Web Development Live

Everything’s ready to go. Piles of 11 different kinds of shirts and pants for girls ages 5 to 12 sit stacked on shelves in RealKidz’s office in Ypsilanti’s Depot Town. Boxes, envelopes, tissue paper and clear plastic bags are nearby.

As of Friday, the company had made only one sale, to a Michigan woman who bought a pair of capri pants and a T-shirt. Though the company’s Web site, www.realkidzclothing.com, went live the evening of April 30, it has been plagued with glitches.

Only since Monday has it been operating trouble-free. Initially, the Web site will be the key driver of sales for the company.

Getting to this point wasn’t easy.

In late April, after an Illinois manufacturer had shipped the clothes, Guerra discovered that the inside bottom seams on one product, a pair of crop pants with cuffs, had not been sewn correctly. That meant sending back 100 pairs of pants.

Then, every time she thought her Web site was ready to go live, Guerra found things that needed to be fixed.

Late one evening, her babysitter called to tell her that the site had opened for business and was selling clothes for $0. Guerra frantically called a local Web site development company RealKidz had hired. Thankfully, no one had placed any orders.

And shortly after Guerra had sent out 219 e-mails to potential customers, someone tried to make a purchase and got an error message instead.

The Web site trouble “has been the big frustration of the last few weeks,” she said with a sigh. “I’m really frustrated with my Web developer.”

But the mishaps haven’t got the best of Guerra, RealKidz’s founder and chief executive. She plans to look for a new Web site development company and a new manufacturer.

“It’s stressful,” Guerra admitted in early May, days after she had graduated from the MBA program at the University of Michigan.

Aside from a onetime eBay sale of an outfit her son wore at a wedding, the 37-year-old has never sold any clothing online. Like other entrepreneurs, she is learning firsthand that simply putting up a Web site doesn’t mean customers will come.

To generate sales, RealKidz put flyers touting its clothes in the packets picked up by nearly 800 preteen girls who ran in a 5K Girls on the Run race in Grand Rapids on Thursday. Many participants were plus size.

RealKidz would like to develop a line of clothes for Girls on the Run, an international organization that helps preteen girls develop self-respect and healthy lifestyles through running.

The company also has begun to advertise on Google’s search engine, a marketing tactic used by many businesses.

So far, only a small number of people are landing on her Web site, but those who do are clicking on it.

In the long run, Guerra hopes the Internet won’t be the company’s biggest sales avenue. She plans to set up a network of independent sales representatives for her brand, which she said she believes will generate higher profit margins than going the wholesale-to-retail route.

Guerra knows network marketing. She worked as an Amway sales representative for five years and currently sells Silpada jewelry. She sees RealKidz’s clothes as a good fit with this sales method.

“My product has an extremely high emotional connection with people,” Guerra said, referring to the common struggle with weight issues. “Products that have an emotional connection work best.”

She dreams of the day when her network will be creating business opportunities for women, helping to change lives.

“I can’t wait to see stories like that,” she said.

Guerra is now trying to develop a compensation agreement for an experienced network marketer in Grand Rapids. The potential hire may become the company’s director of consultant development.

By June, Guerra hopes to begin recruiting sales representatives. Her business plans call for 18 representatives by the end of RealKidz’s first year.

To get her network off the ground, Guerra would like to hire a California consulting company that helps start-up network marketing companies with financial models and compensation agreement materials.

But the firm’s service initially costs about $10,000, money that RealKidz can’t afford to spend right now.

Guerra continues to hunt for more capital for her business. In mid-April, she spent 5 1/2 hours talking to the lead investor at BlueWater Angels, a group of wealthy individuals in the Midland area interested in investing seed money in promising start-up companies.

She met again with this investor Monday. This week, she will travel to Midland to make her second presentation to the group, hoping to persuade it to invest $200,000 in her business.

