Path to Mobile Payments

This story about mobile payments sheds light on what decisions need to be made in terms of payment processing before mobile payments can really take off. A lot of the terms discussed are over my head, but it's good to know these discussions are already happening because I intend to take advantage of mobile payments for myself and for my clients.

I recently read this story in Bank Technology, a magazine I get for free:

How Will Payments Ride Rails

2Lingual: Bilingual Google Search

I am fluent in Spanish and English and so the 2Lingual.com service is very useful to me when doing Google searches. Be sure to have the Google setting to show results for both languages you are using.

PicLens

If you have a site with photos or videos you may want to partner with PicLens.com because they offer an incredible interface for browsing your photos or videos. I definitely plan to use them once I have my site up full of photos. I am now using it to browse my Flickr and SmugMug photos.

Plurk: A Twitter Killer?

I recently ran into this article entitled Social Media Wheels Keep On Turning‚ And Fast! and discovered a service called Plurk.com which is similar to Twitter. According to the article Plurk does many more things better than Twitter. It argues that Twitter is more popular because it was first to market. I took at look at Plurk and it has a very interesting interface. I'd like to know what you think of it in comparison to Twitter.

Managers for Outlook Email

If you use Outlook for email there are two plugins you can use to help you manage all your email. Wired magazine has a good review. Here is an excerpt:

Among other cool tricks, Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. It identifies, for instance, who your most important contacts are, what time of day they typically send email, and how long it takes you to reply to one another.

Xobni.com
ClearContext.com

International E-Commerce Blog

I stumbled upon a new blog about International E-Commerce.

http://www.dobbeltaa.dk/

I am sure if I use Technorati.com I can find more.

China Payment Systems

I finally got busy searching for payment systems for China, and I stumbled upon some new ones I had not heard about. It turns out payment systems and trust are lacking in China and just beginning to get known. I read an interesting article that sheds light on the current situation in China. Here are some payment systems to keep an eye on.

Ecapay.com
YeePay.com
Alipay.com

If you know of any international payment systems, please let me know.

mChek: Another Mobile Pay

A while back I wrote about the California-based Obopay. India has their own version called mChek.com. There is also news that Obopay plans to expand its services from the States to India. Hopefully into China soon.

Need a Voice?

If you have a script for someone to read who has a really nice-sounding voice then you can find voice talented people at:
Voices.com
Voice123.com

On the other hand, if you have a great voice, you can sign up to sell your voice talent.

PollDaddy: Create A Poll

Want to create a poll? Just use PollDaddy.com and send out to your targeted audience to participate. Then collect and analyze the data.

Flip It ʇı dılɟ

I found this Flip tool from the story on TechCrunch. I tried it within my corporate Lotus Notes and yes it works there too. ¡ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı sıɥʇ

SlideShare.net: My New Research Tool

I started using SlideShare.net as a research tool because it provides me with concise information in the form of slides. People who want to share their presentation slides upload them for anyone to see. I am current conducting research on "social e-commerce" and "social networks". Many slides provide links to other useful information such as books, blogs, etc.

ThisNext: Explore, Shop, Rave

Here is a social network of people who are exploring products, shopping and raving about products they like. It is a good source of people to which you can push your product so they can spread the word about it. I need to do the same, once I get my product done. I have seen others like this service and will need to review what those are. I will come back and update this list. You can also help by commenting about others you may know. Thanks!

ThisNext.com

Watch Global Twitters

At TwitterVision.com you can watch near real-time twits (or tweets) as they happen. It's like watching TV but only of all the global twitters talking. It is amazing to ponder that this is happening live, perhaps with a few minutes of delay. What else could be possible to monitor in near real time across the world that is useful for individuals?

What about all this data that TwitterVision is showing? Is it possible to build some historical trends about its content? For example, where are the most tweets coming from? What are the top 10 things people are doing in the morning, at noon, and at night? What two countries mutually follow each others' twits the most (does this mean these two countries are the friendliest to each other)?
Is it also possible (perhaps using Microsoft Labs Translations) to translate all the twits into the viewing user's preferred language?

It is very interesting that today there are people all around the world talking about the iPhone. For example, I just learned the iPhone has sold-out in Seattle city-wide. People all over are mentioning the long lines. Just from this, you can tell the world needs more iPhones and you can tell people hate long lines. What other needs do people have that are obvious in these conversations?

TwitterVision is almost like being God and watching all these conversations. Of course, it would be overwhelming for any individual to monitor all of them as they happen. Perhaps one could apply various filters to refine the types of conversations one is interested in. The hard-core monitoring and trend analysis would need to be done by super-computers.

SocialCalc: A Wiki Spreadsheet

Need to build community-managed spreadsheets of data? Use SocialCalc along with SocialText to get a full-featured wiki with spreadsheets. What would this be useful for? Think of any public data that would be useful to have online and managed by the same people who use it.  You could initially seed the data yourself. Then let anyone who uses it be able to manage it as well.

SocialCalc

iPhone Incredible Apps

I'm sure everyone is hyped about the iPhone being available in stores tomorrow and I'm sure every other blog has some kind of story about the iPhone, so I decided to put out my two cents worth of blogging on it as well.

I just got done reading the NYT article For iPhone, the 'New' Is Relative and here is an excerpt I like about some of the apps coming for it:

Apple has demonstrated 16 of these programs, including an instant message program, an eBay auction tracker, medical references and a touch-sensitive musical keyboard; the best of them exploit the iPhone's orientation sensor, wireless technologies and other high-tech components.

One coming program, called iCall, will give you free phone calls when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another, called G-Park, exploits G.P.S. to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is "a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone's G.P.S. and motion sensor.

You can also expect to see a time and expense tracker, home-automation remote control, voice recorder, Etch-a-Sketch, a recipe box, tip calculator, currency converter, e-book reader and so on.

Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine. The games revealed so far feature smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control; in one driving simulator, you turn the iPhone itself like a steering wheel, and your 3-D car on the screen banks accordingly. Other games exploit the multitouch screen, so you and a buddy can sit at opposite ends of the screen and fire at each other.

myJambi: Market Your Services

Here is another service by which to market your skills to the world. On the other hand, if you are looking for a freelancer, you can look here as well.

MyJambi.com

Others I can think of now are:
freelance.com
guru.com

They are easy to find, just google "freelance"

Citi Mobile: Pay by SMS

Citibank is testing a new system in the Philippines that allows registered users to pay merchants by texting. This sounds a lot like one of my concepts for paying by text for which I have reserved the domain textpaying.com. So when you go to a restaurant, your waiter will ask, "Will you be textpaying today?"

Read about CitiMobile.

Ashley Furniture Uses SMS

Read about the success Ashley Furniture is having with text messaging.

Also take note of how they are building up their database of permission-based phone numbers of users.

Also note how they use different keywords appearing in different print ads so they can measure the response of each ad.

Very interesting. I'm sure you can think of how to apply this knowledge to other industries.

They are using MobileStorm

Tips For Own RoR Social Network

Nice list of tips/plugins for coding your own social network site with Ruby on Rails (RoR).

Building A Social Networking Site in Rails