PayPal To Add 1,000 New Jobs In Asia Pacific Region
March 17, 2010
Ebay's online payment service PayPal said today it would double the number of employees in Asia Pacific from 1,000 currently to more than 2,000 by the end of the year.
PayPal said it plans to add more than 100 new jobs at its international headquarters in Singapore. New jobs will be located at all seven offices including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. For its Singapore business headquarters, PayPal will be seeking Singapore-based people with background in technology, product development, infrastructure design, risk and engineering.
"While PayPal's growth in Asia Pacific to date has largely been driven by our cross border business, we fully expect the domestic business in many of our Asian markets to explode in the coming years," said Farhad Irani, vice president of PayPal Asia Pacific.
"Our success in the region will continue to rely on partnering with merchants, financial services companies and local governments to deliver the right services for our customers."
PayPal says it processed more than $6 billion of total payment volume in Asia Pacific in 2009, an increase of 38 percent from 2008.
As part of its plans to grow across Asia Pacific, the company also announced the PayPal mobile payment software development kit (SDK) will be available to developers in the region.
Twitter Announces @anywhere Platform
March 16, 2010
Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web. Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout.
Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address. You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here.
As for what Biz Stone was up to, he explained on the official Twitter Blog, "We've developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com."
Stone then continued, "Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript."
Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo, and YouTube are among Twitter's first partners in this effort. Target dates and many other details remain unknown, but it looks like Twitter's set to give its own version of Facebook Connect a solid start.
Twitter Announces @anywhere Platform
March 16, 2010
Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web. Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout.
Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address. You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here.
As for what Biz Stone was up to, he explained on the official Twitter Blog, "We've developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com."
Stone then continued, "Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript."
Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo, and YouTube are among Twitter's first partners in this effort. Target dates and many other details remain unknown, but it looks like Twitter's set to give its own version of Facebook Connect a solid start.
eBay Says Buying Used Is Being Green
March 9, 2010
eBay announced today the launch of the eBay Green Team Challenge, a program aimed at turning green shopping into a tangible environmental impact.
Under the program, the first 250,000 people to pledge to reuse on eBay, the company will protect an acre of rainforest in their name through a new collaboration with Team Earth, a coalition of non-governmental organizations, private sector companies and individuals convened by Conservation International.
Along with the launch of the Green Team Challenge, eBay has introduced a new green shopping site, designed to help people access green products.

The new shopping hub is a result of the requests of eBay Green Team members, a community of nearly 150,000 individuals committed to making greener lifestyle choices.
To promote the challenge, eBay is teaming up with Hearst Magazines for the second year in a row, for their month long "30 Days of Green" program. The collaboration features a three-page ad insert that will run in the April issues of all 15 Hearst magazines. The ads will feature a variety of eBay items and will aim to educate consumers about being green.
"We at eBay are constantly looking for ways to show our community of 90 million users that their shopping decisions can have real environmental impact," said Amy Skoczlas Cole, Director of the eBay Green Team.
"This year, through our collaborations with Hearst and Team Earth, we have the opportunity to not only educate millions of consumers about the green value of shopping used, but translate that action into tangible environmental impact."