On Wednesday, Guerra met in Ypsilanti with a Chicago-based group of angel investors that focuses on women-owned businesses and is interested in RealKidz. But she’s uncertain whether they will be able to reach an agreement.

“I’m still stressed. It’s definitely hard for me to shut my brain at night,” Guerra said.

“But every week something really big and exciting happens that will help move this business forward.”

The company’s cash cushion has shrunk to $12,000. To keep her business going, Guerra hopes to quickly sell at least 200 pieces of clothing. That way, she will have enough cash to order more clothes and possibly add a line of shorts.

Her shirts sell for $22.50 for a short-sleeve T-shirt to $32 for a mock turtleneck jumper combination, with the pants going for $30 to $32 apiece. These aren’t Wal-Mart prices, but Guerra said she thinks mothers will be willing to pay a little more for clothes that fit their daughters.

Will she be right? Consumers are already reeling from soaring prices at gas pumps and supermarkets.

The survey, conducted by US market research firm Evans Data Corp, ranked Microsoft’s MSN/Live developer package above other offerings from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and eBay according to user satisfaction.

However, Australian web developer and co-founder of the Web Directions conference John Allsopp told ZDNet.com.au on Wednesday that the survey “doesn’t say anything meaningful at all”.

Allsopp added that the nature of Web 2.0 development and its accompanying technologies isn’t suited to this type of assessment, as developers don’t tend to compartmentalise which programs they use to Web Development build applications.

“It’s a misleading thing,” he said. “Web 2.0 is all about mashing and mixing things up to create something new, and using a whole lot of different programs to do it.”

“One of the criticisms of a lot of these technologies is that they’re tied to a certain property, such as Facebook, meaning you have to use their platform to build applications for their site,” he said.

Stewart Smith, president of the Australian Linux Foundation, echoed Allsopp’s sentiments, saying many of the Web Development programs “really aren’t as open as they’d have you believe”.

“People who really care about writing their own applications won’t be doing it for someone else’s platform, they’ll be writing them for their own sites, using a variety of things,” he said.

Allsopp said technologies are “still in their infancy”, and for many large companies, such as Google and Microsoft, “it’s still a pretty novel way of doing things… to open up and let other people start building things for you”.

“A lot of companies are still coming to grips with that, but I think that, over the next year or two, all of these programs are going to Web Development become more sophisticated and usable,” he said.

Everyone knows the Web has come a long way since its early days, and one of the most changed areas has to be e-commerce. A landscape once dominated by boutique, Web-only shops, sparsely populated with shoppers, is now home to every major retailer and corporation on the planet. Selling goods on the Web has become huge business.

Many companies’ fortes, however, are in brick and mortar storefronts. For others, the only selling they have done is wholesale to retailers; selling direct to end-customers just wasn’t an option. They would love to take advantage of the Web Development Classes additional sales channels the Web opens up, but time and money spent building a e-commerce applications, as well as the high-availability, highly scalable environment needed to run them, is time and money that could be spent on core business processes. If only there was somebody to handle the legwork of building, managing and housing such an application …

For big companies that need enterprise-class e-commerce applications, that somebody is Demandware. Based in Woburn, Mass., Demandware offers an on-demand e-commerce application that customers use to service their consumer-facing needs.  According to Vice President of Engineering and Technology Wayne Whitcomb, the company’s platform is like licensed enterprise software that customers can customize, extend and Web Development Classes integrate as they wish, but without the burdens of development or delivery via computing resources.

As opposed to the old ASP model of hosting applications, though, where everything was individually managed and quarantined, Whitcomb says Demandware’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform allows the company to deliver new features and innovations “all the time, to all customers.” Being able to roll out these updates across the customer board is very important, too, because Demandware’s customers are large retail brands facing substantial competitive pressures. The demands of being a real-time business, finicky customers trends, aggressive competition and the need to drive customer loyalty via the Web site make for a situation where retailers not only need a high-performance, highly available solution, but also one that is constantly evolving.

“Normally in an enterprise application, for reliability, security and stability, you’d want to minimize change as much as possible,” says Whitcomb. “However, the [e-commerce] market demand and consumer demands are exactly opposite that. They push for frequent change, innovation and dealing with unpredictable consumer traffic at the Web Development Classes same time.”

Perhaps this necessary combination of both application and platform innovation is the reason Whitcomb says Demandware has little to no competition in the high-end e-commerce market. SaaS options like Amazon WebStore and eBay ProStores work for the low end, he noted, but just are not designed to handle larger companies’ needs in terms of branding, customer experience and scale.

To ensure it can deliver adequate capacity, scalability, reliability and security, Demandware chose to build a closely coupled grid computing delivery platform for its application. The platform is comprised of a series of PODs (points of delivery), which Whitcomb explains as e-commerce appliances with packaged compute capacity that Demandware deploys to tier 1 datacenters globally. The company directly manages those PODs, as well as the customer environment, sandbox development environments, integrated test environments, pre-production staging and production environments, all of which are isolated from one another within the Demandware grid. “To effectively manage all of those environments requires a lot of automation and a lot of flexibility of the delivery platform that really can only be provided through grid computing techniques,” Whitcomb says.

As for the nuts and bolts of the grid, Whitcomb says blades, each of one of which is imparted with a persona, handle the computing. Each blade’s persona determines how it will participate in the grid, and the persona model allows Demandware to envision how customer environments will utilize that capacity. Customer environments can be flexed to meet significant changes in demand (e.g, 10:1) in a matter of minutes, said Whitcomb. Computing resources within the grid are pooled using Demandware’s internally developed virtualization software.

A flexible, dedicated grid delivery platform is necessary, says Whitcomb, because the alternatives are either economically or pragmatically infeasible. Whereas Demandware can invest heavily in research and development of the platform because the company derives value from the grid across its customer base, it would be difficult for those customers to make such investments individually.

Among Demandware’s most interesting customers, in terms of use, is Bare Escentuals. A purveyor of “healthy” makeup, Bare Escentuals does a lot of marketing through print, electronic media and television (in the form of infomercials). Thanks in large part to the latter, Whitcomb says Bare Escentuals’ Web traffic varies unpredictably and at factors as high as 10x. Bare Escentuals also populates its site with a fair amount of rich media, a practice that is facilitated through Demandware’s use of Akamai’s content distribution technology.

Apparel company Timberland also utilizes Demandware to manage sites across several geographies and lines of business, all without needing to toil with infrastructure or application development. Whitcomb is especially proud that HP, a company with “all the resources in the world,” also sees tremendous value in using Demandware. Other customers include Playmobil, Sally Beauty Supply, Gardener’s Supply Co. and Playboy.com.

Although he believes that all applications that share core or common requirements will eventually find their ways into an on-demand delivery model, Whitcomb acknowledges that such models do bring with Web Development Classes them a certain degree of difficulty for the provider. These challenges include integration with legacy backend systems and third-party services, letting customers have control over the elements they want to control, and keeping the application current and reliable.

“The dimensions of that make it a real challenge to serve the enterprise,” says Whitcomb. “The enterprises certainly want it — they’re crying for it — and I think it’s up to the market to deliver against those strong needs. Demandware proves that, at least in the e-commerce market, it can be done.”

eBay Inc’s customers do not need to open a web browser to search the site or auction an item anymore.
After a quick download, the online auctioneer’s users can click the company’s logo on their desktop and launch an application that will allow them to do their business directly - no browser required.
eBay is one of several companies, including Nasdaq Stock Market Inc, Time Warner Inc’s AOL, Nickelodeon and Salesforce.com Inc, that have created downloadable, desktop versions of their websites using software developed by Adobe Systems Inc.
Adobe is launching the application, called AIR, on Monday. Adobe says AIR will allow any company with a website to inhabit a permanent spot on people’s desktops.
It also reduces the wait time for downloading images and data, because the desktop is constantly updated while the computer is online.
Adobe says AIR runs on any operating system. It is a more powerful version of widgets, the customisable little web pullouts often provided by third parties like Google Inc.
The AIR application removes any kind of go-between, giving companies a direct, constant and versatile link to the consumer, said Adrian Ludwig, a spokesman for Adobe.
“The browser was in the way and the widget, in some instances, was in the way,” Ludwig said. “It’s the willingness to let the brand of the person providing the application to take front and centre.”

NEW YORK Marty Sellers used to need about a hundred postage stamps every three months. These days, he can stretch that supply to last a year.Sellers, 40, now pays most bills online and receives financial statements electronically. The owner of Sellers Photo in Huntsville, Ala., he also has cut down on mailing clients CDs, transferring images over the Internet instead.”Even things like a birthday card, I will just send a happy birthday e-mail,” he said.Because many people around the world are like Sellers, the U.S. Postal Service and its counterparts in other countries are tapping technology to cut costs and expand into electronic services - including services designed to attract more “junk” mail.In the United States, first-class mail volume has dropped 7 percent since 2001 - an average of 1.3 billion fewer letters, postcards and bills each year. A 15 percent boost in bulk advertising and other discounted mailings has so far offset only some of the loss in revenue.Many postal agencies are having to serve more households because their nations’ populations are growing but are getting less mail to deliver to each, said Dean Pope, general manager of business development at Canada Post.”In order to sustain business in that formula, you have to find new services and products and find new revenue growth opportunities,” he said.One of those new services is Canada Post’s Borderfree program, which allows Canadians to buy items from U.S. e-commerce partners, pay in Canadian currency and know all taxes and fees ahead of time. Borderfree takes packages from U.S. hubs through Canadian customs and delivers them in Canada.In France, La Poste will print e-mails customers send in and deliver them to physical mailboxes with registered notes and time stamps.Tunisia’s postal service offers a pre-charged payment service for paying utility bills and buying things online.In Italy, a new digital certification service at Poste Italiane archives loan documents for banks so that years after a transaction a party can retrieve the original document with an electronic postmark as proof of its authenticity.Not all efforts have been successful.For lack of demand, the U.S. Postal Service canceled a few programs it started in 1999 and 2000, including electronic bill payments - which the private sector now offers with greater success.”If we look back to the boom days of the Internet, … there was a surge of e-commerce-related activities in a lot of posts,” said Luis Jimenez, chief industry policy officer for Pitney Bowes Inc., a mail and document-management company. “That was primarily motivated by a fear that mail would decline precipitously and they needed a new source of income.”The realization came just a few short years after that it’s very difficult to make money from e-commerce.”Now, most electronic efforts supplement traditional, physical mail. In the United States, that includes ordering stamps and packing supplies online and providing delivery confirmation electronically without mailing back a receipt.The USPS also helps retailers like L.L. Bean Inc. generate preprinted labels to include with shipments for merchandise returns. Merchants, including eBay Inc. auction participants, also can create shipping labels and buy postage online.Jimenez said the refocus comes as postal agencies find that mail volume isn’t dropping as quickly as once feared. E-mail isn’t replacing all letters and cards; partly, it’s creating communication that might not have occurred otherwise. The Internet also has created new mailing opportunities from e-commerce sales, digital photo printing and DVD rentals.And many people remain more comfortable with paper.”I just find paper records more reliable and trustworthy,” said David Hildebrand, 72. “They all push me to get electronic statements, but I can’t put them in a drawer and I can’t look at them when the computer doesn’t work.”Hildebrand is no technophobe. The retired IBM Corp. computer programmer from San Jose, Calif., started visiting online bulletin boards and sending e-mail in the mid-1980s - back when few friends even had computers.”We’re going to use more paper, not less, for the short and medium term,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in San Mateo, Calif.That means postal agencies can benefit for several more years by cutting costs through automation and measures like installing kiosks to reduce labor-intensive window transactions. A new change-of-address system in the United States reduces costs by redirecting mail earlier in the process.By next year, U.S. bulk mailers also will have to start using intelligent bar codes - with 31 instead of 11 digits of data, allowing for refined tracking and earlier identification of undeliverable addresses.But ultimately, the challenge will be creating new revenue streams.Hybrid services represent one tactic. France, Italy and the United States let people send documents electronically for printing and delivery by the post. Italy also has a reverse service, scanning physical mail into digital form - which can be great for government agencies needing to distribute items to scores of branch offices.Other strategies could involve increasing the value of snail mail with, for example, the intelligent bar codes, which can tell U.S. mailers which mailings arrive when and help them remove bad information from their mailing lists.”The better the quality of mailings and mailing lists they are generated from, the better the response rates these companies are going to see,” said Thomas Day, the USPS senior vice president for intelligent mail and address quality.In other words, expect more catalogs and credit-card offers in the short term, although Saffo believes environmental pressures won’t make that strategy sustainable in the long run.Elsewhere, postal services are adapting to local needs, said Paul Donohoe, the Universal Postal Union’s eBusiness manager. For example, in Brazil, where e-commerce is fairly new, the postal service offers technical muscle to operate Web sites.Postal agencies don’t have forever to adapt.”There will be a day of reckoning, but I don’t know how far down the road that is,” said Tony Conway, a former USPS executive who now heads the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers. “First-class mail continues to decline. I don’t see anything that suggests that trend will reverse itself.”

