qloud iTunes Plugin install could cause iTunes to be shaky potentially fail. So proceed at your own risk. It was definitely something that iTunes was lacking though I presume they will now try to add the feature. The tagging feature is shown in the screen-shot below - click the screen-shot for a closer look.

Qloud iTunes Plugin
Qloud has created a helpful Qloud tutorial as well as iTunes Plugin help to aid the adoption of the product. Also be sure to check out the Qloud blog. For other blogosphere perspectives visit GigaOm, Mashable! and PaulStamatiou.com.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 have jumped to nearly $4,000 on eBay listings after the gaming console was launched in the US this week.

As soon as the devices went on sale, eBay reported that close to 800 PlayStation 3 systems had sold at an average price of $2,716.

Sony is launching two models of its next-generation gaming console, a 20GB version at $500 and a 60GB version at $600. Games go for $60 each.

The company started selling the console at midnight on Thursday, five days after the launch in Japan.

Sony made 100,000 systems available in Japan, while the 400,000 units available for the US are expected to sell out within days.

The scarcity of the system caused long queues outside shops, with some eager buyers camping out for days to guarantee one of the coveted systems.

A frenzied midnight rush on shelves caused authorities to close a Wal-Mart store in California, and caused injuries at a store in Wisconsin, according to an Associated Press report.

Limited supply and the spike in demand gave rise to a flourishing market on eBay. By Friday morning in the US the consoles were selling for more than $2,500.

Sellers offering free overnight shipping and bundled games in some cases saw bids of more than $3,850.

Numerous sellers asked up to $15,000 for their consoles, but failed to attract any bids.

Lendmonkey is a free-membership Media trading community which allows members to trade in media items like books, movies, games, music.

Lendmonkey is a media swapping site that helps you trade movies, games, books, and music. You can put up titles you have and are interested in bartering or you can alternatively search for movies, books etc you need and pick it from members who have listed it. Every successful delivery entitles the sender to a credit which can e collected and later used for other trades.

It also has a RSS feed which gives you a list of latest items put up on Lendmonkey.

Motorola has acquired Good Technology, maker of push email and secure connectivity software for handheld devices, the companies announced today. The two companies have previously been in a business relationship, and the acquisition is said to extend Motorola’s mobile computing capabilities and enterprise client base.

Good Technology’s push email solution is used in the popular Motorola Q smartphone, and is designed to compete with market leader Research In Motion’s Blackberry service. Over the last six years, Good Technology has received over US$200 million in funding, though the specifics of Motorola’s acquisition were not disclosed.

The deal is expected to close early 2007 pending regulatory approval and other customary conditions.

Vouchor is your online key to identity management. You can use Voucher ID’s to gain access to dozens of affiliated sites and also your Numly account to preserve your Copyrighted content.

Vouchor is an identity 2.0 service, brought to you by the makers of the copyrighting application- Numly. Vouchor was created to establish certified Numly IDs.

As Numly allows authors and artists to register their digital works as copyrights. Assigning them with Numly numbers as a form of identification. Numly serves as a source of non-repudiation verifying that certain works were submitted by certain user ids at certain times. To prove a copyright claim, Numly needs to know to whom the user id belongs.

The Vouchor service consists of an international community of vouchors rather than a governmental agency charged with verifying web user identities. Anyone can become a vouchor - either by mailing your paperwork to Numly or by being vouched by someone who has already been vouched. Vouchors can review your paperwork in person and verify your identity online. Once you are vouched online, you automatically become a vouchor.

You can make use of Vouchor APIs to verify user identities as well. Vouchor ensures that your email addresses are really yours and your identity is really yours even if you are using a pen name by which your true user identity will never be revealed. As a Voucher user, you are more likely to be trusted than anonymous users. Use your vouched identity on EBay, CraigsList, Amazon, Yahoo, and other services.

After years of super hype and speculations, the latest round of video game console wars is finally about to begin.The sleek PlayStation 3 by Sony Corp. is the priciest system, crammed with the very latest in cutting-edge technology. The Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp., meanwhile, has had a yearlong head start to build a fan base.By touting intuitive controls over fancy graphics, Nintendo Co. has billed its Wii as a simpler, cheaper alternative to Microsoft’s and Sony’s offerings.

