July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After properly stuffing themselves with copious amounts of turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, dressing, and pumpkin pie, eBay saw a ton of people reach for their mobile devices to make some form of payment.

Overall, eBay had a 133 percent increase (compared to the previous year) in mobile transaction for the holiday. It’s online transaction service PayPal also saw a jump of 173 percent in global mobile payments for Thanksgiving 2012, compared to the previous year.

The most popular time to shop on mobile devices with PayPal during the holiday was between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. (PT). Coincidentally, this was also the most popular time for people to upload Turkey day-related photos to Instagram.

The most popular cities using PayPal, according to the company, were Houston at No. 1, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and New York.

EBay predicted it would see a huge boost in mobile transactions for the holiday season in its Q3 earnings report. So that, combined with the growing number of people using mobile devices in general makes this particular piece of news pretty unsurprising.

Did you do any shopping from your smartphone or tablet yesterday? Let us know in the comment section below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

During a live demo at the D9 event Tuesday, Google said it views its new Wallet service as entirely different from the new point of sale devices PayPal is reportedly developing with major retailers.

Google is probably hoping the court will feel the same way when reviewing the recent lawsuit filed by PayPal’s parent company Ebay against the search engine giant for allegedly stealing trade secrets about mobile transactions.

The lawsuit was filed just as Google revealed its plans for Google Wallet, which allows consumers to use their Android smartphones for transactions and coupons.

When All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher — noting the lawsuit — asked how Google Wallet was like PayPal’s efforts, Google executive Stephanie Tilenius explained that Google Wallet is “integrating at the point of sale.”

“We’re not actually distributing new point of sale devices… (like credit card machines)”, she said, which is what PayPal has indicated it was working on in regards to mobile transactions.

Instead of swiping a credit card’s magnetic strip for transactions, Google Wallet uses a smartphone’s NFC chip, which was described as a unique identifier that can be assigned to credit accounts.

Google also stated that it would monetize Google Wallet through its Groupon-like service, Google Offers, which allows vendors to offer special deals to consumers.

Since Google isn’t directly profiting from its Wallet platform or creating point of sale devices for store vendors, the company doesn’t seem worried about the outcome of a legal battle — even if some of its top executives violated contract agreements with previous employers.

The company also provides solutions for carrying out financial transactions over mobile phones, and is coming up with new transaction services for developing countries.

And business is on the rise: Clickatell has just announced bringing in $12 million in a second round of funding, led by Sequoia Capital and new investor DAG Ventures. The new round makes the company’s total funding $21.5 million.

Up front, text messaging is like e-mail—boring, yet incredibly effective. Even though there are numerous options for mobile communication, the good old text message is still a surefire way to reach the masses. According to Clickatell, 9 out of 10 Americans can receive text messages, when, for instance, Twitter reaches only about a quarter of the population. And, in 2010, around 6.1 trillion text messages were sent globally. The astonishing number (that’s thousands of billions) also represents steady growth, as it is triple the amount of text messages that were sent in 2007.

Therefore, Clickatell aims to take advantage of the text message’s ubiquity and is going to use the new funding to hire more people (the company now employs around 120) develop its product, and expand in emerging markets. To better serve the domestic market, Clickatell is also launching a new, web-based SMS messaging package for small and medium U.S. businesses. Originally founded in South Africa in 2000, Clickatell has 13,000 enterprise, government and small and medium business customers and is profitable, bringing in “double-digit millions” in revenue.

[Photo credit: kiwanja]