Its easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations that are part of daily life had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness.
The internet and the web have changed the way we keep in touch with family and friends, do business, form new relationships, leaving little of our lives untouched in some way or other, says John Allsopp, a software engineer, author and founder of the influential Web Directions conference series.
A decade from now, Ive no doubt well be similarly astounded with the way these technologies will have reached even further into our lives.
But predicting exactly what will be the next thing or which ideas will bomb and which will fly is fraught with difficulty. (Besides, if I knew for certain, do you really think Id still be writing for a living?)
What follows is a smorgasbord of websites, services, concepts and gadgets that at first glance seem to have little to do with each other but which taken together give a picture of where our brave new networked world may be heading.
THE CHUMBY - The creators of this bizarre little device have generated a huge buzz over the past few months - and its not even due to be launched until early in the year. The Chumby is a wireless internet device about the size of a rugby ball. It has no keyboard or mouse but instead uses software called widgets to display pretty much anything you want it to - all the time. For instance, it will act as an alarm clock, play your music, show you constantly updated news or track an eBay auction.
And the really interesting thing is that it is designed to be hacked - everything from the software code to the specifications for the case are freely available. No one, including the manufacturers, knows what owners will make Chumbys do once they are released. http://www.chumby.com
MICROBLOGGING - This involves sharing short messages among a group. Messages are typically posted from mobile phones via SMS or instant messaging. True microblogging obsessives will dispatch messages to the group dozens of times daily, updating their peers on even the most inconsequential details of their lives.
The best-known microblogging service is called Twitter and its best-known user is US presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Twitter has also spawned a host of imitators such as Pownce and Jaiku. Microblogging fans claim that, at their best, the mini-messages are almost haiku-like, while detractors question the usefulness of being bombarded with messages such as Just made cup of tea.http://www.pownce.comhttp://www.jaiku.com
EVERYBLOCK - This is still in development but EveryBlock is definitely worth keeping an eye on, if only because it is the work of young Chicago journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty. He was the brains behind a celebrated project called chicagocrime.org, which overlays crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department on maps, thus providing a powerful graphic overview of crime in the city.
EveryBlock will use some of the same techniques to create hyperlocal news. The kinds of information Holovaty wants to provide include the results of house sales, scores from youngsters sports events, local crime figures and stories written by local people. http://www.chicagocrime.orghttp://www.everyblock.com
23ANDME - With the tagline genetics just got personal, 23AndMe allows anyone to unlock their own genetic history - and likely future. For $US1000 ($NZ1300) the service (named after the 23 pairs of human chromosomes) will reveal whether you have a predisposition to arthritis or Alzheimers or, more frivolously, why you cant stand tomatoes.
23AndMe customers provide a sample of saliva from which technicians extract the DNA for analysis. When the results are in, customers are given a secure login that allows them to explore their own genome at their leisure, revealing their genetic family around the world as well as their likely future health. http://www.23andme.com.
PEER-TO-PEER LENDING - Whether youre distributing music or books, auctioning off unwanted household items, wanting to bet on a horse race or looking for a soulmate, the internet can put you in touch with someone who is interested in what you have or are.
Kiva takes that idea and applies it to the established concept of microfinance - making small loans to the working poor to help them establish or expand businesses.