If you compare the trio to automobiles, said Bruno Bonnell, chairman and chief creative officer at publishing giant Atari Inc., the PS3 “is a kind of prototype Formula 1. The Wii is definitely a fun car, a Mini Cooper or a Beetle, something that everybody can enjoy riding. The 360 fulfills so much of the demand of the standard player, it’s one of the Toyotas or standard GM cars.”

The Wii and the PS3 go on sale in the United States within two days of each other this month, but getting one in time for Christmas could be a daunting task.

“November is going to be the most exciting month for video games for probably the next five or six years,” said Tom Russo, editorial director at the G4 Games cable television network. “But everyone’s going to sell out this season.”

Sony, which has already delayed the PS3 launch twice, expects to have only 400,000 PS3s available for its Nov. 17 U.S. launch. Already, bidders on eBay have staked their claim on pre-ordered systems for more than $2,300 — almost four times higher than the system’s top retail price.

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Nintendo expects to have 4 million Wiis ready worldwide when the console hits store shelves Nov. 19, with the bulk of those going to North America.

Microsoft, burned by supply shortfalls during the Xbox 360’s launch last Christmas, expects to sell more than 10 million systems by the end of 2006.

Worldwide, Sony expects to ship only 2 million units by year’s end instead of an original projection of 4 million, but a company executive shrugged off long-term supply concerns and expressed confidence that manufacturing problems will soon be fixed.

“Regardless of what the number is, we’re going to take knocks,” said Jack Tretton, executive vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America. “It really has no bearing on what we’re ultimately going to sell.”

All three devices are taking the video game industry in new directions and promise to serve as centerpieces for an era of digital entertainment where games, movies and music coexist in a single, Internet-enabled box. But games will continue to be the main draw.

The Wii, pronounced “We,” will be available for $250. Instead of sheer computing power, the Wii’s primary attraction is a wireless controller that tracks movements to mimic a football pass or the swing of a golf club.

The Wii can’t display high-definition video, and the system’s storage and processing power are limited compared to the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Perrin Kaplan, vice president for marketing at Nintendo’s U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Wash., said the Wii is about attracting newcomers to video games, so cutting-edge technology isn’t needed.

“We’re not launching rocket ships,” she said. “Everyone is going to bigger, badder machines. We have taken a complete right turn. It either fails or succeeds, and we’re not afraid of that.”

Two flavors of Sony’s sleek black or silver PS3 will debut: a $600 version with a 60-gigabyte hard drive, built-in wireless and a Blu-ray player for high-def video. A version costing $100 less has a 20-gigabyte drive and fewer features.

Returning with a few tweaks from last year, the Xbox 360 comes in two models costing $300 and $400, depending on options. An attachment to play high-def movies in the HD DVD format, chief rival to the PS3’s Blu-ray standard, is expected this month for an additional $200.

The new consoles come at a critical time for the video game business, which has grown in fits and starts from the simple days of “Pong” in the 1970s to an entertainment industry worth roughly $10 billion in the United States. That exceeds the $9 billion Hollywood grossed last year on domestic ticket sales, according to analyst estimates and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Software companies, in particular, have reason to rejoice after languishing in a sales vacuum created by shoppers who stopped buying games for older systems in anticipation of the new consoles.

Now analysts are predicting solid growth, with Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets expecting the games business to expand at a healthy 15 to 20 percent for at least the next two years.

Sony dominated the previous generation with 70 percent of the global market, including 35 million PlayStation 2 consoles in the United States. The original Xbox was second with nearly 15 million sold, followed by 11 million Nintendo GameCubes.

In the newest round, Sebastian predicts Sony will grab about half of the market, with Microsoft and Nintendo splitting the difference. That would mean Sony loses share, while Nintendo makes some gains.

All three devices will succeed in the short term because of pent-up demand and the lack of supply, said David Cole, president of market research firm DFC Intelligence.

“We’ll have to wait, I think until holiday 2007 and even into 2008, before we start making really definitive judgments about what consumers are saying about these systems,” Cole said.

Source: AP