PayPal, eBay’s online payment service, was to announce a new service yesterday that aims to make it easier to shop online by cutting down on the number of accounts consumers have to create with various Web retailers.
Called PayPal Access, the service was to be unveiled at eBay’s X.commerce developer conference in San Francisco. It was to be launched with X.commerce, a new eBay Inc business also set to launch yesterday geared toward developers and merchants to encourage developers to integrate eBay’s technology into mobile commerce apps.
X.commerce merges the software developer communities for eBay.com, PayPal and eBay-owned e-commerce software company Magento, which together include 850,000 developers.
EBay spokesman Anuj Nayar said PayPal Access will let users log on to participating retailers’ sites and pay with their PayPal username and password, rather than creating a separate account as many online retailers currently require.
As it stands now, shoppers on some sites have to set up an account even if they’re paying with PayPal, the details for which they don’t enter until near the end of the transaction. The service would keep a user’s personal details within PayPal, Nayar said.
Also yesterday, X.commerce was to release a set of developer tools called X.commerce Fabric, which is intended to simplify the process for adding eBay-owned technology — such as that behind Milo, a local shopping engine eBay bought last year — to apps for smartphones and tablet computers.
The conference was also to be used to show off the upcoming version of eBay’s smartphone app RedLaser, which currently lets people scan product barcodes and compare prices online and in local stores. RedLaser 3.0, which Nayar said will be out by the end of the year, will add PayPal for purchasing items directly from the app.
It was also likely that X.commerce would announce some sort of partnership with Facebook yesterday. Though eBay wouldn’t divulge any details, Facebook’s platform and mobile marketing director, Katie Mitic, was to be a keynote speaker at the conference.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts