Payvment is a US based startup with an online shopping cart offering as a webservice. They makes use of PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments API, which was developed in an effort to compete with Amazon’s Flexible Payments API. PayPal’s API gives developers, and Payvment in this case, full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments. So now, with Payvment’s Facebook app, anyone can open up a retail storefront on Facebook.

Payvment’s network character disconnects the shopping cart from the store, just like in a store in store concept. Just keep shopping through different stores and put stuff in your cart. In other words, Payvment creates a unified shopping cart across Facebook for buyers. Standalone sites who want to use Payvment’s shopping cart experience can also implement Facebook Connect, to let consumers access their personal shopping cart from Facebook.

The Payvment technology is offered as a free web service. The only costs incurred are the PayPal fees for the user. According to Facebook and this screenshot, the solution should be available outside the US soon.

The conversation and the controversy on privacy also around mobile apps the their collection of only partially anonymous data will go on and with Google’s latest announcement it won’t get any better. And my point to accept sharing data with out loosing anything but for the benefit of a greater good gets lots of support through this:

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone <..> your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part <..> and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Google’s response to your immediate privacy concerns is

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions <..>. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection.

I do not think a “I’m doing 120 here on this little road – there can not be any congestion here” message from my mobile phone will hold enough usable evidence to fine me for speeding. And should I consider robbing a bank or killing my neighbor and have the intention to escape by car and know that this is my only weak spot to not be caught, I will seriously consider to opt-out of the service before departure.

If you’d like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

Cant wait to see this work in Europe/Zurich/Stuttgart(?)…

Read more details on the Google blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/bright-side-of-sitting-in-traffic.html

Publishers who distribute content, media and applications on the web want to understand how, where and by whom their assets are being consumed. This is a question very often answered by Google Analytics, a tool based on JavaScript and Cockies to track user behavior on the web that comes bundled with a nice analytics service and reporting engine to draw conclusions out of the collected data. Some people argue that the analytics are not all actionable or do not lead to any actions, but Google is the most popular today – by far.

With the mobile web finally becoming a reality thanks to the iPhone, the distribution channels of digital assets to consumers today include not only mobile sites but more and more also mobile applications and especially iPhone applications. For the consumer the difference between the two is small and sometimes even not noticed, but for distributors of content moving to iPhone applications is quite a change when it comes to analytics. For websites optimized to show on the iPhones web browser one can rely on the same tracking and analytics functionality from Google. But iPhone applications are not supported.

Quite early in time, Pinch Media started providing an analytics library and service very similar to Google Analytics that can be used for user tracking in iPhone applications.

Pinch Analytics is software that collects anonymous usage data from mobile phone applications, and presents it in aggregated form. <..> Using Pinch Analytics will provide you with information about how your application is being used, which you can then use to improve and enhance it.

So Pinch Media is really a Google Analytics for the iPhone and they also track the same type of data. But also since the revelation of the Palm Pre collecting user data and constantly updating the vendor about them, the community seems to see this differently. The current conversation considers tracking user behavior in iPhone apps spying on them and using their bandwidth for the tracked data stealing from them. Two of the differences are an assumed less anonymous character of a device id of the iPhone over an IP address and the higher accuracy of a geo location based on real latitude and longitude and not just the location of your provider IP location.

The German newspaper Die Zeit also considers Pinch Media spyware and suggests a firewall for the iPhone. At least the blocking part of such a firewall is now available to users of cracked iPhones through Jay Freeman’s privaCy tool.

Pinch Media have in the mean time reacted and now also offer a version of their tool with an extended option for users to opt-out of the user tracking. And this requires the developers to update the existing iPhone apps.

I am sure a lot of developers will update their apps and carefully consider whether to use analytics libraries or not in the future. The is in line with the typical patterns of the consumerized mobile and web business and this is good. But I do not like the term spyware. Wikipedia says about Spyware:

Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Pinch media is able to derive relevant conclusions out of their intelligence that do not harm the user but help the developer of the application.

