June 22nd, 2009

PayPal remains a good online shopping service thus far as it will need only three seconds to decide if it trusts us or if it will block the sale transaction right after we decide to buy something online and set up our first PayPal account.

Anyway, online shopping gives a much better description about a prospective customer than traditional bankers ever had because good people on the Internet leave footprints that consist of e-mail accounts, IP addresses and things that accumulate over time that we can find on the Internet if we poke around.

That kind of digital poking around typically does not find any evidence of someone who just made up an identity to commit a fraud.

Risk management had been the key to PayPal’s success. Even before it was purchased by eBay, the company was willing to let everyone selling on eBay accept credit cards, when banks and eBay itself found that concept of trusting someone who appeared out of nowhere over the Internet too frightening. There is greater potential for fraud by a seller than a buyer, because someone could sell a lot of stuff then disappear without shipping it)

PayPal has found is that the Internet actually reduces risk, because it provides so much information to identify potential fraud artists. So if it is a fraudster, we cannot find footprints because they go out of their way not to leave traces about who they are.

Last year, the company spent $169 million to buy Fraud Sciences, an Israeli company that specialized in this sort of data analysis. While Fraud Sciences sold a fraud prevention service to other merchants, PayPal is keeping the technology in-house.

Certainly it hopes to attract merchants claiming that PayPal helps detect fraudulent customers, and by reducing its own costs from fraudulent merchants, PayPal can lower fees to merchants.

E-commerce like links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms is a likely to become a revenue stream for Twitter, for it has now become one of the best shopping resources and in the future we can even move further and buy any product on the Twitter site.

Many companies have now used Twitter to monitor what customers say about them and offer discounts and promotions to their followers, while many use Twitter to ask for recommendations such as which kind of gadget to buy or which movie to watch.

Institutional Venture Partners today has invested in Twitter and this is an additional indication about how Twitter will make money, and  we can also expect Twitter to offer filters and feeds to sort tweets by whom they are from and what they are about.

Commerce-based search businesses are very profitable and if people use Twitter to get trusted recommendations from friends and followers on what to buy, e-commerce navigation and payments will certainly play a role in Twitter monetization.

Twitter will offer e-commerce with advice from other shoppers, an element that most search engines do not offer. Shopping on Twitter could also potentially be useful on mobile phones, on which it is more difficult to surf the Web. People might find it simpler to ask for advice on a product, pick it out and pay for it on the same site.

The company also expects to offer users the ability to sort their Twitter streams. Over time, Twitter will develop filters to help users manage and classify their tweet streams into useful categories like tweets from friends, family, celebrities, news organizations, charities.

Twitter might also offer interesting topics. For instance, if you are interested in laptop computers, there might be a Twitter stream that includes Dell Outlet or Media Geek like Felicia Day, and other electronic gadgets or Work at Home writers like RiverMaya, you might not otherwise have known about.

Some third-party Twitter applications, including TweetDeck, Filttr and twitTangle, already enable Twitter users to filter and sort their tweets.

That is the case with many features that Twitter might want to add someday. If the company does decide to include those features in the service, Twitter could either develop its own version, acquire a company already doing it or, most likely, team up with third-party developers and work out a revenue-sharing deal.

Sony has announced a new VAIO laptop, the new VAIO laptop name called “NW” series, complete with a Blu-ray drive and 15.5-inch WXGA display with XBRITE.

The new VAIO feature, 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7350, ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570 with 512MB VRAM, a 4x BD-ROM drive, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, webcam, 802.11a/b/g/n, a 400GB HDD, and a Li-ion battery that’s at best 5.5 hours in large capacity and at worst 1.5 hours with the standard-sized version, includes VGA, HDMI output and Memory Stick Pro, ExpressCard, and SD card slots.