So, instead of giving a donation to an organisation such as Oxfam to distribute, peer-to-peer lending lets you invest small amounts directly in a particular entrepreneur - such as Mohamad Marah in Kabala, Sierra Leone. With his $US200 loan, Marah has been able to expand his garment business, buying three extra sewing machines. So far he has repaid half the loan. More than $US15 million has already been lent through Kiva - and the default rate is claimed to be just .23 per cent. http://www.kiva.org
MOB RULES - The concept of a mob of networked citizens forming an irresistible force has been proposed and developed by, among others, futurist Harold Rheingold and Sydney web theorist and author Mark Pesce. Pesce has pointed out that in about the middle of this year every second person on Earth will have a mobile phone.
In just a decade, well have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone, he said recently. In effect, he reckons, the people are the network and when that mob of people get together and decide to go in a particular direction they are virtually unstoppable. Just ask the record companies that have battled in vain for years to stop people sharing music or former Philippines president Joseph Estrada, who was forced from office in 2001 by mass protests co-ordinated by waves of SMS messages.
According to Pesce, the mob is faster, smarter and stronger than you are. Just as importantly, the mob is quite unpredictable - so expect a wild ride in coming years. blog.futurestreetconsulting.com; http://www.rheingold.com.
GUERILLA WI-FI - Having a wireless internet system set up at home is becoming increasingly common. However, tapping into the internet while out and about is still very hit and miss - and where it is available is often nose-bleedingly expensive (Telstra hot spots cost $14 an hour while Optus slugs users about $12 an hour).
Meraki is an internet start-up that aims to change all that by providing cheap - or free - wireless networks. Meraki sells a remarkable device call the Meraki Mini for $US49. Plug it in to your internet connection and it will instantly provide shared access to other users up to 50 metres away.
Put several Merakis together in a neighbourhood (and perhaps include a few of the more powerful versions that cover up to 350 metres) and they will instantly form a mesh network, giving internet access to anyone in the area. These guerilla networks are beginning to spring up in cities around the world, driven by people for whom internet access is a social-equity issue. Do internet service providers like this Robin Hood-style behaviour? Not at all. Can they do much about it? Er, no. http://www.meraki.com.
WORLD COMMUNITY GRID -The World Community Grid project is one of the latest examples of a concept called distributed computing. The idea, though not new, involves harnessing the computing power of many thousands of idle PCs around the world to try to crack complex scientific challenges.
Distributed computing first came to prominence with the Seti@home project, which uses participants computers to analyse radio telescope data in the search for extra-terrestrial life. World Community Grid takes the concept one stage further and aims to establish the worlds largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
So far 343,000 members have donated a total of 128,000 years of computing time. Projects include one aimed at giving scientists a better understanding of cancer and another that is modelling the effects of climate change in Africa. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org
LOOPT - One of many social networking services that capitalise on the global positioning software now standard on many mobile phones.
Loopt members register with the site and then, when one of their friends is nearby, their location is shown on a map plus a note about what they are doing at that time.
You might not want your location to be always visible - so, thankfully, users can turn off the service. http://www.loopt.com.
ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD - When marvelling at the potential of the networked world its easy to forget the 2 billion youngsters in the developing world who dont have the tools to connect.
The One Laptop per Child program is a bid to help bridge this digital divide with a machine called the XO Laptop that sells for just $US200. OLPC is a non-profit group established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nicholas Negroponte and supported by companies including News Corp, Intel and Google.
Under a Give One Get One scheme, donors give $US399 and they receive a child-sized XO machine and another will be sent on their behalf to a youngster in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda. http://www.laptop.org.

