Soon, buyers can use PayPal offline, too
Published 3:00 pm Friday, May 14, 2010
The waiter comes to your table and asks: “Will you be paying by cash, credit or PayPal?”
Don’t be surprised to hear that question six months or a year from now, says John Donahoe, the CEO of PayPal’s parent company, eBay Inc. Although PayPal is best known as a way to pay people or buy things online, the service is eyeing more opportunities offline.
Last fall, PayPal opened its system to make it easier for outside software developers to create Web services or mobile applications that use PayPal as a payment engine. Since then nearly 30,000 developers have signed up to create PayPal-based applications.
Among the third-party apps in the works are services that would let restaurants or retailers collect payments over PayPal on a customer’s mobile phone, Donahoe said.
New LEDs emit light and music
Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are starting to become cost-effective alternatives to standard light bulbs and fluorescent tubes. That opens up some interesting possibilities, such as the combination LED light and speaker Osram Sylvania announced.
The MusicLite, due out this fall, has a standard screw-in socket and fits in regular cans for so-called recessed lighting, common in offices and newer homes. The 10-watt cluster of LEDs puts out light equivalent to a 65-watt reflector bulb, and backs it up with a 25-watt speaker.
The MusicLites will be sold in pairs with a wireless audio transmitter that reaches about 90 feet.
New lighting gets stimulus cash
A new type of power-efficient lighting — thin, flat panels of materials known as organic light-emitting diodes — is getting an injection of federal stimulus money.
Universal Display Corp. said this week that it and a partner company are getting $4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a pilot factory for OLEDs. The money comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the bill that provided $787 billion in economic stimulus funds.
Universal Display is based in Ewing, N.J., but the location of the plant has not been decided yet.
New WiGig could replace video cables
The industry group that supports Wi-Fi is adopting a new technology that should boost data speeds more than 10 times at short distances, which could replace video cables in the home entertainment center.
The Wi-Fi Alliance said it is joining up with the Wireless Gigabit Alliance, or WiGig, which has been developing ways to exploit the 60 gigahertz frequency band for extremely high data speeds between devices in the same room.
The technology will probably take two years to show up in products. The first ones might be Blu-ray players that can send video signal wirelessly to TV sets.
Firefox improves privacy features
The next version of the Firefox browser, set for release by the end of the year, will pare down the software’s menus and certain user options while giving Web surfers more control over privacy.
Firefox 4 promises to let users better control relationships with websites by describing more simply what information is gathered by cookies, which are files that store data on website visits.
In Firefox’s current version, determining which websites are peering into users’ Internet habits is a complex process involving many menus and submenus.
Associated Press
