Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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There is an interesting news floating around about an upcoming payment feature to be launched by Facebook. AllThingsD first wrote that the social network is testing something like a “PayPal competitor” for mobile purchases. Later, TechCrunch published a piece confirming that it had heard similar rumours, but that the feature in fact would play well with PayPal and all other payment solutions currently being used by online retailers.
According to TechCrunch, what Facebook is testing is a solution which would enable users to fill out credit card and billing address information on e-commerce websites based on what they have stored on Facebook. So instead of having to enter all this data manually every time they buy something from an online retailer through their smartphone, they would be able to use a function saying something like “Let Facebook Input My Billing Info” to skip that effort. The payment would then be processed as usually through PayPal or whatever other payment provider is being used. The goal would be to improve the efficiency of ads on Facebook and to be able to tell retailers what advertising investments led to which revenues.
Interesting stuff for sure.
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It’s unlikely that you haven’t heard yet, but Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has bought the renowned Washington Post for $250 million. Not through Amazon but as a private person. There is a lot of speculation out there what his goals are, and whether Bezos will try to use the Post to sell more stuff on Amazon, or whether he’ll use Amazon to sell more newspapers (or if maybe the Post stops to print news). To get a better understand about Bezos possible motives, read MG Siegler’s great analysis.
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The global media agency Mindshare has released the results of a study looking at the motivations for the use of digital media by 33 nations across the globe. 14 nations were above “normal” in their use of digital communications across the four motivation areas self –expression / entertainment / information gathering and transacting. Self-expression of course is what drives many bloggers, whereas information gathering could be what drives readers to blogs. Twingly motherland Sweden turned out to be second most advanced in Europe in regards to those motivation areas. Globally, Singapore, Portugal and China are leading the motivations table.