The internet has already brought the worldTs shopping malls into the bedroom but now Australian shopaholics can satisfy their impulses with a few button presses while walking home or riding a bus - as long as they have a PayPal account.
PayPal Australia product director Dinuke Ranasinghe said people had long been able to surf the web on their handsets but there had never been an easy way to make payments.
Keying credit card and other details into websites manually was cumbersome using a mobile keypad, while shopping via the mobile providers walled garden portal, which charged purchases to the customers phone bill, was largely limited to ringtones and wallpapers.
Ranasinghe said merchants had largely avoided mobile commerce to date because of the telcos prohibitive fees, which added as much as 50 per cent to the product prices.
With the PayPal system merchants setup their own mobile website, bypassing the telcos, and are charged up to 2.4 per cent of the sale price and a flat fee of 30 cents per transaction.
On the consumers side, the safety that we provide in not sharing financial information with third parties allays their fears of having their [credit card and bank account] details compromised over the phone, Ranasinghe said.
A Galaxy Survey of 1100 Australian mobile phone users, commissioned by PayPal, found 64 per cent wanted to purchase products via their mobile but 72 per cent were concerned about the security of their personal information.
PayPal is inviting Australian merchants looking to sell their wares via mobile phone-optimised websites to adopt Mobile Checkout as a payment method, but it has already signed up several partners including Hoyts, Warner Music, Deals Direct, Ready Flowers and Mobile Wine Club.
Hoyts and Warner Music are expected to start selling tickets and music via mobile phones before Christmas, while the others have launched their offerings.
The process is simply navigating to the WAP homepage, finding the movie and session times that youre after, making the purchase - going through checkout on the phone - and then once thats completed Hoyts will provide a reference number through SMS back to your phone, Ranasinghe said of the upcoming Hoyts Mobile Ticketing site.
Once you have the reference number that unique code you will use to claim your ticket once you get to the cinema.
Daniel Feiler, a spokesman for PayPals parent, eBay, said early next year users of the auction site would be able to buy things without touching a computer.
At the moment people can bid and buy [using their mobile] but they just have to wait until they get home to their computer to pay for the purchase via PayPal, he said.
Jason Nealon, vice president of business development at Warner Music Australia, said mobile phones were increasingly becoming mini-computers and commerce activity was growing.
This is an obvious area of focus for us as were all about providing consumers with easy access to our artists music, greater choice in how they consume and pay for it - ultimately maximising the returns for both our artists and Warner Music, Nealon said.
Anthony Thiessen, head of marketing at Hoyts, said Hoyts Mobile Ticketing would provide an easy, convenient and secure way to buy tickets at any time.
Once launched, it will be much easier for movie-goers to purchase last-minute tickets for themselves and for their friends, he said.
PayPal launched in Australia at the beginning of 2005 and has just surpassed 5 million registered users.
Ranasinghe said early in the new year PayPal would expand its mobile payment products to let users transfer money peer-to-peer and buy products or give money to charity via text message.
I could be in a restaurant and I can send my friend money over the phone to their PayPal account, he said.
Imagine that youre sitting on a bus and youre reading a magazine and it says text 123 CD, and you buy the latest CD from Guy Sebastian.