The latest from TechCrunch
- Cheep Combines Product Comparisons With Social Shopping
- Could Apple Buy Sony? Absolutely Not
- Square Competitor VeriFone Strikes Key Deal With PayPal
- Lazy Hackers Unite: Firesheep Boasts +104,000 Downloads In 24 Hours
| Cheep Combines Product Comparisons With Social Shopping | Top |
| There are a vast amount of product comparison sites on the web and a number of social shopping sites that allow online shoppers use their social graph to share purchasing decisions. Today video search engine Blinkx is trying to combine the two functionalities with the launch of Cheep, a social shopping service. Through a browser add-on (which currently only works on Firefox or IE), Cheep recognizes when you're looking at a specific product and will show you current price comparisons from around the Web, as well as reviews and ratings. Cheep will appear as a small bar at the top of your screen when you're looking at a product page. The startup has indexed millions of products nearly 200 online retailers, including Amazon, BestBuy and Walmart, so chances are that Cheep will be able to find the product you are viewing within your browser. Beyond the add-on, Cheep is also a standalone social network that encourages users to share their shopping activity, including purchases, wishlists, likes, reviews and more; with other Cheep members. The startup is also creating profiles for millions of products, which users can share on Facebook and Twitter. I doubt I’d really use the online community side of Cheep but the browser add-on could be useful. The ability to receive automatic, contextual information such as alternative reviews or prices for a product without having open another browser tab for a search is appealing. CrunchBase Information blinkx Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Could Apple Buy Sony? Absolutely Not | Top |
| First, call me a negative Nancy but the rumors that Apple could buy Sony – Lord knows Sony needs some better management – are false. This sort of thing seems more like a solo Steve Jobs move than a move by Apple proper. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at where all this speculation comes from. In his earnings call, Jobs said, when asked what they would do with the $51 billion in cash it has lying around: "We would like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.” Read more… | |
| Square Competitor VeriFone Strikes Key Deal With PayPal | Top |
| VeriFone Systems this morning announced a deal with electronic payments giant PayPal that sounds like bad news for Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey ‘s latest venture, Square . VeriFone, which offers solutions that enable electronic payment transactions and related services at points of sale, will extend mobile payments acceptance with PayPal and integrate traditional card payments with its new partner’s Mobile Payments products. In addition, PayPal Mobile App will soon work with VeriFone's PAYware Mobile for iPhone (which is the product Square competes with , as it also enables merchants to accept payments via a software-hardware combo for the Apple smartphone). Furthermore, the PAYware Mobile App will be enhanced to support PayPal Bump technology that enables iPhone users to bump their phones together to transfer money between them. VeriFone will, upon integration, promote PayPal and Bump acceptance to its reseller channel. PayPal, in turn, will co-market VeriFone's PAYware Mobile to its own user base. The integrated capabilities are expected to be available next year. CrunchBase Information VeriFone Systems PayPal Square Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Lazy Hackers Unite: Firesheep Boasts +104,000 Downloads In 24 Hours | Top |
| Well, that was fast. In roughly 24 hours, Firesheep has been downloaded more than 104,000 times, as would-be-hackers — or the merely curious— downloaded the Firefox extension to test the exploit. As we reported on Sunday night, Eric Butler’s Firesheep allows users on a public Wi-Fi network to effectively spy on others, by giving Firesheep users access to sensitive information (via cookies) that lets them log into their victim’s accounts on unsecured sites. The Firesheep extension is wired to identify a few dozen popular sites that are vulnerable to attack on public networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Yelp. On Monday night we got a chance to catch up with Butler, who has been pretty overwhelmed by the attention. Although he opened Pandora’s box expecting to spark controversy and discussion, he repeatedly asserts that his aim was fundamentally altruistic. Butler argues that this HTTP vulnerability was being exploited by moderately sophisticated hackers, and therefore, by making it dead simple to the average joe it would raise awareness and compel sites to raise the bar on security: Firesheep was written over the course of a few months in spare time but really boils down to a few weeks of work. I originally thought of the idea three or four years ago, but didn’t start working on it until this year. I went back and forth trying to predict what the reaction might be. Initially before Firesheep was completed I thought there might be moderate interest, but then after doing more research found a lot of one-off articles discussing this same issue that were essentially ignored. I certainly never expected Firesheep to be the #10 trending search on Google in the US. I’ve received a ton of great messages from people who are happy that this issue has finally received widespread attention, so after day one I’m happy with the result. The attack that Firesheep demonstrates is easy to do using tools that have been available for years. Criminals already knew this, and I reject the notion that something like Firesheep turns otherwise innocent people evil. Butler says he will release a new blog post in the next few hours that will help users protect themselves— apparently, he says, since the launch there has been significant misinformation floating on the web. We will update this post when it goes live. In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more about the extension (without actually downloading it) Butler recommends this YouTube video: UPDATE: Butler’s latest blog post is live, click here. (Image: Flickr/ nettsu ) | |
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