Nokia has announced today will be launching a new service called Nokia Money. This means that anyone that has a Nokia phone will have access to basic financial services.
Nokia users will be able to send money to another person just by entering another person’s mobile phone number. Merchants will also be able to collect bills through this service as well.
The telecommunications giant is currently building a network of Nokia Money agents where consumers will be able to deposit and withdraw cash.
“We believe mobile financial services offer a market opportunity with long term growth potential. In many countries, mobile phone ownership significantly exceeds bank account usage, suggesting that many mobile phone users have very limited or no access to basic financial services. With more than 4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts, global demand for access to financial services presents a strong opportunity to combine mobile devices with simple but powerful financial services such as Nokia Money”, stated Nokia EVP and Chief Development Officer Mary McDowell in a press release.
The service is being put together through a partnership between Nokia and Obopay. Obopay already has a mobile payment platform in place, now they are working on getting it integrated with Nokia.
One of the reasons why Tr.im decided to initially shut themselves down is because of the monopoly that Bit.ly has for URL shortening services. Twitter and TweetDeck both use Bit.ly as the default URL shortening services. Now Google, TypePad, and CBS has embraced Bit.ly for shortening the URLs of their content.
One of the reasons why Bit.ly has become the preferred choice for URL shortening is because of their constant service upgrades. Last month Bit.ly started to track what links are malicious in content and warns users before sending them to the link.
Within the last few weeks, Google added Bit.ly to Google Reader’s “send-to” feature. This feature allows anyone using Google Reader to send Bit.ly links on Twitter to their followers.
TypePad added a feature that generates Bit.ly links on Twitter for new blog posts. Bit.ly statistics have also been added into TypePad’s dashboard. All TypePad users will see this feature integrated by this fall.
CBS is also launched a new service called cbs.bit.ly. This service tracks the URLs on CBS’ website that has been shortened and tracks how many people clicked on the shortened links.
Omidyar Network, the investment arm of Pierre Omidyar’s wealth has made a $2 million grant. Pierre is the founder of eBay and his personal wealth is roughly $3.6 billion. The Omidyar Network was started in 2004 and there was about $270 million in assets given to the investment firm.
Some of the Internet companies that the Omidyar Network invested in include Digg, Federated Media Publishing, KaBOOM, Seesmic, Linden Lab, and Wikia. Wikia is another company that was founded by the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia receives about 300 million monthly unique visitors and is the 5th most visited website in the world. However Wikipedia runs on donations and does not have any advertising. At the end of last year, about 125,000 donors invested $6.2 million in helping keep Wikipedia alive.
Of that $6.2 million, $3 million was given by the Sloan Foundation and an anonymous friend gave $286,800. As part of the investment, Matt Halprin of Omidyar will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. Before working at Omidyar, Halprin was the VP of global trust and safety at eBay.
Gideon Yu is the former chief financial officer at Facebook. In late March, Yu had suddenly quit and it was uncertain where he was headed to next. According to a source with TechCrunch, Yu has joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner.
Yu was previously an SVP in Finance and Yahoo! and he was also the former CFO of YouTube. Before joining Khosla, Yu worked for a short while at Sequoia Capital. He was one of the main reasons why Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.
Khosla recently raised $1 billion in a fund to invest in various startups in the mobile, Internet, science, and clean-tech sectors.
Someone at the big red retailer has leaked a circulation ad that reveals future prices for the Xbox 360 Pro and the Xbox Elite. The Xbox 360 60GB Pro system will cost $250 starting later this week and the 120GB price will drop to about $300. These prices cuts are not surprising because last week, Sony released the PS3 Slim and cut the price of the original PS3.
Ben Stiller loves using Twitter as you can tell by the videos he’s been pumping out through Red Hour Studios. Stiller previously talked about Twitter with Mickey Rooney and now he’s talking to Ryan Seacrest about it.
In this video, Stiller asks Seacrest to give him a shout out on Twitter in an effort to gain more followers.
Seacrest has about 1.9 million followers and Stiller has about 150,000. Seacrest said that he’d be willing to do it for money and that he “doesn’t even talk to anybody that has less than 900,000 followers.” When Stiller first announced Red Hour studios on YouTube, he introduced his family.
Epson Imaging Devices has plead guilty to price fixing LCD screens that were sold to Motorola. As a result, the company will be paying $26 million for the conspiracy. Epson Imaging Devices is a subsidiary of Seiko Epson. Motorola used the LCD panels for their Razr mobile phone devices between 2005 and 2006.
During the time of the conspiracy, Epson was called Sanyo Epson Imaging Devices. The U.S. Department of Justice accused Epson for meeting with competitors and agreeing to set the prices of LCDs that were sold to Motorola.
This past December, LG made a similar confession to the U.S. DOJ. LG was sentenced to pay $400 million for price-fixing LCDs. Around the same time Sharp paid $120 million for the same charge. Sharp fixed the prices of LCDs that were sold to Apple, Motorola, and Dell.
About one month later, Chunghwa Picture Tubes plead guilty and was forced to pay $65 million. This past May, Hitachi paid $31 million for selling fixed-price LCDs to Dell.
Jessica Biel has become one of the most searched for women on the Internet. But the problem is that there is a lot of malware out there that is connected to her name these days.
According to McAfee, every one out of five searches for terms that are related to Jessica Biel is connected to an image, website, video, or other spam that poses a threat to your computer.
Last year Brad Pitt was on the top of the list. Now he is ranked number 10. The top list of worst celebrites to search for on the Internet are as follows:
1. Jessica Biel
2. Beyonce
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Tom Brady
5. Jessica Simpson
6. Gisele Bundchen
7. Miley Cyrus
8. Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie
9. Ashley Tisdale
10. Brad Pitt
11. Reese Witherspoon
12. Britney Spears
13. Rihanna
14. Lindsay Lohan
15. Kim Kardashian
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