An approach I really like is the one of Twitterfon. They have a free and a commercial version of their app and for the free one they expect their users to agree to sharing some of their data. Get something for free but give something back that does not cost you anything that can be valuable for the vendor.

What do you think?

From the Google Wave Developer Blog:

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation.
The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Through their labs Adobe has launched a new service called Adobe Wave.

Adobe Wave is a client application (based on Air) that will keep you informed about updates to subscribed services. The subscriptions are handled by a service by Adobe.

With Adobe Wave, get all of your notifications through a single application. You don’t have to worry about downloading a separate notification application for each website.

Why can’t they find their own name? And how can they think this will not confuse the consumer? And why would they believe this confusion won’t be of a disadvantage for Adobe?

Check out the new offering here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/

I’ve been trying dozens of online storage and backup services in the last couple of years. I also have some experience with (Enterprise) Content and Document Management and have an understanding of the benefits and challenges with cloud based and SaaS services.

So here comes dropbox. Dropbox are quite successful in revolutionizing the way people (including myself) think about and access their files. In particular, they make it easy to securely share files with other people, sync them across multiple computers, access them from anywhere, and keep them. Safe.

I’m currently involved in three different projects with distributed teams and with no Alfresco or the like at hand, dropbox was the answer to all document based collaboration. And the feedback from the teams is: a very satisfactory one.

Dropbox has an online web client for document management including

• online storage and retrieval
• sharing
• versioning
• special support for pictures
• update notification (incl. RSS)
• account information and settings and
• installation support for OS specific clients

They provide clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and the web client has a special iPhone output version. I just love the Growl integration. Check the screencast for a detailed introduction and to see what I mean here.

Dropbox is a tech startup based in San Francisco. They are funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners and since launching end of last year they have attracted over a million users.

Get Dropbox here.

Online social media, meaning social networking and all 2.0 style platforms following the principles of the architecture of participation are growing rapidly and get a ton of interest across industries. The understanding is, that these compelling interaction communities are the new access to consumer behavior and thus need to be leveraged for marketing and sales to outperform the competition. Harris Interactive has done a poll earlier this month to address the question whether Online Social Media really leverage behavior or they just act as communication enablers:

When it comes to making purchase decisions, consumers obtain information using a mixture of old media and new media and those that would constitute “push” (advertising and websites) and “pull” (information from neutral, informal communication).

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,355 U.S. adults surveyed online between March 9 and 16, 2009 by Harris Interactive.

The most frequently identified methods of gathering information were:

• Using a company website (36%),
• Face-to-face with a salesperson or other company representative (22%), and
• Face-to-face with a person not associated with the company (21%).

Other frequently mentioned methods or sources were:

• Advertising in print media (19%),
• Independent websites that have reviews (19%),
• Phone call to the company (16%), and
• Public or private social networking sites (4%).

See the report here: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_06_15.pdf

The poll results are really quite interesting. But I am missing the demand and lead generation role of Online Social Media and their impact on the overall marketing and sales funnel. Obviously people do not go on Facebook to find the right brand to choose for their new car, but I’m quite sure that conversations on social media sites generate a lot of demand and leads that then later enter into the controlled and monitored sales process through one of the above mentioned channels.

Techcrunch has published their True Value of Social Networks Report for 2009 and the information actually made it on the front page of today’s tagesanzeiger.

The number given for Switzerland is 1.859 million unique users per month, which means almost 25% of the Swiss population visit Facebook regulary.

Marcel Weiss has a good analysis explaining why Facbook overtook Myspace on netzwertig today (German) distinguishing between platforms for communication and such for publication and the ability to retain an anonymous (alias) user.

I remember writing email to only to three other students in the CS lab and to the one other admin that I worked with as a student. It was not really reliable, because you had no idea when and if at all the person would actually get the message (“Did you get my email about…”) and there were hardly any people that would have an email address (that they knew of or had proper access to). The other cool thing at the time where SMS text messages. My first mobile phone subscription in Germany came with unlimited free SMS – no one thought that the service would be relevant or actually be able to generate substantial revenues and it came at almost no additional cost for the operators.

In the mean time the almost 40 year old email and 25 year old SMS have become the most widely used data applications world wide (read a great article on SMS and its user base and reach here).

Only in recent years we see the continuously increasing messaging traffic growing in other channels like instant messaging and online chats, collaboration platforms including wikis and forums, blogging and micro blogging and the cross syndication of those – even in larger corporations and enterprises (tell companies how to use Twitter at http://256.dk and get access to the data here at http://aleqz.com).

But each channel has more or less their own primary purpose and the very synchronous (IM, chat, etc) and very asynchronous (email, forums, wikis etc) ways of exchanging messages do not mix very well with the standard messaging clients today. As much as I always believed, that it was important to determine the most effective delivery mode since it directly impacts the level of interaction, micro blogging services like Twitter seem to prove me wrong or at least render the question irrelevant, as they seem to be able to address both – depending on how you use the service (and set up your client).

And even more “both” is in Google Wave. Google Wave is a soon to be open sourced framework for distributed messaging and collaboration platforms. It perfectly combines asynchronous email type messaging with instant messaging capabilities (both look extremely usable) and adds collaboration as content is not categorized as message, stream or document before selecting the sharing and editing metaphor.
The user experience is equally compelling like with Google Maps – no surprise with the two Rasmussen brothers on board of the Australian team. Drag and drop from the desktop, context sensitive action menus inside the content and concurrent live editing by multiple users are just a few highlights of what was shown at Google I/O.
Other features include wave history and playback of changes, Android and iPhone mobile browser support, versioning and version control, extensible content model to support more than just rich text content, embed API (as in maps: APIs make it happen) and plugin architecture. The chess game plugin definitely benefits from the history/playback feature but the spell checker, the link checker and the real time translation are genius tools already by them selves. Doodle will not like the Yes/No/Maybe plugin too much I assume.

Google Wave has only be announced an a small group of users is currently testing an early version. But if Google gets is half as right as they did with Maps, Google Waves is going to become the platform for most of the communication that is today distributed over hundreds of networks, platforms and technologies. What Facebook provided as the combination of micro blogging, picture gallery and exchange and address book is going to be available from a Google supported open source community with additional features and integrations. And this combination and the fact that Google is opening it up AND giving it into the hands of the community might be the right foundation for a new standard way of communication.

Curious to see how the mobile and address book service for non internet devices is going to be addressed.

The product: wave.google.com
The platform: code.google.com/apis/wave
The protocol: www.waveprotocol.org

The Best of Swiss Web Awards are the most coveted awards for e-business, Internet and mobile projects in Switzerland since 2001. A total of 277 projects were submitted to the jury this year in eight categories. A panel of 80 experts has revealed this year’s winners of the Best of Swiss Web Awards and one of our projects we successfully delivered in 2008, me2me, was awarded twice with this accolade which honours Switzerland’s top websites.

Congratulations go to our partners Liip AG for winning the Master of Swiss Web with their iPhone Application. Gottago is an amazing application and was for long the most popular free app in Switzerland. With open sourcing the project to Transport, Marc took a bold move that deserves every recognition.

The special topic of this year’s award was “Women wired in Web” and I had the pleasure to share a table with Maya and Terry from byteKultur, a women only web and design agency focussing on Joomla based website implementations. Interestingly enough the jury did not find the fact that a bunch of girls with no support from any boys run their own business relying on an open source project and the community worth mentioning. Instead they awarded a larger campaign project that was leveraging a female celebrity and recognized a bunch of submissions with female supporting roles. Hm. If you ever need a small but good piece of design or look for some Joomla experts, got check out byteKultur.net.

me2me was awarded the Best of Swiss Web Technology Innovation Silver Award and the Business Efficiency Bronze Award 2009.

The project was also a nominee for the 2009 Master of Swiss Web.